Security Through Amnesia: A Software-Based Solution to the Cold Boot Attack on Disk Encryption

Disk encryption has become an important security measure for a multitude of clients, including governments, corporations, activists, security-conscious professionals, and privacy-conscious individuals. Unfortunately, recent research has discovered an effective side channel attack against any disk mounted by a running machine\cite{princetonattack}. This attack, known as the cold boot attack, is effective against any mounted volume using state-of-the-art disk encryption, is relatively simple to perform for an attacker with even rudimentary technical knowledge and training, and is applicable to exactly the scenario against which disk encryption is primarily supposed to defend: an adversary with physical access. To our knowledge, no effective software-based countermeasure to this attack supporting multiple encryption keys has yet been articulated in the literature. Moreover, since no proposed solution has been implemented in publicly available software, all general-purpose machines using disk encryption remain vulnerable. We present Loop-Amnesia, a kernel-based disk encryption mechanism implementing a novel technique to eliminate vulnerability to the cold boot attack. We offer theoretical justification of Loop-Amnesia's invulnerability to the attack, verify that our implementation is not vulnerable in practice, and present measurements showing our impact on I/O accesses to the encrypted disk is limited to a slowdown of approximately 2x. Loop-Amnesia is written for x86-64, but our technique is applicable to other register-based architectures. We base our work on loop-AES, a state-of-the-art open source disk encryption package for Linux.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

SoK: Acoustic Side Channels

We provide a state-of-the-art analysis of acoustic side channels, cover all the significant academic research in the area, discuss their security implications and countermeasures, and identify areas for future research. We also make an attempt to bridge side channels and inverse problems, two fields that appear to be completely isolated from each other but have deep connections.Comment: 16 page

Fault attacks on RSA and elliptic curve cryptosystems

This thesis answered how a fault attack targeting software used to program EEPROM can threaten hardware devices, for instance IoT devices. The successful fault attacks proposed in this thesis will certainly warn designers of hardware devices of the security risks their devices may face on the programming leve

Efficient scalar multiplication against side channel attacks using new number representation

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is probably the most popular public key systems nowadays. The classic algorithm for computation of elliptic curve scalar multiplication is Doubling-and-Add. However, it has been shown vulnerable to simple power analysis, which is a type of side channel attacks (SCAs). Among different types of attacks, SCAs are becoming the most important and practical threat to elliptic curve computation. Although Montgomery power ladder (MPL) has shown to be a good choice for scalar multiplication against simple power analysis, it is still subject to some advanced SCAs such like differential power analysis. In this thesis, a new number representation is firstly proposed, then several scalar multiplication algorithms using this new number system are presented. It has also been shown that the proposed algorithms outperform or comparable to the best of existing similar algorithms in terms of against side channel attacks and computational efficiency. Finally we extend both the new number system and the corresponding scalar multiplication algorithms to high radix cases

Effects of Architecture on Information Leakage of a Hardware Advanced Encryption Standard Implementation

Side-channel analysis (SCA) is a threat to many modern cryptosystems. Many countermeasures exist, but are costly to implement and still do not provide complete protection against SCA. A plausible alternative is to design the cryptosystem using architectures that are known to leak little information about the cryptosystem\u27s operations. This research uses several common primitive architectures for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and assesses the susceptibility of the full AES system to side-channel attack for various primitive configurations. A combined encryption/decryption core is also evaluated to determine if variation of high-level architectures affects leakage characteristics. These different configurations are evaluated under multiple measurement types and leakage models. The results show that different hardware configurations do impact the amount of information leaked by a device, but none of the tested configurations are able to prevent exploitation

Using quantum key distribution for cryptographic purposes: a survey

The appealing feature of quantum key distribution (QKD), from a cryptographic viewpoint, is the ability to prove the information-theoretic security (ITS) of the established keys. As a key establishment primitive, QKD however does not provide a standalone security service in its own: the secret keys established by QKD are in general then used by a subsequent cryptographic applications for which the requirements, the context of use and the security properties can vary. It is therefore important, in the perspective of integrating QKD in security infrastructures, to analyze how QKD can be combined with other cryptographic primitives. The purpose of this survey article, which is mostly centered on European research results, is to contribute to such an analysis. We first review and compare the properties of the existing key establishment techniques, QKD being one of them. We then study more specifically two generic scenarios related to the practical use of QKD in cryptographic infrastructures: 1) using QKD as a key renewal technique for a symmetric cipher over a point-to-point link; 2) using QKD in a network containing many users with the objective of offering any-to-any key establishment service. We discuss the constraints as well as the potential interest of using QKD in these contexts. We finally give an overview of challenges relative to the development of QKD technology that also constitute potential avenues for cryptographic research.Comment: Revised version of the SECOQC White Paper. Published in the special issue on QKD of TCS, Theoretical Computer Science (2014), pp. 62-8

Exploitation of Unintentional Information Leakage from Integrated Circuits

Unintentional electromagnetic emissions are used to recognize or verify the identity of a unique integrated circuit (IC) based on fabrication process-induced variations in a manner analogous to biometric human identification. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated through an extensive empirical study, with results presented indicating correct device identification success rates of greater than 99:5%, and average verification equal error rates (EERs) of less than 0:05% for 40 near-identical devices. The proposed approach is suitable for security applications involving commodity commercial ICs, with substantial cost and scalability advantages over existing approaches. A systematic leakage mapping methodology is also proposed to comprehensively assess the information leakage of arbitrary block cipher implementations, and to quantitatively bound an arbitrary implementation\u27s resistance to the general class of differential side channel analysis techniques. The framework is demonstrated using the well-known Hamming Weight and Hamming Distance leakage models, and approach\u27s effectiveness is demonstrated through the empirical assessment of two typical unprotected implementations of the Advanced Encryption Standard. The assessment results are empirically validated against correlation-based differential power and electromagnetic analysis attacks

RSA Power Analysis Obfuscation: A Dynamic FPGA Architecture

The modular exponentiation operation used in popular public key encryption schemes, such as RSA, has been the focus of many side channel analysis (SCA) attacks in recent years. Current SCA attack countermeasures are largely static. Given sufficient signal-to-noise ratio and a number of power traces, static countermeasures can be defeated, as they merely attempt to hide the power consumption of the system under attack. This research develops a dynamic countermeasure which constantly varies the timing and power consumption of each operation, making correlation between traces more difficult than for static countermeasures. By randomizing the radix of encoding for Booth multiplication and randomizing the window size in exponentiation, this research produces a SCA countermeasure capable of increasing RSA SCA attack protection