528 research outputs found
Transparent code authentication at the processor level
The authors present a lightweight authentication mechanism that verifies the authenticity of code and thereby addresses the virus and malicious code problems at the hardware level eliminating the need for trusted extensions in the operating system. The technique proposed tightly integrates the authentication mechanism into the processor core. The authentication latency is hidden behind the memory access latency, thereby allowing seamless on-the-fly authentication of instructions. In addition, the proposed authentication method supports seamless encryption of code (and static data). Consequently, while providing the software users with assurance for authenticity of programs executing on their hardware, the proposed technique also protects the software manufacturers’ intellectual property through encryption. The performance analysis shows that, under mild assumptions, the presented technique introduces negligible overhead for even moderate cache sizes
Estimating the cost of generic quantum pre-image attacks on SHA-2 and SHA-3
We investigate the cost of Grover's quantum search algorithm when used in the
context of pre-image attacks on the SHA-2 and SHA-3 families of hash functions.
Our cost model assumes that the attack is run on a surface code based
fault-tolerant quantum computer. Our estimates rely on a time-area metric that
costs the number of logical qubits times the depth of the circuit in units of
surface code cycles. As a surface code cycle involves a significant classical
processing stage, our cost estimates allow for crude, but direct, comparisons
of classical and quantum algorithms.
We exhibit a circuit for a pre-image attack on SHA-256 that is approximately
surface code cycles deep and requires approximately
logical qubits. This yields an overall cost of
logical-qubit-cycles. Likewise we exhibit a SHA3-256 circuit that is
approximately surface code cycles deep and requires approximately
logical qubits for a total cost of, again,
logical-qubit-cycles. Both attacks require on the order of queries in
a quantum black-box model, hence our results suggest that executing these
attacks may be as much as billion times more expensive than one would
expect from the simple query analysis.Comment: Same as the published version to appear in the Selected Areas of
Cryptography (SAC) 2016. Comments are welcome
Design and implementation of robust embedded processor for cryptographic applications
Practical implementations of cryptographic algorithms are vulnerable to side-channel analysis and fault attacks. Thus, some masking and fault detection algorithms must be incorporated into these implementations. These additions further increase the complexity of the cryptographic devices which already need to perform computationally-intensive operations. Therefore, the general-purpose processors are usually supported by coprocessors/hardware accelerators to protect as well as to accelerate cryptographic applications. Using a configurable processor is just another solution. This work designs and implements robust execution units as an extension to a configurable processor, which detect the data faults (adversarial or otherwise) while performing the arithmetic operations. Assuming a capable adversary who can injects faults to the cryptographic computation with high precision, a nonlinear error detection code with high error detection capability is used. The designed units are tightly integrated to the datapath of the configurable processor using its tool chain. For different configurations, we report the increase in the space and time complexities of the configurable processor. Also, we present performance evaluations of the software implementations using the robust execution units. Implementation results show that it is feasible to implement robust arithmetic units with relatively low overhead in an embedded processor
Reliable Hardware Architectures for Cyrtographic Block Ciphers LED and HIGHT
Cryptographic architectures provide different security properties to sensitive usage models. However, unless reliability of architectures is guaranteed, such security properties can be undermined through natural or malicious faults. In this thesis, two underlying block ciphers which can be used in authenticated encryption algorithms are considered, i.e., LED and HIGHT block ciphers. The former is of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) type and has been considered areaefficient, while the latter constitutes a Feistel network structure and is suitable for low-complexity and low-power embedded security applications. In this thesis, we propose efficient error detection architectures including variants of recomputing with encoded operands and signature-based schemes to detect both transient and permanent faults. Authenticated encryption is applied in cryptography to provide confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity simultaneously to the message sent in a communication channel. In this thesis, we show that the proposed schemes are applicable to the case study of Simple Lightweight CFB (SILC) for providing authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD). The error simulations are performed using Xilinx ISE tool and the results are benchmarked for the Xilinx FPGA family Virtex- 7 to assess the reliability capability and efficiency of the proposed architectures
Applying Grover's algorithm to AES: quantum resource estimates
We present quantum circuits to implement an exhaustive key search for the
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and analyze the quantum resources required
to carry out such an attack. We consider the overall circuit size, the number
of qubits, and the circuit depth as measures for the cost of the presented
quantum algorithms. Throughout, we focus on Clifford gates as the
underlying fault-tolerant logical quantum gate set. In particular, for all
three variants of AES (key size 128, 192, and 256 bit) that are standardized in
FIPS-PUB 197, we establish precise bounds for the number of qubits and the
number of elementary logical quantum gates that are needed to implement
Grover's quantum algorithm to extract the key from a small number of AES
plaintext-ciphertext pairs.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables; to appear in: Proceedings of the 7th
International Conference on Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQCrypto 2016
Novel Framework for Hidden Data in the Image Page within Executable File Using Computation between Advanced Encryption Standard and Distortion Techniques
The hurried development of multimedia and internet allows for wide
distribution of digital media data. It becomes much easier to edit, modify and
duplicate digital information. In additional, digital document is also easy to
copy and distribute, therefore it may face many threats. It became necessary to
find an appropriate protection due to the significance, accuracy and
sensitivity of the information. Furthermore, there is no formal method to be
followed to discover a hidden data. In this paper, a new information hiding
framework is presented.The proposed framework aim is implementation of
framework computation between advance encryption standard (AES) and distortion
technique (DT) which embeds information in image page within executable file
(EXE file) to find a secure solution to cover file without change the size of
cover file. The framework includes two main functions; first is the hiding of
the information in the image page of EXE file, through the execution of four
process (specify the cover file, specify the information file, encryption of
the information, and hiding the information) and the second function is the
extraction of the hiding information through three process (specify the stego
file, extract the information, and decryption of the information).Comment: 6 Pages IEEE Format, International Journal of Computer Science and
Information Security, IJCSIS 2009, ISSN 1947 5500, Impact Factor 0.42
Sequential Circuit Design for Embedded Cryptographic Applications Resilient to Adversarial Faults
In the relatively young field of fault-tolerant cryptography, the main research effort has focused exclusively on the protection of the data path of cryptographic circuits. To date, however, we have not found any work that aims at protecting the control logic of these circuits against fault attacks, which thus remains the proverbial Achilles’ heel. Motivated by a hypothetical yet realistic fault analysis attack that, in principle, could be mounted against any modular exponentiation engine, even one with appropriate data path protection, we set out to close this remaining gap. In this paper, we present guidelines for the design of multifault-resilient sequential control logic based on standard Error-Detecting Codes (EDCs) with large minimum distance. We introduce a metric that measures the effectiveness of the error detection technique in terms of the effort the attacker has to make in relation to the area overhead spent in
implementing the EDC. Our comparison shows that the proposed EDC-based technique provides superior performance when compared against regular N-modular redundancy techniques. Furthermore, our technique scales well and does not affect the critical path delay
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