4,278 research outputs found
A Touch of Evil: High-Assurance Cryptographic Hardware from Untrusted Components
The semiconductor industry is fully globalized and integrated circuits (ICs)
are commonly defined, designed and fabricated in different premises across the
world. This reduces production costs, but also exposes ICs to supply chain
attacks, where insiders introduce malicious circuitry into the final products.
Additionally, despite extensive post-fabrication testing, it is not uncommon
for ICs with subtle fabrication errors to make it into production systems.
While many systems may be able to tolerate a few byzantine components, this is
not the case for cryptographic hardware, storing and computing on confidential
data. For this reason, many error and backdoor detection techniques have been
proposed over the years. So far all attempts have been either quickly
circumvented, or come with unrealistically high manufacturing costs and
complexity.
This paper proposes Myst, a practical high-assurance architecture, that uses
commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, and provides strong security
guarantees, even in the presence of multiple malicious or faulty components.
The key idea is to combine protective-redundancy with modern threshold
cryptographic techniques to build a system tolerant to hardware trojans and
errors. To evaluate our design, we build a Hardware Security Module that
provides the highest level of assurance possible with COTS components.
Specifically, we employ more than a hundred COTS secure crypto-coprocessors,
verified to FIPS140-2 Level 4 tamper-resistance standards, and use them to
realize high-confidentiality random number generation, key derivation, public
key decryption and signing. Our experiments show a reasonable computational
overhead (less than 1% for both Decryption and Signing) and an exponential
increase in backdoor-tolerance as more ICs are added
Side-channel based intrusion detection for industrial control systems
Industrial Control Systems are under increased scrutiny. Their security is
historically sub-par, and although measures are being taken by the
manufacturers to remedy this, the large installed base of legacy systems cannot
easily be updated with state-of-the-art security measures. We propose a system
that uses electromagnetic side-channel measurements to detect behavioural
changes of the software running on industrial control systems. To demonstrate
the feasibility of this method, we show it is possible to profile and
distinguish between even small changes in programs on Siemens S7-317 PLCs,
using methods from cryptographic side-channel analysis.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. For associated code, see
https://polvanaubel.com/research/em-ics/code
Smart Ticket Protection: An Architecture for Cyber-Protecting Physical Tickets Using Digitally Signed Random Pattern Markers
In order to counter forgeries of tickets for public transport or mass events,
a method to validate them, using printed unique random pattern markers was
developed. These markers themselves are unforgeable by their physically random
distribution. To assure their authenticity, however, they have to be
cryptographically protected and equipped with an environment for successful
validation, combining physical and cyber security protection. This paper
describes an architecture for cryptographically protecting these markers, which
are stored in Aztec codes on physical tickets, in order to assure that only an
authorized printer can generate a valid Aztec code of such a pattern, thus
providing forge protection in combination with the randomness and uniqueness of
the pattern. Nevertheless, the choice of the signature algorithm is heavily
constrained by the sizes of the pattern, ticket provider data, metadata and the
signature confronted by the data volume the code hold. Therefore, this paper
also defines an example for a signature layout for the proposed architecture.
This allows for a lightweight ticket validation system that is both physically
and cryptographically secured to form a smart solution for mass access
verification for both shorter to longer periods at relatively low cost.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
- …