Public Evidence from Secret Ballots

Elections seem simple---aren't they just counting? But they have a unique, challenging combination of security and privacy requirements. The stakes are high; the context is adversarial; the electorate needs to be convinced that the results are correct; and the secrecy of the ballot must be ensured. And they have practical constraints: time is of the essence, and voting systems need to be affordable and maintainable, and usable by voters, election officials, and pollworkers. It is thus not surprising that voting is a rich research area spanning theory, applied cryptography, practical systems analysis, usable security, and statistics. Election integrity involves two key concepts: convincing evidence that outcomes are correct and privacy, which amounts to convincing assurance that there is no evidence about how any given person voted. These are obviously in tension. We examine how current systems walk this tightrope.Comment: To appear in E-Vote-Id '1

HandiVote: simple, anonymous, and auditable electronic voting

We suggest a set of procedures utilising a range of technologies by which a major democratic deficit of modern society can be addressed. The mechanism, whilst it makes limited use of cryptographic techniques in the background, is based around objects and procedures with which voters are currently familiar. We believe that this holds considerable potential for the extension of democratic participation and control

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

Democracy Enhancing Technologies: Toward deployable and incoercible E2E elections

End-to-end verifiable election systems (E2E systems) provide a provably correct tally while maintaining the secrecy of each voter's ballot, even if the voter is complicit in demonstrating how they voted. Providing voter incoercibility is one of the main challenges of designing E2E systems, particularly in the case of internet voting. A second challenge is building deployable, human-voteable E2E systems that conform to election laws and conventions. This dissertation examines deployability, coercion-resistance, and their intersection in election systems. In the course of this study, we introduce three new election systems, (Scantegrity, Eperio, and Selections), report on two real-world elections using E2E systems (Punchscan and Scantegrity), and study incoercibility issues in one deployed system (Punchscan). In addition, we propose and study new practical primitives for random beacons, secret printing, and panic passwords. These are tools that can be used in an election to, respectively, generate publicly verifiable random numbers, distribute the printing of secrets between non-colluding printers, and to covertly signal duress during authentication. While developed to solve specific problems in deployable and incoercible E2E systems, these techniques may be of independent interest

Information Leakage Attacks and Countermeasures

The scientific community has been consistently working on the pervasive problem of information leakage, uncovering numerous attack vectors, and proposing various countermeasures. Despite these efforts, leakage incidents remain prevalent, as the complexity of systems and protocols increases, and sophisticated modeling methods become more accessible to adversaries. This work studies how information leakages manifest in and impact interconnected systems and their users. We first focus on online communications and investigate leakages in the Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS). Using modern machine learning models, we show that an eavesdropping adversary can efficiently exploit meta-information (e.g., packet size) not protected by the TLS’ encryption to launch fingerprinting attacks at an unprecedented scale even under non-optimal conditions. We then turn our attention to ultrasonic communications, and discuss their security shortcomings and how adversaries could exploit them to compromise anonymity network users (even though they aim to offer a greater level of privacy compared to TLS). Following up on these, we delve into physical layer leakages that concern a wide array of (networked) systems such as servers, embedded nodes, Tor relays, and hardware cryptocurrency wallets. We revisit location-based side-channel attacks and develop an exploitation neural network. Our model demonstrates the capabilities of a modern adversary but also presents an inexpensive tool to be used by auditors for detecting such leakages early on during the development cycle. Subsequently, we investigate techniques that further minimize the impact of leakages found in production components. Our proposed system design distributes both the custody of secrets and the cryptographic operation execution across several components, thus making the exploitation of leaks difficult

On Secure Bulletin Boards for E-Voting

Peaaegu iga elektroonilise hääletamise protokolli esimeseks etapiks on häälte kogumine ning nende talletamine. Seda teenust pakub teadetetahvlisüsteem (bulletin board). Paljud teadusartiklid eeldavad turvalise teadetetahvlisüsteemi olemasolu, kuid konkreetseid süsteeme on välja pakutud vähe. Tihti eeldatakse, et teadetetahvlisüsteem on tsentraalne usaldatav osapool, kuid hiljutistes töödes on tähelepanu juhitud tõrkekindla hajustalletuse olulisusele. Käesolevas töös pakume välja formaalse mudeli teadetetahvlisüsteemi funktsionaalsuse ning turvalisuse analüüsimisseks. Meie mudeli aluseks on Culnane ja Schneideri poolt konverentsil Computer Security Foundations Symposium 2014 väljapakutud teadetetahvlisüsteemi omadused. Me käsitleme turvalist teadetetahvlisüsteemi kui Garay ja teiste poolt konverentsil Eurocrypt 2015 tutvustatud avalikku tehingute pearaamatut, mis õnnestunud hääle talletamise korral väljastab kviitungi. Täpsemalt, me defineerime omadused (tõendatav) püsivus ning tõendatav elusus.Me analüüsime Culnane ja Schneideri väljapakutud teadetetahvlisüsteemi turvalisust ning näitame, et nende protokolli korral ei ole elususe omadus täidetud, kui mõni kogumisneel (item collection peer) on ebaaus. Nende süsteem saavutab tõendatava püsivuse kasutades triviaalset lävisignatuuri juhul, kui ebaausaid kogumisneele on <N/3, vastasel korral on tõke <N/4. Culnane ja Schneideri teadetetahvlisüsteemist motiveeritult pakume välja uue süsteemi, mille korral on tagatud nii tõendatav püsivus kui ka tõendatav elusus, kui ebaausaid kogumisneele on vastavalt <N/3 ning <N/2. Lisaks on meie protokoll lihtne suhtluskeerukuselt. Antud töö põhineb konverentsile esitatud artiklil „A Cryptographic Approach to Bulletin Boards“ („Krüptograafiline lähenemine teadetetahvlisüsteemidele“), mille kaasautoriteks on Aggelos Kiayas, Helger Lipmaa, Janno Siim ja Thomas Zacharias.Vote collection together with storage of collected votes is the first phase of practically any electronic voting (e-voting) protocol. This functionality is provided by a bulletin board system. Many research papers in e-voting require the existence of a secure bulletin board, but there are only a few concrete systems. In the literature it is common to assume that bulletin board is a centralized trusted party, but in recent works the importance of a distributed fault-tolerant bulletin board has been raised. In this thesis, we propose a formal model for analysis of security and functionality of a bulletin board system motivated by the security requirements Culnane and Schneider introduced in Computer Security Foundations Symposium 2014. We consider a secure bulletin board as a robust public transaction ledger presented by Garay et al. in Eurocrypt 2015 that additionally provides receipts for successful postings. More precisely, we introduce two properties: (Confirmable) Persistence and Confirmable Liveness. We study a bulletin board system proposed by Culnane and Schneider in our model, and show that their protocol does not achieve Confirmable Liveness if there exist corrupted item collection peers, but achieves Confirmable Persistence for <N/3 corrupted item collection peers using only our trivial threshold signature scheme, otherwise the bound is <N/4. Motivated by the security analysis of Culnane-Schneider bulletin board system, we propose a fully secure bulletin board system and prove that it tolerates <N/3 corrupted item collection peers for Confirmable Persistence and <N/2 corrupted item collection peers for Confirmable Liveness. This thesis is based on a submitted paper "A Cryptographic Approach to Bulletin Boards" with co-authors Aggelos Kiayas, Helger Lipmaa, Janno Siim and Thomas Zacharias

Application of information theory and statistical learning to anomaly detection

In today\u27s highly networked world, computer intrusions and other attacks area constant threat. The detection of such attacks, especially attacks that are new or previously unknown, is important to secure networks and computers. A major focus of current research efforts in this area is on anomaly detection.;In this dissertation, we explore applications of information theory and statistical learning to anomaly detection. Specifically, we look at two difficult detection problems in network and system security, (1) detecting covert channels, and (2) determining if a user is a human or bot. We link both of these problems to entropy, a measure of randomness information content, or complexity, a concept that is central to information theory. The behavior of bots is low in entropy when tasks are rigidly repeated or high in entropy when behavior is pseudo-random. In contrast, human behavior is complex and medium in entropy. Similarly, covert channels either create regularity, resulting in low entropy, or encode extra information, resulting in high entropy. Meanwhile, legitimate traffic is characterized by complex interdependencies and moderate entropy. In addition, we utilize statistical learning algorithms, Bayesian learning, neural networks, and maximum likelihood estimation, in both modeling and detecting of covert channels and bots.;Our results using entropy and statistical learning techniques are excellent. By using entropy to detect covert channels, we detected three different covert timing channels that were not detected by previous detection methods. Then, using entropy and Bayesian learning to detect chat bots, we detected 100% of chat bots with a false positive rate of only 0.05% in over 1400 hours of chat traces. Lastly, using neural networks and the idea of human observational proofs to detect game bots, we detected 99.8% of game bots with no false positives in 95 hours of traces. Our work shows that a combination of entropy measures and statistical learning algorithms is a powerful and highly effective tool for anomaly detection

Security and Privacy for Modern Wireless Communication Systems

The aim of this reprint focuses on the latest protocol research, software/hardware development and implementation, and system architecture design in addressing emerging security and privacy issues for modern wireless communication networks. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following: deep-learning-based security and privacy design; covert communications; information-theoretical foundations for advanced security and privacy techniques; lightweight cryptography for power constrained networks; physical layer key generation; prototypes and testbeds for security and privacy solutions; encryption and decryption algorithm for low-latency constrained networks; security protocols for modern wireless communication networks; network intrusion detection; physical layer design with security consideration; anonymity in data transmission; vulnerabilities in security and privacy in modern wireless communication networks; challenges of security and privacy in node–edge–cloud computation; security and privacy design for low-power wide-area IoT networks; security and privacy design for vehicle networks; security and privacy design for underwater communications networks

Documentation Assessment of the Diebold Voting System

The California Secretary of State commissioned a comprehensive, independent evaluation of the electronic voting systems certified for use within the State. This team, working as part of the “Top to Bottom” Review (“TTBR”), evaluated the documentation supplied by Diebold Election System, Inc