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

Denial of Service in Voice Over IP Networks

In this paper we investigate denial of service (DoS) vulnerabilities in Voice over IP (VoIP) systems, focusing on the ITU-T H.323 family of protocols. We provide a simple characterisation of DoS attacks that allows us to readily identify DoS issues in H.323 protocols. We also discuss network layer DoS vulnerabilities that affect VoIP systems. A number of improvements and further research directions are proposed

Security Attacks and Countermeasures in Smart Homes

The Internet of Things (IoT) application is visible in all aspects of humans’ day-to-day affairs. The demand for IoT is growing at an unprecedented rate, from wearable wristwatches to autopilot cars. The smart home has also seen significant advancements to improve the quality of lifestyle. However, the security and privacy of IoT devices have become primary concerns as data is shared among intelligent devices and over the internet in a smart home network. There are several attacks - node capturing attack, sniffing attack, malware attack, boot phase attack, etc., which are conducted by adversaries to breach the security of smart homes. The security breach has a negative impact on the tenants\u27 privacy and prevents the availability of smart home services. This article presents smart homes\u27 most common security attacks and mitigation techniques