861 research outputs found
Attacking Deterministic Signature Schemes using Fault Attacks
Many digital signature schemes rely on random numbers that are unique and non-predictable per signature. Failures of random number generators may have catastrophic effects such as compromising private signature keys. In recent years, many widely-used cryptographic technologies adopted deterministic signature schemes because they are presumed to be safer to implement.
In this paper, we analyze the security of deterministic ECDSA and EdDSA signature schemes and show that the elimination of random number generators in these schemes enables new kinds of fault attacks. We formalize these attacks and introduce practical attack scenarios against EdDSA using the Rowhammer fault attack. EdDSA is used in many widely used protocols such as TLS, SSH and IPSec, and we show that these protocols are not vulnerable to our attack. We formalize the necessary requirements of protocols using these deterministic signature schemes to be vulnerable, and discuss mitigation strategies and their effect on fault attacks against deterministic signature schemes
Lattice-based Fault Attacks on Deterministic Signature Schemes of ECDSA and EdDSA
The deterministic ECDSA and EdDSA signature schemes have found plenty of applications since their publication and standardization. Their theoretical security can be guaranteed under certain well-designed models, while their practical risks from the flaw of random number generators can be mitigated since no randomness is required by the algorithms anymore. But the situation is not completely optimistic, since it has been gradually found that delicately designed fault attacks can threaten the practical security of the schemes.
We present a lattice-based fault analysis method to the deterministic ECDSA and EdDSA algorithms. The underlying fault injection model is a special case of the random fault model in~\cite{MMF2019}. By noticing the algebraic structures of the deterministic algorithms, we show that, when providing with some valid faulty signatures and an associated correct signature of the same input message, some instances of lattice problems can be constructed to recover the signing key. This makes the allowed faulty bits close to the size of the signing key, and obviously bigger than that of the existing differential fault attacks. Moreover, the lattice-based approach supports much more alternative targets of fault injection when comparing with the existing approaches, which further improves its applicability.
Experiments are performed to validate the effectiveness of the key recovery method. It is demonstrated that, for 256-bit deterministic ECDSA/EdDSA, the signing key can be recovered efficiently with significant probability even if the targets are affected by 250 (or 247) faulty bits. This is, however, impractical for the existing faulty pattern enumerating approaches
A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in
the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed
nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks
are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their
proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed
for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield.
Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios.
Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security
mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible
in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging
task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms
for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures
presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN
security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table
Formal Analysis of CRT-RSA Vigilant's Countermeasure Against the BellCoRe Attack: A Pledge for Formal Methods in the Field of Implementation Security
In our paper at PROOFS 2013, we formally studied a few known countermeasures
to protect CRT-RSA against the BellCoRe fault injection attack. However, we
left Vigilant's countermeasure and its alleged repaired version by Coron et al.
as future work, because the arithmetical framework of our tool was not
sufficiently powerful. In this paper we bridge this gap and then use the same
methodology to formally study both versions of the countermeasure. We obtain
surprising results, which we believe demonstrate the importance of formal
analysis in the field of implementation security. Indeed, the original version
of Vigilant's countermeasure is actually broken, but not as much as Coron et
al. thought it was. As a consequence, the repaired version they proposed can be
simplified. It can actually be simplified even further as two of the nine
modular verifications happen to be unnecessary. Fortunately, we could formally
prove the simplified repaired version to be resistant to the BellCoRe attack,
which was considered a "challenging issue" by the authors of the countermeasure
themselves.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1401.817
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
Quantum cryptography: key distribution and beyond
Uniquely among the sciences, quantum cryptography has driven both
foundational research as well as practical real-life applications. We review
the progress of quantum cryptography in the last decade, covering quantum key
distribution and other applications.Comment: It's a review on quantum cryptography and it is not restricted to QK
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