Benchmarking Block Ciphers for Wireless Sensor Networks

Choosing the most storage- and energy-efficient block cipher specifically for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is not as straightforward as it seems. To our knowledge so far, there is no systematic evaluation framework for the purpose. We have identified the candidates of block ciphers suitable for WSNs based on existing literature. For evaluating and assessing these candidates, we have devised a systematic framework that not only considers the security properties but also the storage- and energy-efficency of the candidates. Finally, based on the evaluation results, we have selected the suitable ciphers for WSNs, namely Rijndael for high security and energy efficiency requirements; and MISTY1 for good storage and energy efficiency

FAIR: Forwarding Accountability for Internet Reputability

This paper presents FAIR, a forwarding accountability mechanism that incentivizes ISPs to apply stricter security policies to their customers. The Autonomous System (AS) of the receiver specifies a traffic profile that the sender AS must adhere to. Transit ASes on the path mark packets. In case of traffic profile violations, the marked packets are used as a proof of misbehavior. FAIR introduces low bandwidth overhead and requires no per-packet and no per-flow state for forwarding. We describe integration with IP and demonstrate a software switch running on commodity hardware that can switch packets at a line rate of 120 Gbps, and can forward 140M minimum-sized packets per second, limited by the hardware I/O subsystem. Moreover, this paper proposes a "suspicious bit" for packet headers - an application that builds on top of FAIR's proofs of misbehavior and flags packets to warn other entities in the network.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figure

Verifiable side-channel security of cryptographic implementations: constant-time MEE-CBC

We provide further evidence that implementing software countermeasures against timing attacks is a non-trivial task and requires domain-specific software development processes: we report an implementation bug in the s2n library, recently released by AWS Labs. This bug ( now fixed) allowed bypassing the balancing countermeasures against timing attacks deployed in the implementation of the MAC-then-Encode-then-CBC-Encrypt (MEE-CBC) component, creating a timing side-channel similar to that exploited by Lucky 13.Although such an attack could only be launched when the MEE-CBC component is used in isolation - Albrecht and Paterson recently confirmed in independent work that s2n's second line of defence, once reinforced, provides adequate mitigation against current adversary capabilities - its existence serves as further evidence to the fact that conventional software validation processes are not effective in the study and validation of security properties. To solve this problem, we define a methodology for proving security of implementations in the presence of timing attackers: first, prove black-box security of an algorithmic description of a cryptographic construction; then, establish functional correctness of an implementation with respect to the algorithmic description; and finally, prove that the implementation is leakage secure.We present a proof-of-concept application of our methodology to MEE-CBC, bringing together three different formal verification tools to produce an assembly implementation of this construction that is verifiably secure against adversaries with access to some timing leakage. Our methodology subsumes previous work connecting provable security and side-channel analysis at the implementation level, and supports the verification of a much larger case study. Our case study itself provides the first provable security validation of complex timing countermeasures deployed, for example, in OpenSSL.The first two authors were funded by Project "TEC4Growth - Pervasive Intelligence, Enhancers and Proofs of Concept with Industrial Impact/ NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000020", which is financed by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, and through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The third and fourth authors were supported by projects S2013/ICE-2731 N-GREENS Software-CM and ONR Grants N000141210914 (AutoCrypt) and N00014151 2750 (SynCrypt). The fourth author was supported by FP7 Marie Cure Actions-COFUND 291803 (Amarout II). The machine-checked proof for CBC improves on a script by Benjamin Gregoire and Benedikt Schmidt. Pierre-Yves Strub provided support for extracting Why3 definitions from EasyCrypt specifications. We thank Mathias Pedersen and Bas Spitters for useful comments.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Survey and Benchmark of Block Ciphers for Wireless Sensor Networks

Cryptographic algorithms play an important role in the security architecture of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Choosing the most storage- and energy-efficient block cipher is essential, due to the facts that these networks are meant to operate without human intervention for a long period of time with little energy supply, and that available storage is scarce on these sensor nodes. However, to our knowledge, no systematic work has been done in this area so far.We construct an evaluation framework in which we first identify the candidates of block ciphers suitable for WSNs, based on existing literature and authoritative recommendations. For evaluating and assessing these candidates, we not only consider the security properties but also the storage- and energy-efficiency of the candidates. Finally, based on the evaluation results, we select the most suitable ciphers for WSNs, namely Skipjack, MISTY1, and Rijndael, depending on the combination of available memory and required security (energy efficiency being implicit). In terms of operation mode, we recommend Output Feedback Mode for pairwise links but Cipher Block Chaining for group communications