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

Weakened Random Oracle Models with Target Prefix

Weakened random oracle models (WROMs) are variants of the random oracle model (ROM). The WROMs have the random oracle and the additional oracle which breaks some property of a hash function. Analyzing the security of cryptographic schemes in WROMs, we can specify the property of a hash function on which the security of cryptographic schemes depends. Liskov (SAC 2006) proposed WROMs and later Numayama et al. (PKC 2008) formalized them as CT-ROM, SPT-ROM, and FPT-ROM. In each model, there is the additional oracle to break collision resistance, second preimage resistance, preimage resistance respectively. Tan and Wong (ACISP 2012) proposed the generalized FPT-ROM (GFPT-ROM) which intended to capture the chosen prefix collision attack suggested by Stevens et al. (EUROCRYPT 2007). In this paper, in order to analyze the security of cryptographic schemes more precisely, we formalize GFPT-ROM and propose additional three WROMs which capture the chosen prefix collision attack and its variants. In particular, we focus on signature schemes such as RSA-FDH, its variants, and DSA, in order to understand essential roles of WROMs in their security proofs

SplitCommit: Implementing and Analyzing Homomorphic UC Commitments

In this paper we present SplitCommit, a portable and efficient C++ implementation of the recent additively homomorphic commmitment scheme of Frederiksen et al. [FJNT16]. We describe numerous optimizations that go into engineering such an implementation, including highly optimized general purpose bit-matrix transposition and efficient ECC encoding given the associated generator matrix. We also survey and analyze in detail the applicability of [FJNT16] and include a detailed comparison to the canonical (non-homomorphic) commitment scheme based on a Random Oracle. We include performance benchmarks of the implementation in various network setting, for instance on a 10 Gbps LAN we achieve amortized commitment and decommitment running times of $0.65\mu s$ and $0.27\mu s$, respectively. Finally we also include an extensive tutorial on how to use the library

DAG-Based Attack and Defense Modeling: Don't Miss the Forest for the Attack Trees

This paper presents the current state of the art on attack and defense modeling approaches that are based on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). DAGs allow for a hierarchical decomposition of complex scenarios into simple, easily understandable and quantifiable actions. Methods based on threat trees and Bayesian networks are two well-known approaches to security modeling. However there exist more than 30 DAG-based methodologies, each having different features and goals. The objective of this survey is to present a complete overview of graphical attack and defense modeling techniques based on DAGs. This consists of summarizing the existing methodologies, comparing their features and proposing a taxonomy of the described formalisms. This article also supports the selection of an adequate modeling technique depending on user requirements

Inflation-Tracking Proof-of-Work Crypto-Currencies

We show that Bitcoin and other egalitarian crypto-currencies are unstable as store-of-value as they fail to track inflation of local currencies closely, and the price dynamic is purely driven by speculation. Based on rational expectations equilibrium, we argue that if the coins awarded during mining are increased in proportion to increase in difficulty of the underlying cryptographic puzzle, then the price of the coin is likely to track inflation of local currencies closely over medium to long term. Further, a hyper-geometric tapering, instead of a geometric tapering, of the mining award over time is recommended for bootstrapping interest in the crypto-currency

Injective Rank Metric Trapdoor Functions with Homogeneous Errors

In rank-metric cryptography, a vector from a finite dimensional linear space over a finite field is viewed as the linear space spanned by its entries. The rank decoding problem which is the analogue of the problem of decoding a random linear code consists in recovering a basis of a random noise vector that was used to perturb a set of random linear equations sharing a secret solution. Assuming the intractability of this problem, we introduce a new construction of injective one-way trapdoor functions. Our solution departs from the frequent way of building public key primitives from error-correcting codes where, to establish the security, ad hoc assumptions about a hidden structure are made. Our method produces a hard-to-distinguish linear code together with low weight vectors which constitute the secret that helps recover the inputs.The key idea is to focus on trapdoor functions that take sufficiently enough input vectors sharing the same support. Applying then the error correcting algorithm designed for Low Rank Parity Check (LRPC) codes, we obtain an inverting algorithm that recovers the inputs with overwhelming probability