An implementation of Deflate in Coq

The widely-used compression format "Deflate" is defined in RFC 1951 and is based on prefix-free codings and backreferences. There are unclear points about the way these codings are specified, and several sources for confusion in the standard. We tried to fix this problem by giving a rigorous mathematical specification, which we formalized in Coq. We produced a verified implementation in Coq which achieves competitive performance on inputs of several megabytes. In this paper we present the several parts of our implementation: a fully verified implementation of canonical prefix-free codings, which can be used in other compression formats as well, and an elegant formalism for specifying sophisticated formats, which we used to implement both a compression and decompression algorithm in Coq which we formally prove inverse to each other -- the first time this has been achieved to our knowledge. The compatibility to other Deflate implementations can be shown empirically. We furthermore discuss some of the difficulties, specifically regarding memory and runtime requirements, and our approaches to overcome them

SoK: Why Johnny Can't Fix PGP Standardization

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) has long been the primary IETF standard for encrypting email, but suffers from widespread usability and security problems that have limited its adoption. As time has marched on, the underlying cryptographic protocol has fallen out of date insofar as PGP is unauthenticated on a per message basis and compresses before encryption. There have been an increasing number of attacks on the increasingly outdated primitives and complex clients used by the PGP eco-system. However, attempts to update the OpenPGP standard have failed at the IETF except for adding modern cryptographic primitives. Outside of official standardization, Autocrypt is a "bottom-up" community attempt to fix PGP, but still falls victim to attacks on PGP involving authentication. The core reason for the inability to "fix" PGP is the lack of a simple AEAD interface which in turn requires a decentralized public key infrastructure to work with email. Yet even if standards like MLS replace PGP, the deployment of a decentralized PKI remains an open issue

Analysis Resistant Cipher Method and Apparatus

A system for encoding and decoding data words including an anti-analysis encoder unit for receiving an original plaintext and producing a recoded data, a data compression unit for receiving the recoded data and producing a compressed recoded data, and an encryption unit for receiving the compressed recoded data and producing an encrypted data. The recoded data has an increased non-correlatable data redundancy compared with the original plaintext in order to mask the statistical distribution of characters in the plaintext data. The system of the present invention further includes a decryption unit for receiving the encrypted data and producing a decrypted data, a data decompression unit for receiving the decrypted data and producing an uncompressed recoded data, and an anti-analysis decoder unit for receiving the uncompressed recoded data and producing a recovered plaintext that corresponds with the original plaintext

SafeDeflate: compression without leaking secrets

CRIME and BREACH attacks on TLS/SSL leverage the fact that compression ratio is not hidden by encryption to recover content of secrets. We introduce SafeDeflate---a modification of a standard Deflate algorithm which compression ratio does not leak information about secret tokens. The modification is compatible with existing Deflate and gzip decompressors. We introduce a model in which attacker can obtain ciphertexts of arbitrary compressed plaintext containing secret values. Then we prove that SafeDeflate is secure in this model

Randomized Lempel-Ziv Compression for Anti-Compression Side-Channel Attacks

Security experts confront new attacks on TLS/SSL every year. Ever since the compression side-channel attacks CRIME and BREACH were presented during security conferences in 2012 and 2013, online users connecting to HTTP servers that run TLS version 1.2 are susceptible of being impersonated. We set up three Randomized Lempel-Ziv Models, which are built on Lempel-Ziv77, to confront this attack. Our three models change the deterministic characteristic of the compression algorithm: each compression with the same input gives output of different lengths. We implemented SSL/TLS protocol and the Lempel-Ziv77 compression algorithm, and used them as a base for our simulations of compression side-channel attack. After performing the simulations, all three models successfully prevented the attack. However, we demonstrate that our randomized models can still be broken by a stronger version of compression side-channel attack that we created. But this latter attack has a greater time complexity and is easily detectable. Finally, from the results, we conclude that our models couldn't compress as well as Lempel-Ziv77, but they can be used against compression side-channel attacks

The Weakness Of Winrar Encrypted Archives To Compression Side-channel Attacks

Arthur-Durett, Kristine MS, Purdue University, December 2014. The weakness of WinRAR encrypted archives to compression side-channel attacks. Major Professor: Eugene Spaff This paper explores the security of WinRAR encrypted archives. Previous works concerning potential attacks against encrypted archives are studied and evaluated for practical implementation. These attacks include passive actions examining the effects of compression ratios of archives and the fi contained, the study of temporary ar- tifacts and active man-in-the-middle attacks on communication between individuals. An extensive overview of the WinRAR software and the functions implemented within it is presented to aid in understanding the intricacies of attacks against archives. Several attacks are chosen from the literature to execute on WinRAR v5.10. Select fi types are identifi through the examination of compression ratios. The appear- ance of a fi in an archive is determined through both the appearance of substrings in the known area of an archive and the comparison of compression ratios. Finally, the author outlines a revised version of an attack that takes advantage of the independence between the compression and encryption algorithms. While a previous version of this attack only succeeded in removing the encryption from an archive, the revised version is capable of fully recovering an original document from a encrypted compressed archive. The advantages and shortcomings of these attacks are discussed and some countermeasures are briefl mentione

Steady: A Simple End-to-End Secure Logging System

We present Steady: an end-to-end secure logging system engineered to be simple in terms of design, implementation, and assumptions for real-world use. Steady gets its name from being based on a steady (heart)beat of events from a forward-secure device sent over an untrusted network through untrusted relays to a trusted collector. Properties include optional encryption and compression (with loss of confidentiality but significant gain in goodput), detection of tampering, relays that can function in unidirectional networks (e.g., as part of a data diode), cost-effective use of cloud services for relays, and publicly verifiable proofs of event authenticity. The design is formalized and security proven in the standard model. Our prototype implementation (about 2,200 loc) shows reliable goodput of over 1M events/s (about 160 MiB/s) for a realistic dataset with commodity hardware for a device on a GigE network using 16 MiB of memory connected to a relay running at Amazon EC2