Defending cache memory against cold-boot attacks boosted by power or EM radiation analysis

Some algorithms running with compromised data select cache memory as a type of secure memory where data is confined and not transferred to main memory. However, cold-boot attacks that target cache memories exploit the data remanence. Thus, a sudden power shutdown may not delete data entirely, giving the opportunity to steal data. The biggest challenge for any technique aiming to secure the cache memory is performance penalty. Techniques based on data scrambling have demonstrated that security can be improved with a limited reduction in performance. However, they still cannot resist side-channel attacks like power or electromagnetic analysis. This paper presents a review of known attacks on memories and countermeasures proposed so far and an improved scrambling technique named random masking interleaved scrambling technique (RM-ISTe). This method is designed to protect the cache memory against cold-boot attacks, even if these are boosted by side-channel techniques like power or electromagnetic analysis.Postprint (author's final draft

Reuse It Or Lose It: More Efficient Secure Computation Through Reuse of Encrypted Values

Two-party secure function evaluation (SFE) has become significantly more feasible, even on resource-constrained devices, because of advances in server-aided computation systems. However, there are still bottlenecks, particularly in the input validation stage of a computation. Moreover, SFE research has not yet devoted sufficient attention to the important problem of retaining state after a computation has been performed so that expensive processing does not have to be repeated if a similar computation is done again. This paper presents PartialGC, an SFE system that allows the reuse of encrypted values generated during a garbled-circuit computation. We show that using PartialGC can reduce computation time by as much as 96% and bandwidth by as much as 98% in comparison with previous outsourcing schemes for secure computation. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with two sets of experiments, one in which the garbled circuit is evaluated on a mobile device and one in which it is evaluated on a server. We also use PartialGC to build a privacy-preserving "friend finder" application for Android. The reuse of previous inputs to allow stateful evaluation represents a new way of looking at SFE and further reduces computational barriers.Comment: 20 pages, shorter conference version published in Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Pages 582-596, ACM New York, NY, US

AnonyControl: Control Cloud Data Anonymously with Multi-Authority Attribute-Based Encryption

Cloud computing is a revolutionary computing paradigm which enables flexible, on-demand and low-cost usage of computing resources. However, those advantages, ironically, are the causes of security and privacy problems, which emerge because the data owned by different users are stored in some cloud servers instead of under their own control. To deal with security problems, various schemes based on the Attribute- Based Encryption (ABE) have been proposed recently. However, the privacy problem of cloud computing is yet to be solved. This paper presents an anonymous privilege control scheme AnonyControl to address the user and data privacy problem in a cloud. By using multiple authorities in cloud computing system, our proposed scheme achieves anonymous cloud data access, finegrained privilege control, and more importantly, tolerance to up to (N -2) authority compromise. Our security and performance analysis show that AnonyControl is both secure and efficient for cloud computing environment.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables, conference, IEEE INFOCOM 201

Malicious cryptography techniques for unreversable (malicious or not) binaries

Fighting against computer malware require a mandatory step of reverse engineering. As soon as the code has been disassemblied/decompiled (including a dynamic analysis step), there is a hope to understand what the malware actually does and to implement a detection mean. This also applies to protection of software whenever one wishes to analyze them. In this paper, we show how to amour code in such a way that reserse engineering techniques (static and dymanic) are absolutely impossible by combining malicious cryptography techniques developped in our laboratory and new types of programming (k-ary codes). Suitable encryption algorithms combined with new cryptanalytic approaches to ease the protection of (malicious or not) binaries, enable to provide both total code armouring and large scale polymorphic features at the same time. A simple 400 Kb of executable code enables to produce a binary code and around $2^{140}$ mutated forms natively while going far beyond the old concept of decryptor.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures, accepted for presentation at H2HC'1