Fast and secure key distribution using mesoscopic coherent states of light

This work shows how two parties A and B can securely share sequences of random bits at optical speeds. A and B possess true-random physical sources and exchange random bits by using a random sequence received to cipher the following one to be sent. A starting shared secret key is used and the method can be described as an unlimited one-time-pad extender. It is demonstrated that the minimum probability of error in signal determination by the eavesdropper can be set arbitrarily close to the pure guessing level. Being based on the $M$-ry encryption protocol this method also allows for optical amplification without security degradation, offering practical advantages over the BB84 protocol for key distribution.Comment: 11 pages and 4 figures. This version updates the one published in PRA 68, 052307 (2003). Minor changes were made in the text and one section on Mutual Information was adde

SOFIA : software and control flow integrity architecture

Microprocessors used in safety-critical systems are extremely sensitive to software vulnerabilities, as their failure can lead to injury, damage to equipment, or environmental catastrophe. This paper proposes a hardware-based security architecture for microprocessors used in safety-critical systems. The proposed architecture provides protection against code injection and code reuse attacks. It has mechanisms to protect software integrity, perform control flow integrity, prevent execution of tampered code, and enforce copyright protection. We are the first to propose a mechanism to enforce control flow integrity at the finest possible granularity. The proposed architectural features were added to the LEON3 open source soft microprocessor, and were evaluated on an FPGA running a software benchmark. The results show that the hardware area is 28.2% larger and the clock is 84.6% slower, while the software benchmark has a cycle overhead of 13.7% and a total execution time overhead of 110% when compared to an unmodified processor

Evaluation of Cryptography Usage in Android Applications

Mobile application developers are using cryptography in their products to protect sensitive data like passwords, short messages, documents etc. In this paper, we study whether cryptography and related techniques are employed in a proper way, in order to protect these private data. To this end, we downloaded 49 Android applications from the Google Play marketplace and performed static and dynamic analysis in an attempt to detect possible cryptographic misuses. The results showed that 87.8 % of the applications present some kind of misuse, while for the rest of them no cryptography usage was detected during the analysis. Finally, we suggest countermeasures, mainly intended for developers, to alleviate the issues identified by the analysis

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

An IoT Endpoint System-on-Chip for Secure and Energy-Efficient Near-Sensor Analytics

Near-sensor data analytics is a promising direction for IoT endpoints, as it minimizes energy spent on communication and reduces network load - but it also poses security concerns, as valuable data is stored or sent over the network at various stages of the analytics pipeline. Using encryption to protect sensitive data at the boundary of the on-chip analytics engine is a way to address data security issues. To cope with the combined workload of analytics and encryption in a tight power envelope, we propose Fulmine, a System-on-Chip based on a tightly-coupled multi-core cluster augmented with specialized blocks for compute-intensive data processing and encryption functions, supporting software programmability for regular computing tasks. The Fulmine SoC, fabricated in 65nm technology, consumes less than 20mW on average at 0.8V achieving an efficiency of up to 70pJ/B in encryption, 50pJ/px in convolution, or up to 25MIPS/mW in software. As a strong argument for real-life flexible application of our platform, we show experimental results for three secure analytics use cases: secure autonomous aerial surveillance with a state-of-the-art deep CNN consuming 3.16pJ per equivalent RISC op; local CNN-based face detection with secured remote recognition in 5.74pJ/op; and seizure detection with encrypted data collection from EEG within 12.7pJ/op.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication to the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems - I: Regular Paper

Recent Advancements on Symmetric Cryptography Techniques -A Comprehensive Case Study

Now a day2019;s Cryptography is one of the broad areas for researchers; because of the conventional block cipher has lost its potency due to the sophistication of modern systems that can break it by brute force. Due to its importance, several cryptography techniques and algorithms are adopted by many authors to secure the data, but still there is a scope to improve the previous approaches. For this necessity, we provide the comprehensive survey which will help the researchers to provide better techniques