5,917 research outputs found
Transparent code authentication at the processor level
The authors present a lightweight authentication mechanism that verifies the authenticity of code and thereby addresses the virus and malicious code problems at the hardware level eliminating the need for trusted extensions in the operating system. The technique proposed tightly integrates the authentication mechanism into the processor core. The authentication latency is hidden behind the memory access latency, thereby allowing seamless on-the-fly authentication of instructions. In addition, the proposed authentication method supports seamless encryption of code (and static data). Consequently, while providing the software users with assurance for authenticity of programs executing on their hardware, the proposed technique also protects the software manufacturers’ intellectual property through encryption. The performance analysis shows that, under mild assumptions, the presented technique introduces negligible overhead for even moderate cache sizes
Execution Integrity with In-Place Encryption
Instruction set randomization (ISR) was initially proposed with the main goal
of countering code-injection attacks. However, ISR seems to have lost its
appeal since code-injection attacks became less attractive because protection
mechanisms such as data execution prevention (DEP) as well as code-reuse
attacks became more prevalent.
In this paper, we show that ISR can be extended to also protect against
code-reuse attacks while at the same time offering security guarantees similar
to those of software diversity, control-flow integrity, and information hiding.
We present Scylla, a scheme that deploys a new technique for in-place code
encryption to hide the code layout of a randomized binary, and restricts the
control flow to a benign execution path. This allows us to i) implicitly
restrict control-flow targets to basic block entries without requiring the
extraction of a control-flow graph, ii) achieve execution integrity within
legitimate basic blocks, and iii) hide the underlying code layout under
malicious read access to the program. Our analysis demonstrates that Scylla is
capable of preventing state-of-the-art attacks such as just-in-time
return-oriented programming (JIT-ROP) and crash-resistant oriented programming
(CROP). We extensively evaluate our prototype implementation of Scylla and show
feasible performance overhead. We also provide details on how this overhead can
be significantly reduced with dedicated hardware support
On the Design of Perceptual MPEG-Video Encryption Algorithms
In this paper, some existing perceptual encryption algorithms of MPEG videos
are reviewed and some problems, especially security defects of two recently
proposed MPEG-video perceptual encryption schemes, are pointed out. Then, a
simpler and more effective design is suggested, which selectively encrypts
fixed-length codewords (FLC) in MPEG-video bitstreams under the control of
three perceptibility factors. The proposed design is actually an encryption
configuration that can work with any stream cipher or block cipher. Compared
with the previously-proposed schemes, the new design provides more useful
features, such as strict size-preservation, on-the-fly encryption and multiple
perceptibility, which make it possible to support more applications with
different requirements. In addition, four different measures are suggested to
provide better security against known/chosen-plaintext attacks.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, IEEEtran.cl
Stream cipher based on quasigroup string transformations in
In this paper we design a stream cipher that uses the algebraic structure of
the multiplicative group \bbbz_p^* (where p is a big prime number used in
ElGamal algorithm), by defining a quasigroup of order and by doing
quasigroup string transformations. The cryptographical strength of the proposed
stream cipher is based on the fact that breaking it would be at least as hard
as solving systems of multivariate polynomial equations modulo big prime number
which is NP-hard problem and there are no known fast randomized or
deterministic algorithms for solving it. Unlikely the speed of known ciphers
that work in \bbbz_p^* for big prime numbers , the speed of this stream
cipher both in encryption and decryption phase is comparable with the fastest
symmetric-key stream ciphers.Comment: Small revisions and added reference
Revisiting LFSMs
Linear Finite State Machines (LFSMs) are particular primitives widely used in
information theory, coding theory and cryptography. Among those linear
automata, a particular case of study is Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSRs)
used in many cryptographic applications such as design of stream ciphers or
pseudo-random generation. LFSRs could be seen as particular LFSMs without
inputs.
In this paper, we first recall the description of LFSMs using traditional
matrices representation. Then, we introduce a new matrices representation with
polynomial fractional coefficients. This new representation leads to sparse
representations and implementations. As direct applications, we focus our work
on the Windmill LFSRs case, used for example in the E0 stream cipher and on
other general applications that use this new representation.
In a second part, a new design criterion called diffusion delay for LFSRs is
introduced and well compared with existing related notions. This criterion
represents the diffusion capacity of an LFSR. Thus, using the matrices
representation, we present a new algorithm to randomly pick LFSRs with good
properties (including the new one) and sparse descriptions dedicated to
hardware and software designs. We present some examples of LFSRs generated
using our algorithm to show the relevance of our approach.Comment: Submitted to IEEE-I
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