High-level Cryptographic Abstractions

The interfaces exposed by commonly used cryptographic libraries are clumsy, complicated, and assume an understanding of cryptographic algorithms. The challenge is to design high-level abstractions that require minimum knowledge and effort to use while also allowing maximum control when needed. This paper proposes such high-level abstractions consisting of simple cryptographic primitives and full declarative configuration. These abstractions can be implemented on top of any cryptographic library in any language. We have implemented these abstractions in Python, and used them to write a wide variety of well-known security protocols, including Signal, Kerberos, and TLS. We show that programs using our abstractions are much smaller and easier to write than using low-level libraries, where size of security protocols implemented is reduced by about a third on average. We show our implementation incurs a small overhead, less than 5 microseconds for shared key operations and less than 341 microseconds (< 1%) for public key operations. We also show our abstractions are safe against main types of cryptographic misuse reported in the literature

Homomorphic encryption and some black box attacks

This paper is a compressed summary of some principal definitions and concepts in the approach to the black box algebra being developed by the authors. We suggest that black box algebra could be useful in cryptanalysis of homomorphic encryption schemes, and that homomorphic encryption is an area of research where cryptography and black box algebra may benefit from exchange of ideas

Ransomware in High-Risk Environments

In today’s modern world, cybercrime is skyrocketing globally, which impacts a variety of organizations and endpoint users. Hackers are using a multitude of approaches and tools, including ransomware threats, to take over targeted systems. These acts of cybercrime lead to huge damages in areas of business, healthcare systems, industry sectors, and other fields. Ransomware is considered as a high risk threat, which is designed to hijack the data. This paper is demonstrating the ransomware types, and how they are evolved from the malware and trojan codes, which is used to attack previous incidents, and explains the most common encryption algorithms such as AES, and RSA, ransomware uses them during infection process in order to produce complex threats. The practical approach for data encryption uses python programming language to show the efficiency of those algorithms in real attacks by executing this section on Ubuntu virtual machine. Furthermore, this paper analyzes programming languages, which is used to build ransomware. An example of ransomware code is being demonstrated in this paper, which is written specifically in C sharp language, and it has been tested out on windows operating system using MS visual studio. So, it is very important to recognize the system vulnerability, which can be very useful to prevent the ransomware. In contrast, this threat might sneak into the system easily, allowing for a ransom to be demanded. Therefore, understanding ransomware anatomy can help us to find a better solution in different situations. Consequently, this paper shows a number of outstanding removal techniques to get rid from ransomware attacks in the system

Sound Computational Interpretation of Formal Encryption with Composed Keys

The formal and computational views of cryptography have been related by the seminal work of Abadi and Rogaway. In their work, a formal treatment of encryption that uses atomic keys is justified in the computational world. However, many proposed formal approaches allow the use of composed keys, where any arbitrary expression can be used as encryption key. We consider an extension of the formal model presented by Abadi and Rogaway, in which it is allowed to use composed keys in formal encryption. We then provide a computational interpretation for expressions that allow us to establish the computational soundness of formal encryption with composed keys

Dodrant-Homomorphic Encryption for Cloud Databases using Table Lookup

Users of large commercial databases increasingly want to outsource their database operations to a cloud service providers, but guaranteeing the privacy of data in an outsourced database has become the major obstacle to this move. Encrypting all data solves the privacy issue, but makes many operations on the data impossible in the cloud, unless the service provider has the capacity to decrypt data temporarily. Homomorphic encryption would solve this issue, but despite great and on-going progress, it is still far from being operationally feasible. In 2015, we presented what we now call dodrant-homomorphic encryption, a method that encrypts numeric values deterministically using the additively homomorphic Paillier encryption and uses table lookup in order to implement multiplications. We discuss here the security implications of determinism and discuss options to avoid these pitfalls

Ransomware in High-Risk Environments

In today’s modern world, cybercrime is skyrocketing globally, which impacts a variety of organizations and endpoint users. Hackers are using a multitude of approaches and tools, including ransomware threats, to take over targeted systems. These acts of cybercrime lead to huge damages in areas of business, healthcare systems, industry sectors, and other fields. Ransomware is considered as a high risk threat, which is designed to hijack the data. This paper is demonstrating the ransomware types, and how they are evolved from the malware and trojan codes, which is used to attack previous incidents, and explains the most common encryption algorithms such as AES, and RSA, ransomware uses them during infection process in order to produce complex threats. The practical approach for data encryption uses python programming language to show the efficiency of those algorithms in real attacks by executing this section on Ubuntu virtual machine. Furthermore, this paper analyzes programming languages, which is used to build ransomware. An example of ransomware code is being demonstrated in this paper, which is written specifically in C sharp language, and it has been tested out on windows operating system using MS visual studio. So, it is very important to recognize the system vulnerability, which can be very useful to prevent the ransomware. In contrast, this threat might sneak into the system easily, allowing for a ransom to be demanded. Therefore, understanding ransomware anatomy can help us to find a better solution in different situations. Consequently, this paper shows a number of outstanding removal techniques to get rid from ransomware attacks in the system