2,967 research outputs found
Trojans in Early Design Steps—An Emerging Threat
Hardware Trojans inserted by malicious foundries
during integrated circuit manufacturing have received substantial
attention in recent years. In this paper, we focus on a different
type of hardware Trojan threats: attacks in the early steps of
design process. We show that third-party intellectual property
cores and CAD tools constitute realistic attack surfaces and that
even system specification can be targeted by adversaries. We
discuss the devastating damage potential of such attacks, the
applicable countermeasures against them and their deficiencies
Chip and Skim: cloning EMV cards with the pre-play attack
EMV, also known as "Chip and PIN", is the leading system for card payments
worldwide. It is used throughout Europe and much of Asia, and is starting to be
introduced in North America too. Payment cards contain a chip so they can
execute an authentication protocol. This protocol requires point-of-sale (POS)
terminals or ATMs to generate a nonce, called the unpredictable number, for
each transaction to ensure it is fresh. We have discovered that some EMV
implementers have merely used counters, timestamps or home-grown algorithms to
supply this number. This exposes them to a "pre-play" attack which is
indistinguishable from card cloning from the standpoint of the logs available
to the card-issuing bank, and can be carried out even if it is impossible to
clone a card physically (in the sense of extracting the key material and
loading it into another card). Card cloning is the very type of fraud that EMV
was supposed to prevent. We describe how we detected the vulnerability, a
survey methodology we developed to chart the scope of the weakness, evidence
from ATM and terminal experiments in the field, and our implementation of
proof-of-concept attacks. We found flaws in widely-used ATMs from the largest
manufacturers. We can now explain at least some of the increasing number of
frauds in which victims are refused refunds by banks which claim that EMV cards
cannot be cloned and that a customer involved in a dispute must therefore be
mistaken or complicit. Pre-play attacks may also be carried out by malware in
an ATM or POS terminal, or by a man-in-the-middle between the terminal and the
acquirer. We explore the design and implementation mistakes that enabled the
flaw to evade detection until now: shortcomings of the EMV specification, of
the EMV kernel certification process, of implementation testing, formal
analysis, or monitoring customer complaints. Finally we discuss
countermeasures
Formal verification of a software countermeasure against instruction skip attacks
Fault attacks against embedded circuits enabled to define many new attack
paths against secure circuits. Every attack path relies on a specific fault
model which defines the type of faults that the attacker can perform. On
embedded processors, a fault model consisting in an assembly instruction skip
can be very useful for an attacker and has been obtained by using several fault
injection means. To avoid this threat, some countermeasure schemes which rely
on temporal redundancy have been proposed. Nevertheless, double fault injection
in a long enough time interval is practical and can bypass those countermeasure
schemes. Some fine-grained countermeasure schemes have also been proposed for
specific instructions. However, to the best of our knowledge, no approach that
enables to secure a generic assembly program in order to make it fault-tolerant
to instruction skip attacks has been formally proven yet. In this paper, we
provide a fault-tolerant replacement sequence for almost all the instructions
of the Thumb-2 instruction set and provide a formal verification for this fault
tolerance. This simple transformation enables to add a reasonably good security
level to an embedded program and makes practical fault injection attacks much
harder to achieve
Formally designing and implementing cyber security mechanisms in industrial control networks.
This dissertation describes progress in the state-of-the-art for developing and deploying formally verified cyber security devices in industrial control networks. It begins by detailing the unique struggles that are faced in industrial control networks and why concepts and technologies developed for securing traditional networks might not be appropriate. It uses these unique struggles and examples of contemporary cyber-attacks targeting control systems to argue that progress in securing control systems is best met with formal verification of systems, their specifications, and their security properties. This dissertation then presents a development process and identifies two technologies, TLA+ and seL4, that can be leveraged to produce a high-assurance embedded security device. The method presented in this dissertation takes an informal design of an embedded device that might be found in a control system and 1) formalizes the design within TLA+, 2) creates and mechanically checks a model built from the formal design, and 3) translates the TLA+ design into a component-based architecture of a native seL4 application. The later chapters of this dissertation describe an application of the process to a security preprocessor embedded device that was designed to add security mechanisms to the network communication of an existing control system. The device and its security properties are formally specified in TLA+ in chapter 4, mechanically checked in chapter 5, and finally its native seL4 architecture is implemented in chapter 6. Finally, the conclusions derived from the research are laid out, as well as some possibilities for expanding the presented method in the future
Secure Vehicular Communication Systems: Implementation, Performance, and Research Challenges
Vehicular Communication (VC) systems are on the verge of practical
deployment. Nonetheless, their security and privacy protection is one of the
problems that have been addressed only recently. In order to show the
feasibility of secure VC, certain implementations are required. In [1] we
discuss the design of a VC security system that has emerged as a result of the
European SeVeCom project. In this second paper, we discuss various issues
related to the implementation and deployment aspects of secure VC systems.
Moreover, we provide an outlook on open security research issues that will
arise as VC systems develop from today's simple prototypes to full-fledged
systems
Public Evidence from Secret Ballots
Elections seem simple---aren't they just counting? But they have a unique,
challenging combination of security and privacy requirements. The stakes are
high; the context is adversarial; the electorate needs to be convinced that the
results are correct; and the secrecy of the ballot must be ensured. And they
have practical constraints: time is of the essence, and voting systems need to
be affordable and maintainable, and usable by voters, election officials, and
pollworkers. It is thus not surprising that voting is a rich research area
spanning theory, applied cryptography, practical systems analysis, usable
security, and statistics. Election integrity involves two key concepts:
convincing evidence that outcomes are correct and privacy, which amounts to
convincing assurance that there is no evidence about how any given person
voted. These are obviously in tension. We examine how current systems walk this
tightrope.Comment: To appear in E-Vote-Id '1
Exploring formal verification methodology for FPGA-based digital systems.
Abstract Not Provide
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