The Hush Cryptosystem

In this paper we describe a new cryptosystem we call "The Hush Cryptosystem" for hiding encrypted data in innocent Arabic sentences. The main purpose of this cryptosystem is to fool observer-supporting software into thinking that the encrypted data is not encrypted at all. We employ a modified Word Substitution Method known as the Grammatical Substitution Method in our cryptosystem. We also make use of Hidden Markov Models. We test our cryptosystem using a computer program written in the Java Programming Language. Finally, we test the output of our cryptosystem using statistical tests.Comment: 7 pages. 5 figures. Appeared in the 2nd International Conference on Security of Information and Networks (SIN 2009), North Cyprus, Turkey; Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Security of Information and Networks (SIN 2009), North Cyprus, Turke

CacheZoom: How SGX Amplifies The Power of Cache Attacks

In modern computing environments, hardware resources are commonly shared, and parallel computation is widely used. Parallel tasks can cause privacy and security problems if proper isolation is not enforced. Intel proposed SGX to create a trusted execution environment within the processor. SGX relies on the hardware, and claims runtime protection even if the OS and other software components are malicious. However, SGX disregards side-channel attacks. We introduce a powerful cache side-channel attack that provides system adversaries a high resolution channel. Our attack tool named CacheZoom is able to virtually track all memory accesses of SGX enclaves with high spatial and temporal precision. As proof of concept, we demonstrate AES key recovery attacks on commonly used implementations including those that were believed to be resistant in previous scenarios. Our results show that SGX cannot protect critical data sensitive computations, and efficient AES key recovery is possible in a practical environment. In contrast to previous works which require hundreds of measurements, this is the first cache side-channel attack on a real system that can recover AES keys with a minimal number of measurements. We can successfully recover AES keys from T-Table based implementations with as few as ten measurements.Comment: Accepted at Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES '17

A Polynomial Description of the Rijndael Advanced Encryption Standard

The paper gives a polynomial description of the Rijndael Advanced Encryption Standard recently adopted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Special attention is given to the structure of the S-Box.Comment: 12 pages, LaTe

Optimized Compressed Sensing Matrix Design for Noisy Communication Channels

We investigate a power-constrained sensing matrix design problem for a compressed sensing framework. We adopt a mean square error (MSE) performance criterion for sparse source reconstruction in a system where the source-to-sensor channel and the sensor-to-decoder communication channel are noisy. Our proposed sensing matrix design procedure relies upon minimizing a lower-bound on the MSE. Under certain conditions, we derive closed-form solutions to the optimization problem. Through numerical experiments, by applying practical sparse reconstruction algorithms, we show the strength of the proposed scheme by comparing it with other relevant methods. We discuss the computational complexity of our design method, and develop an equivalent stochastic optimization method to the problem of interest that can be solved approximately with a significantly less computational burden. We illustrate that the low-complexity method still outperforms the popular competing methods.Comment: Submitted to IEEE ICC 2015 (EXTENDED VERSION

AES-CBC Software Execution Optimization

With the proliferation of high-speed wireless networking, the necessity for efficient, robust and secure encryption modes is ever increasing. But, cryptography is primarily a computationally intensive process. This paper investigates the performance and efficiency of IEEE 802.11i approved Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-Rijndael ciphering/deciphering software in Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode. Simulations are used to analyse the speed, resource consumption and robustness of AES-CBC to investigate its viability for image encryption usage on common low power devices. The detailed results presented in this paper provide a basis for performance estimation of AES cryptosystems implemented on wireless devices. The use of optimized AES-CBC software implementation gives a superior encryption speed performance by 12 - 30%, but at the cost of twice more memory for code size.Comment: 8 pages, IEEE 200