A Survey on Security Threats and Countermeasures in IEEE Test Standards

International audienceEditor's note: Test infrastructure has been shown to be a portal for hackers. This article reviews the threats and countermeasures for IEEE test infrastructure standards

Lightweight symmetric cryptography

The Internet of Things is one of the principal trends in information technology nowadays. The main idea behind this concept is that devices communicate autonomously with each other over the Internet. Some of these devices have extremely limited resources, such as power and energy, available time for computations, amount of silicon to produce the chip, computational power, etc. Classical cryptographic primitives are often infeasible for such constrained devices. The goal of lightweight cryptography is to introduce cryptographic solutions with reduced resource consumption, but with a sufficient security level. Although this research area was of great interest to academia during the last years and a large number of proposals for lightweight cryptographic primitives have been introduced, almost none of them are used in real-word. Probably one of the reasons is that, for academia, lightweight usually meant to design cryptographic primitives such that they require minimal resources among all existing solutions. This exciting research problem became an important driver which allowed the academic community to better understand many cryptographic design concepts and to develop new attacks. However, this criterion does not seem to be the most important one for industry, where lightweight may be considered as "rightweight". In other words, a given cryptographic solution just has to fit the constraints of the specific use cases rather than to be the smallest. Unfortunately, academic researchers tended to neglect vital properties of the particular types of devices, into which they intended to apply their primitives. That is, often solutions were proposed where the usage of some resources was reduced to a minimum. However, this was achieved by introducing new costs which were not appropriately taken into account or in such a way that the reduction of costs also led to a decrease in the security level. Hence, there is a clear gap between academia and industry in understanding what lightweight cryptography is. In this work, we are trying to fill some of these gaps. We carefully investigate a broad number of existing lightweight cryptographic primitives proposed by academia including authentication protocols, stream ciphers, and block ciphers and evaluate their applicability for real-world scenarios. We then look at how individual components of design of the primitives influence their cost and summarize the steps to be taken into account when designing primitives for concrete cost optimization, more precisely - for low energy consumption. Next, we propose new implementation techniques for existing designs making them more efficient or smaller in hardware without the necessity to pay any additional costs. After that, we introduce a new stream cipher design philosophy which enables secure stream ciphers with smaller area size than ever before and, at the same time, considerably higher throughput compared to any other encryption schemes of similar hardware cost. To demonstrate the feasibility of our findings we propose two ciphers with the smallest area size so far, namely Sprout and Plantlet, and the most energy efficient encryption scheme called Trivium-2. Finally, this thesis solves a concrete industrial problem. Based on standardized cryptographic solutions, we design an end-to-end data-protection scheme for low power networks. This scheme was deployed on the water distribution network in the City of Antibes, France

Towards low energy stream ciphers

Energy optimization is an important design aspect of lightweight cryptography. Since low energy ciphers drain less battery, they are invaluable components of devices that operate on a tight energy budget such as handheld devices or RFID tags. At Asiacrypt 2015, Banik et al. presented the block cipher family Midori which was designed to optimize the energy consumed per encryption and which reduces the energy consumption by more than 30% compared to previous block ciphers. However, if one has to encrypt/decrypt longer streams of data, i.e. for bulk data encryption/decryption, it is expected that a stream cipher should perform even better than block ciphers in terms of energy required to encrypt. In this paper, we address the question of designing low energy stream ciphers. To this end, we analyze for common stream cipher design components their impact on the energy consumption. Based on this, we give arguments why indeed stream ciphers allow for encrypting long data streams with less energy than block ciphers and validate our findings by implementations. Afterwards, we use the analysis results to identify energy minimizing design principles for stream ciphers

A Hardware Security Solution against Scan-Based Attacks

Scan based Design for Test (DfT) schemes have been widely used to achieve high fault coverage for integrated circuits. The scan technique provides full access to the internal nodes of the device-under-test to control them or observe their response to input test vectors. While such comprehensive access is highly desirable for testing, it is not acceptable for secure chips as it is subject to exploitation by various attacks. In this work, new methods are presented to protect the security of critical information against scan-based attacks. In the proposed methods, access to the circuit containing secret information via the scan chain has been severely limited in order to reduce the risk of a security breach. To ensure the testability of the circuit, a built-in self-test which utilizes an LFSR as the test pattern generator (TPG) is proposed. The proposed schemes can be used as a countermeasure against side channel attacks with a low area overhead as compared to the existing solutions in literature

J3Gen : a PRNG for Low-Cost Passive RFID

Pseudorandom number generation (PRNG) is the main security tool in low-cost passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) technologies, such as EPC Gen2. We present a lightweight PRNG design for low-cost passive RFID tags, named J3Gen. J3Gen is based on a linear feedback shift register (LFSR) configured with multiple feedback polynomials. The polynomials are alternated during the generation of sequences via a physical source of randomness. J3Gen successfully handles the inherent linearity of LFSR based PRNGs and satisfies the statistical requirements imposed by the EPC Gen2 standard. A hardware implementation of J3Gen is presented and evaluated with regard to different design parameters, defining the key-equivalence security and nonlinearity of the design. The results of a SPICE simulation confirm the power-consumption suitability of the proposal

SPONGENT: The Design Space of Lightweight Cryptographic Hashing

The design of secure yet efficiently implementable cryptographic algorithms is a fundamental problem of cryptography. Lately, lightweight cryptography - optimizing the algorithms to fit the most constrained environments - has received a great deal of attention, the recent research being mainly focused on building block ciphers. As opposed to that, the design of lightweight hash functions is still far from being well-investigated with only few proposals in the public domain. In this article, we aim to address this gap by exploring the design space of lightweight hash functions based on the sponge construction instantiated with PRESENT-type permutations. The resulting family of hash functions is called SPONGENT. We propose 13 SPONGENT variants -- for different levels of collision and (second) preimage resistance as well as for various implementation constraints. For each of them we provide several ASIC hardware implementations - ranging from the lowest area to the highest throughput. We make efforts to address the fairness of comparison with other designs in the field by providing an exhaustive hardware evaluation on various technologies, including an open core library. We also prove essential differential properties of SPONGENT permutations, give a security analysis in terms of collision and preimage resistance, as well as study in detail dedicated linear distinguishers

Survey on Lightweight Primitives and Protocols for RFID in Wireless Sensor Networks

The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies is becoming widespread in all kind of wireless network-based applications. As expected, applications based on sensor networks, ad-hoc or mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can be highly benefited from the adoption of RFID solutions. There is a strong need to employ lightweight cryptographic primitives for many security applications because of the tight cost and constrained resource requirement of sensor based networks. This paper mainly focuses on the security analysis of lightweight protocols and algorithms proposed for the security of RFID systems. A large number of research solutions have been proposed to implement lightweight cryptographic primitives and protocols in sensor and RFID integration based resource constraint networks. In this work, an overview of the currently discussed lightweight primitives and their attributes has been done. These primitives and protocols have been compared based on gate equivalents (GEs), power, technology, strengths, weaknesses and attacks. Further, an integration of primitives and protocols is compared with the possibilities of their applications in practical scenarios