State of Alaska Election Security Project Phase 2 Report

A laska’s election system is among the most secure in the country, and it has a number of safeguards other states are now adopting. But the technology Alaska uses to record and count votes could be improved— and the state’s huge size, limited road system, and scattered communities also create special challenges for insuring the integrity of the vote. In this second phase of an ongoing study of Alaska’s election security, we recommend ways of strengthening the system—not only the technology but also the election procedures. The lieutenant governor and the Division of Elections asked the University of Alaska Anchorage to do this evaluation, which began in September 2007.Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell. State of Alaska Division of Elections.List of Appendices / Glossary / Study Team / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Summary of Recommendations / Part 1 Defense in Depth / Part 2 Fortification of Systems / Part 3 Confidence in Outcomes / Conclusions / Proposed Statement of Work for Phase 3: Implementation / Reference

A Touch of Evil: High-Assurance Cryptographic Hardware from Untrusted Components

The semiconductor industry is fully globalized and integrated circuits (ICs) are commonly defined, designed and fabricated in different premises across the world. This reduces production costs, but also exposes ICs to supply chain attacks, where insiders introduce malicious circuitry into the final products. Additionally, despite extensive post-fabrication testing, it is not uncommon for ICs with subtle fabrication errors to make it into production systems. While many systems may be able to tolerate a few byzantine components, this is not the case for cryptographic hardware, storing and computing on confidential data. For this reason, many error and backdoor detection techniques have been proposed over the years. So far all attempts have been either quickly circumvented, or come with unrealistically high manufacturing costs and complexity. This paper proposes Myst, a practical high-assurance architecture, that uses commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, and provides strong security guarantees, even in the presence of multiple malicious or faulty components. The key idea is to combine protective-redundancy with modern threshold cryptographic techniques to build a system tolerant to hardware trojans and errors. To evaluate our design, we build a Hardware Security Module that provides the highest level of assurance possible with COTS components. Specifically, we employ more than a hundred COTS secure crypto-coprocessors, verified to FIPS140-2 Level 4 tamper-resistance standards, and use them to realize high-confidentiality random number generation, key derivation, public key decryption and signing. Our experiments show a reasonable computational overhead (less than 1% for both Decryption and Signing) and an exponential increase in backdoor-tolerance as more ICs are added

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

FastPay: High-Performance Byzantine Fault Tolerant Settlement

FastPay allows a set of distributed authorities, some of which are Byzantine, to maintain a high-integrity and availability settlement system for pre-funded payments. It can be used to settle payments in a native unit of value (crypto-currency), or as a financial side-infrastructure to support retail payments in fiat currencies. FastPay is based on Byzantine Consistent Broadcast as its core primitive, foregoing the expenses of full atomic commit channels (consensus). The resulting system has low-latency for both confirmation and payment finality. Remarkably, each authority can be sharded across many machines to allow unbounded horizontal scalability. Our experiments demonstrate intra-continental confirmation latency of less than 100ms, making FastPay applicable to point of sale payments. In laboratory environments, we achieve over 80,000 transactions per second with 20 authorities---surpassing the requirements of current retail card payment networks, while significantly increasing their robustness

Formally based semi-automatic implementation of an open security protocol

International audienceThis paper presents an experiment in which an implementation of the client side of the SSH Transport Layer Protocol (SSH-TLP) was semi-automatically derived according to a model-driven development paradigm that leverages formal methods in order to obtain high correctness assurance. The approach used in the experiment starts with the formalization of the protocol at an abstract level. This model is then formally proved to fulfill the desired secrecy and authentication properties by using the ProVerif prover. Finally, a sound Java implementation is semi-automatically derived from the verified model using an enhanced version of the Spi2Java framework. The resulting implementation correctly interoperates with third party servers, and its execution time is comparable with that of other manually developed Java SSH-TLP client implementations. This case study demonstrates that the adopted model-driven approach is viable even for a real security protocol, despite the complexity of the models needed in order to achieve an interoperable implementation

Secure and Trusted Execution:Past, Present, and Future - A Critical Review in the Context of the Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems

International audienc

Authentication and Identity Management for the EPOS Project

The increase in the number of online services emphasizes the value of authentication and identity management that we, even without realizing, depend on. In EPOS this authentication and identity management are also crucial, by dealing and being responsible for large amounts of heterogeneous data in multiple formats and from various providers, that can be public or private. Controlling and identify the access to this data is the key. For this purpose, it is necessary to create a system capable of authenticating, authorizing, and account the usage of these services. While services in a development phase can have authentication and authorization modules directly implemented in them, this is not an option for legacy services that cannot be modified. This thesis regards the issue of providing secure and interoperable authentication and authorization framework, associated with correct identity management and an accounting module, stating the difficulties faced and how to be addressed. These issues are approached by implementing the proposed methods in one of the GNSS Data and Products TCS services, that will serve as a study case. While authentication mechanisms have improved constantly over the years, with the addition of multiple authentication factors, there is still not a clear and defined way of how authentication should be done. New security threats are always showing up, and authentication systems need to adapt and improve while maintaining a balance between security and usability. Our goal is, therefore, to propose a system that can provide a good user experience allied to security, which can be used in the TCS services or other web services facing similar problems.A importância da autenticação e gestão de identidades, de que dependemos inconscientemente, aumenta com o crescimento do número de serviços online ao nosso dispor. No EPOS, devido à disponibilização e gestão de dados heterogéneos de várias entidades, que podem ser públicas ou privadas, a existência de um sistema de autenticação e gestão de identidades é também crucial, em que o controlo e identificação do acesso a estes dados é a chave. Numa fase de desenvolvimento dos serviços, estes módulos de autenticação e autorização podem ser diretamente implementados e é possível existir uma adaptação do software aos mesmos. No entanto, há serviços já existentes, cujas alterações implicam mudanças de grande escala e uma reformulação de todo o sistema, e como tal não é exequível fazer alterações diretas aos mesmos. Esta dissertação aborda o desenvolvimento de um sistema de autenticação e autorização seguro e interoperável, associado a uma correta gestão de identidades e um módulo de controlo, identificando os problemas encontrados e propondo soluções para os mesmos. Este desenvolvimento é aplicado num dos serviços do TCS GNSS Data and Products e servirá como caso de estudo. Embora os mecanismos de autenticação tenham melhorado continuamente ao longo dos anos, com a adição de vários fatores de autenticação, ainda não existe um método único e claro de como a autenticação deve ser feita. Novas ameaças estão sempre a surgir e os sistemas atuais precisam de se adaptar e melhorar, mantendo um equilíbrio entre segurança e usabilidade. O nosso objetivo é propor um sistema que possa aliar a segurança a uma boa experiência para o utilizador, e que possa ser utilizado não só nos serviços do TCS, mas também em outros serviços web que enfrentem problemas semelhantes

A framework for development of android mobile electronic prescription transfer applications in compliance with security requirements mandated by the Australian healthcare industry

This thesis investigates mobile electronic transfer of prescription (ETP) in compliance with the security requirements mandated by the Australian healthcare industry and proposes a framework for the development of an Android mobile electronic prescription transfer application. Furthermore, and based upon the findings and knowledge from constructing this framework, another framework is also derived for assessing Android mobile ETP applications for their security compliance. The centralised exchange model-based ETP solution currently used in the Australian healthcare industry is an expensive solution for on-going use. With challenges such as an aging population and the rising burden of chronic disease, the cost of the current ETP solution’s operational infrastructure is certain to rise in the future. In an environment where it is increasingly beneficial for patients to engage in and manage their own information and subsequent care, this current solution fails to offer the patient direct access to their electronic prescription information. The current system also fails to incorporate certain features that would dramatically improve the quality of the patient’s care and safety, i.e. alerts for the patient’s drug allergies, harmful dosage and script expiration. Over a decade old, the current ETP solution was essentially designed and built to meet legislation and regulatory requirements, with change-averting its highest priority. With little, if any, provision for future growth and innovation, it was not designed to cater to the needs of the ETP process. This research identifies the gap within the current ETP implementation (i.e. dependency on infrastructure, significant on-going cost and limited availability of the patient’s medication history) and proposes a framework for building a secure mobile ETP solution on the Android mobile operating system platform which will address the identified gap. The literature review part of this thesis examined the significance of ETP for the nation’s larger initiative to provide an improved and better maintainable healthcare system. The literature review also revealed the stance of each jurisdiction, from legislative and regulatory perspectives, in transitioning to the use of a fully electronic ETP solution. It identified the regulatory mandates of each jurisdiction for ETP as well as the security standards by which the current ETP implementation is iii governed so as to conform to those regulatory mandates. The literature review part of the thesis essentially identified and established how the Australian healthcare industry’s various prescription-related legislations and regulations are constructed, and the complexity of this construction for eTP. The jurisdictional regulatory mandates identified in the literature review translate into a set of security requirements. These requirements establish the basis of the guiding framework for the development of a security-compliant Android mobile ETP application. A number of experimentations were conducted focusing on the native security features of the Android operating system, as well as wireless communication technologies such as NFC and Bluetooth, in order to propose an alternative mobile ETP solution with security assurance comparable to the current ETP implementation. The employment of a proof-of-concept prototype such as this alongside / coupled with a series of iterative experimentations strengthens the validity and practicality of the proposed framework. The first experiment successfully proved that the Android operating system has sufficient encryption capabilities, in compliance with the security mandates, to secure the electronic prescription information from the data at rest perspective. The second experiment indicated that the use of NFC technology to implement the alternative transfer mechanism for exchanging electronic prescription information between ETP participating devices is not practical. The next iteration of the experimentation using Bluetooth technology proved that it can be utilised as an alternative electronic prescription transfer mechanism to the current approach using the Internet. These experiment outcomes concluded the partial but sufficient proofof- concept prototype for this research. Extensive document analysis and iterative experimentations showed that the framework constructed by this research can guide the development of an alternative mobile ETP solution with both comparable security assurance to and better access to the patient’s medication history than the current solution. This alternative solution would present no operational dependence upon infrastructure and its associated, ongoing cost to the nation’s healthcare expenditure. In addition, use of this mobile ETP alternative has the potential to change the public’s perception (i.e. acceptance from regulatory and security perspectives) of mobile healthcare solutions, thereby paving the way for further innovation and future enhancements in eHealth