Proposed Framework for Securing Mobile Banking Applications from Man in the Middle Attacks

Mobile phone banking and payments continues to not only be a popular way of transacting business but it also seems to evolve rapidly. Despite its popularity however there seem to be some very genuine concerns on the security issues revolving around it, particularly in regard to man in the middle attacks. This paper seeks to propose a secure framework for communication between a mobile device and the back end server for protecting mobile banking applications from man-in-the-middle attacks without introducing further threats to the communication channel. Keywords: Defense- in-depth, Security, man in the middle attack, secure framework, bank serve

Automated instantiation of side-channel attacks countermeasures for software cipher implementations

Side Channel Attacks (SCA) have proven to be a practical threat to the security of embedded systems, exploiting the information leakage coming from unintended channels concerning an implementation of a cryptographic primitive. Given the large variety of embedded platforms, and the ubiquity of the need for secure cryptographic implementations, a systematic and automated approach to deploy SCA countermeasures at design time is strongly needed. In this paper, we provide an overview of recent compiler-based techniques to protect software implementations against SCA, making them amenable to automated application in the development of secure-by-design systems

Information Security Theory and Practice. Security and Privacy of Mobile Devices in Wireless Communication: 5th IFIP WG 11.2 International Workshop, WISTP 2011, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, June 1-3, 2011. Proceedings

International audienceBook Front Matter of LNCS 663

Seamless Communication for Crises Management

SECRICOM is proposed as a collaborative research project aiming at development of a reference security platform for EU crisis management operations with two essential ambitions: (A) Solve or mitigate problems of contemporary crisis communication infrastructures (Tetra, GSM, Citizen Band, IP) such as poor interoperability of specialized communication means, vulnerability against tapping and misuse, lack of possibilities to recover from failures, inability to use alternative data carrier and high deployment and operational costs. (B) Add new smart functions to existing services which will make the communication more effective and helpful for users. Smart functions will be provided by distributed IT systems based on an agents’ infrastructure. Achieving these two project ambitions will allow creating a pervasive and trusted communication infrastructure fulfilling requirements of crisis management users and ready for immediate application

Conception de protocoles cryptographiques préservant la vie privée pour les services mobiles sans contact

The increasing number of worldwide mobile platforms and the emergence of new technologies such as the NFC (Near Field Communication) lead to a growing tendency to build a user's life depending on mobile phones. This context brings also new security and privacy challenges. In this thesis, we pay further attention to privacy issues in NFC services as well as the security of the mobile applications private data and credentials namely in Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). We first provide two solutions for public transport use case: an m-pass (transport subscription card) and a m-ticketing validation protocols. Our solutions ensure users' privacy while respecting functional requirements of transport operators. To this end, we propose new variants of group signatures and the first practical set-membership proof that do not require pairing computations at the prover's side. These novelties significantly reduce the execution time of such schemes when implemented in resource constrained environments. We implemented the m-pass and m-ticketing protocols in a standard SIM card: the validation phase occurs in less than 300ms whilst using strong security parameters. Our solutions also work even when the mobile is switched off or the battery is flat. When these applications are implemented in TEE, we introduce a new TEE migration protocol that ensures the privacy and integrity of the TEE credentials and user's private data. We construct our protocol based on a proxy re-encryption scheme and a new TEE model. Finally, we formally prove the security of our protocols using either game-based experiments in the random oracle model or automated model checker of security protocols.Avec l'émergence de nouvelles technologies telles que le NFC (Communication à champ proche) et l'accroissement du nombre de plates-formes mobiles, les téléphones mobiles vont devenir de plus en plus indispensables dans notre vie quotidienne. Ce contexte introduit de nouveaux défis en termes de sécurité et de respect de la vie privée. Dans cette thèse, nous nous focalisons sur les problématiques liées au respect de la vie privée dans les services NFC ainsi qu’à la protection des données privées et secrets des applications mobiles dans les environnements d'exécution de confiance (TEE). Nous fournissons deux solutions pour le transport public: une solution utilisant des cartes d'abonnement (m-pass) et une autre à base de tickets électroniques (m-ticketing). Nos solutions préservent la vie privée des utilisateurs tout en respectant les exigences fonctionnelles établies par les opérateurs de transport. À cette fin, nous proposons de nouvelles variantes de signatures de groupe ainsi que la première preuve pratique d’appartenance à un ensemble, à apport nul de connaissance, et qui ne nécessite pas de calculs de couplages du côté du prouveur. Ces améliorations permettent de réduire considérablement le temps d'exécution de ces schémas lorsqu’ils sont implémentés dans des environnements contraints par exemple sur carte à puce. Nous avons développé les protocoles de m-passe et de m-ticketing dans une carte SIM standard : la validation d'un ticket ou d'un m-pass s'effectue en moins de 300ms et ce tout en utilisant des tailles de clés adéquates. Nos solutions fonctionnent également lorsque le mobile est éteint ou lorsque sa batterie est déchargée. Si les applications s'exécutent dans un TEE, nous introduisons un nouveau protocole de migration de données privées, d'un TEE à un autre, qui assure la confidentialité et l'intégrité de ces données. Notre protocole est fondé sur l’utilisation d’un schéma de proxy de rechiffrement ainsi que sur un nouveau modèle d’architecture du TEE. Enfin, nous prouvons formellement la sécurité de nos protocoles soit dans le modèle calculatoire pour les protocoles de m-pass et de ticketing soit dans le modèle symbolique pour le protocole de migration de données entre TEE

Digital Skills Colloquium 2020: Enhancing Human Capacity for Digital Transformation

The theme for the Digital Skills 2020 Colloquium and Postgraduate Symposium was “Enhancing Human Capacity for Digital Transformation: It is about people”. It is widely accepted that current digital changes that are sweeping through the world are significantly altering the environment in which every organisation, including government, is operating. The scale and scope of the change is what makes all the difference. The way in which organisations respond to these environmental changes will determine their survival. The nature of a digitally transformed organisation cannot be foretold as every organisation will respond according to their local and global environment. There are, however, some uncomfortable realities; manufacturing jobs will not be reinstated, and even if they did, the manufacturing industries are necessarily more capital and not labour intensive (Stiglitz, 2017). Globally, we are experiencing rising unemployment and income inequality as well as increased demand for high skilled labour (Glenn, Florescu & Project, 2019). Accordingly, the Colloquium sought to explore the role played by digital skills in our rapidly transforming realities. The event attracted full academic research papers, case studies, research work that still in progress and practitioner reports and models that portray the NEMISA collaborative ethos involving government, industry and other sectors. Some plenary sessions and guest speakers shared insights on topics such as emerging technologies, blockchain, machine learning, gamification in education, application of 3D printing, upscaling of ICT for development programmes and citizen online safety.School of Computin

Side-Channel Analysis and Cryptography Engineering : Getting OpenSSL Closer to Constant-Time

As side-channel attacks reached general purpose PCs and started to be more practical for attackers to exploit, OpenSSL adopted in 2005 a flagging mechanism to protect against SCA. The opt-in mechanism allows to flag secret values, such as keys, with the BN_FLG_CONSTTIME flag. Whenever a flag is checked and detected, the library changes its execution flow to SCA-secure functions that are slower but safer, protecting these secret values from being leaked. This mechanism favors performance over security, it is error-prone, and is obscure for most library developers, increasing the potential for side-channel vulnerabilities. This dissertation presents an extensive side-channel analysis of OpenSSL and criticizes its fragile flagging mechanism. This analysis reveals several flaws affecting the library resulting in multiple side-channel attacks, improved cache-timing attack techniques, and a new side channel vector. The first part of this dissertation introduces the main topic and the necessary related work, including the microarchitecture, the cache hierarchy, and attack techniques; then it presents a brief troubled history of side-channel attacks and defenses in OpenSSL, setting the stage for the related publications. This dissertation includes seven original publications contributing to the area of side-channel analysis, microarchitecture timing attacks, and applied cryptography. From an SCA perspective, the results identify several vulnerabilities and flaws enabling protocol-level attacks on RSA, DSA, and ECDSA, in addition to full SCA of the SM2 cryptosystem. With respect to microarchitecture timing attacks, the dissertation presents a new side-channel vector due to port contention in the CPU execution units. And finally, on the applied cryptography front, OpenSSL now enjoys a revamped code base securing several cryptosystems against SCA, favoring a secure-by-default protection against side-channel attacks, instead of the insecure opt-in flagging mechanism provided by the fragile BN_FLG_CONSTTIME flag

ANALYSIS OF CRYPTOGRAPHIC ALGORITHMS AGAINST THEORETICAL AND IMPLEMENTATION ATTACKS

This thesis deals with theoretical and implementation analysis of cryptographic functions. Theoretical attacks exploit weaknesses in the mathematical structure of the cryptographic primitive, while implementation attacks leverage on information obtained by its physical implementation, such as leakage through physically observable parameters (side-channel analysis) or susceptibility to errors (fault analysis). In the area of theoretical cryptanalysis, we analyze the resistance of the Keccak-f permutations to differential cryptanalysis (DC). Keccak-f is used in different cryptographic primitives: Keccak (which defines the NIST standard SHA-3), Ketje and Keyak (which are currently at the third round of the CAESAR competition) and the authenticated encryption function Kravatte. In its basic version, DC makes use of differential trails, i.e. sequences of differences through the rounds of the primitive. The power of trails in attacks can be characterized by their weight. The existence of low-weight trails over all but a few rounds would imply a low resistance with respect to DC. We thus present new techniques to effciently generate all 6-round differential trails in Keccak-f up to a given weight, in order to improve known lower bounds. The limit weight we can reach with these new techniques is very high compared to previous attempts in literature for weakly aligned primitives. This allows us to improve the lower bound on 6 rounds from 74 to 92 for the four largest variants of Keccak-f. This result has been used by the authors of Kravatte to choose the number of rounds in their function. Thanks to their abstraction level, some of our techniques are actually more widely applicable than to Keccak-f. So, we formalize them in a generic way. The presented techniques have been integrated in the KeccakTools and are publicly available. In the area of fault analysis, we present several results on differential fault analysis (DFA) on the block cipher AES. Most DFA attacks exploit faults that modify the intermediate state or round key. Very few examples have been presented, that leverage changes in the sequence of operations by reducing the number of rounds. In this direction, we present four DFA attacks that exploit faults that alter the sequence of operations during the final round. In particular, we show how DFA can be conducted when the main operations that compose the AES round function are corrupted, skipped or repeated during the final round. Another aspect of DFA we analyze is the role of the fault model in attacks. We study it from an information theoretical point of view, showing that the knowledge that the attacker has on the injected fault is fundamental to mount a successful attack. In order to soften the a-priori knowledge on the injection technique needed by the attacker, we present a new approach for DFA based on clustering, called J-DFA. The experimental results show that J-DFA allows to successfully recover the key both in classical DFA scenario and when the model does not perfectly match the faults effect. A peculiar result of this method is that, besides the preferred candidate for the key, it also provides the preferred models for the fault. This is a quite remarkable ability because it furnishes precious information which can be used to analyze, compare and characterize different specific injection techniques on different devices. In the area of side-channel attacks, we improve and extend existing attacks against the RSA algorithm, known as partial key exposure attacks. These attacks on RSA show how it is possible to find the factorization of the modulus from the knowledge of some bits of the private key. We present new partial key exposure attacks when the countermeasure known as exponent blinding is used. We first improve known results for common RSA setting by reducing the number of bits or by simplifying the mathematical analysis. Then we present novel attacks for RSA implemented using the Chinese Remainder Theorem, a scenario that has never been analyzed before in this context