A cooperative cellular and broadcast conditional access system for Pay-TV systems

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.The lack of interoperability between Pay-TV service providers and a horizontally integrated business transaction model have compromised the competition in the Pay-TV market. In addition, the lack of interactivity with customers has resulted in high churn rate and improper security measures have contributed into considerable business loss. These issues are the main cause of high operational costs and subscription fees in the Pay-TV systems. As a result, this paper presents the Mobile Conditional Access System (MICAS) as an end-to-end access control solution for Pay-TV systems. It incorporates the mobile and broadcasting systems and provides a platform whereby service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalize their services and adopt appropriate security measurements. This would result in the decrease of operating expenses and increase of customers' satisfaction in the system. The paper provides an overview of state-of-the-art conditional access solutions followed by detailed description of design, reference model implementation and analysis of possible MICAS security architectures.Strategy & Technology (S&T) Lt

Cooperating broadcast and cellular conditional access system for digital television

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The lack of interoperability between Pay‐TV service providers and a horizontally integrated business transaction model have compromised the competition in the Pay‐TV market. In addition, the lack of interactivity with customers has resulted in high churn rate and improper security measures have contributed into considerable business loss. These issues are the main cause of high operational costs and subscription fees in the Pay‐TV systems. This paper presents a novel end‐to‐end system architecture for Pay‐TV systems cooperating mobile and broadcasting technologies. It provides a cost‐effective, scalable, dynamic and secure access control mechanism supporting converged services and new business opportunities in Pay‐TV systems. It enhances interactivity, security and potentially reduces customer attrition and operational cost. In this platform, service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalise their services and adopt appropriate security measures. It breaks up the rigid relationship between a viewer and set‐top box as imposed by traditional conditional access systems, thus, a viewer can fully enjoy his entitlements via an arbitrary set‐top box. Having thoroughly considered state‐of‐the‐art technologies currently being used across the world, the thesis highlights novel use cases and presents the full design and implementation aspects of the system. The design section is enriched by providing possible security structures supported thereby. A business collaboration structure is proposed, followed by a reference model for implementing the system. Finally, the security architectures are analysed to propose the best architecture on the basis of security, complexity and set‐top box production cost criteria

A commodity trusted computing module

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 107-110).The Trusted Execution Module (TEM) is a high-level specification for a commodity chip that can execute user-supplied procedures in a trusted environment. The TEM draws inspiration from the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), the first security-related hardware that has gained massive adoption in the PC market. However, the TEM is capable of securely executing procedures expressing arbitrary computation, originating from a potentially untrusted party, whereas the TPM is limited to a set of cryptographic functions that is fixed at design-time. Despite its greater flexibility, the TEM design was implemented on the same inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware as the TPM, and it does not require any export-restricted technology. Furthermore, the TEM removes the expensive requirement of a secure binding to it host computer. This makes TEM a great candidate for the next-generation TPM. However, the TEM's guarantees of secure execution enable exciting applications that were far beyond the reach of TPM-powered systems. The applications include but are not limited to mobile agents, peer-to-peer multiplayer online games, and anonymous offline payments.by Victor Marius Costan.M.Eng

Information Leakage Attacks and Countermeasures

The scientific community has been consistently working on the pervasive problem of information leakage, uncovering numerous attack vectors, and proposing various countermeasures. Despite these efforts, leakage incidents remain prevalent, as the complexity of systems and protocols increases, and sophisticated modeling methods become more accessible to adversaries. This work studies how information leakages manifest in and impact interconnected systems and their users. We first focus on online communications and investigate leakages in the Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS). Using modern machine learning models, we show that an eavesdropping adversary can efficiently exploit meta-information (e.g., packet size) not protected by the TLS’ encryption to launch fingerprinting attacks at an unprecedented scale even under non-optimal conditions. We then turn our attention to ultrasonic communications, and discuss their security shortcomings and how adversaries could exploit them to compromise anonymity network users (even though they aim to offer a greater level of privacy compared to TLS). Following up on these, we delve into physical layer leakages that concern a wide array of (networked) systems such as servers, embedded nodes, Tor relays, and hardware cryptocurrency wallets. We revisit location-based side-channel attacks and develop an exploitation neural network. Our model demonstrates the capabilities of a modern adversary but also presents an inexpensive tool to be used by auditors for detecting such leakages early on during the development cycle. Subsequently, we investigate techniques that further minimize the impact of leakages found in production components. Our proposed system design distributes both the custody of secrets and the cryptographic operation execution across several components, thus making the exploitation of leaks difficult

Using Java powered iButton to replace student ID card

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A technology white paper on improving the efficiency of social safety net program delivery in low income countries an introduction to available and emerging mobile technologies

This document outlines various available and emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs) and provides a framework to assess how these technologies may be used to improve the efficiency of the delivery of safety net programs. These technologies include: mobile computing, biometrics, satellite communications, simple and smart cards, global positioning systems, radio frequency identification tags, automated teller machines and solar power. Their use in the administration, delivery and monitoring of SSN programs offers numerous advantages including increased accuracy, reliability and timeliness of information, performance measurement and service provider accountability. However, these new and emerging technologies typically require higher initial investment costs that benefit current and future time periods. The optimal solution to design an advanced and efficient delivery system for a safety net program may be a combination of traditional service delivery methods and new technologies that draws on a needs assessment that accounts for local conditions and program characteristics.

A User Centric Security Model for Tamper-Resistant Devices

In this thesis we propose a design for a ubiquitous and interoperable device based on the smart card architecture to meet the challenges of privacy, trust, and security for traditional and emerging technologies like personal computers, smart phones and tablets. Such a de- vice is referred a User Centric Tamper-Resistant Device (UCTD). To support the smart card architecture for the UCTD initiative, we propose the delegation of smart card owner- ship from a centralised authority (i.e. the card issuer) to users. This delegation mandated a review of existing smart card mechanisms and their proposals for modifications/improve- ments to their operation. Since the inception of smart card technology, the dominant ownership model in the smart card industry has been refer to as the Issuer Centric Smart Card Ownership Model (ICOM). The ICOM has no doubt played a pivotal role in the proliferation of the technology into various segments of modern life. However, it has been a barrier to the convergence of different services on a smart card. In addition, it might be considered as a hurdle to the adaption of smart card technology into a general-purpose security device. To avoid these issues, we propose citizen ownership of smart cards, referred as the User Centric Smart Card Ownership Model (UCOM). Contrary to the ICOM, it gives the power of decision to install or delete an application on a smart card to its user. The ownership of corresponding applications remains with their respective application providers along with the choice to lease their application to a card or not. In addition, based on the UCOM framework, we also proposed the Coopetitive Architecture for Smart Cards (CASC) that merges the centralised control of card issuers with the provision of application choice to the card user. In the core of the thesis, we analyse the suitability of the existing smart card architectures for the UCOM. This leads to the proposal of three major contributions spanning the smart card architecture, the application management framework, and the execution environment. Furthermore, we propose protocols for the application installation mechanism and the application sharing mechanism (i.e. smart card firewall). In addition to this, we propose a framework for backing-up, migrating, and restoring the smart card contents. Finally, we provide the test implementation results of the proposed protocols along with their performance measures. The protocols are then compared in terms of features and performance with existing smart cards and internet protocols. In order to provide a more detailed analysis of proposed protocols and for the sake of completeness, we performed mechanical formal analysis using the CasperFDR.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

SoC It to EM:ElectroMagnetic Side-Channel Attacks on a Complex System-on-Chip

Increased complexity in modern embedded systems has presented various important challenges with regard to side-channel attacks. In particular, it is common to deploy SoC-based target devices with high clock frequencies in security-critical scenarios; understanding how such features align with techniques more often deployed against simpler devices is vital from both destructive (i.e., attack) and constructive (i.e., evaluation and/or countermeasure) perspectives. In this paper, we investigate electromagnetic-based leakage from three different means of executing cryptographic workloads (including the general purpose ARM core, an on-chip co-processor, and the NEON core) on the AM335x SoC. Our conclusion is that addressing challenges of the type above {\em is} feasible, and that key recovery attacks can be conducted with modest resources