Breaking a chaos-noise-based secure communication scheme

This paper studies the security of a secure communication scheme based on two discrete-time intermittently-chaotic systems synchronized via a common random driving signal. Some security defects of the scheme are revealed: 1) the key space can be remarkably reduced; 2) the decryption is insensitive to the mismatch of the secret key; 3) the key-generation process is insecure against known/chosen-plaintext attacks. The first two defects mean that the scheme is not secure enough against brute-force attacks, and the third one means that an attacker can easily break the cryptosystem by approximately estimating the secret key once he has a chance to access a fragment of the generated keystream. Yet it remains to be clarified if intermittent chaos could be used for designing secure chaotic cryptosystems.Comment: RevTeX4, 11 pages, 15 figure

Return-Map Cryptanalysis Revisited

As a powerful cryptanalysis tool, the method of return-map attacks can be used to extract secret messages masked by chaos in secure communication schemes. Recently, a simple defensive mechanism was presented to enhance the security of chaotic parameter modulation schemes against return-map attacks. Two techniques are combined in the proposed defensive mechanism: multistep parameter modulation and alternative driving of two different transmitter variables. This paper re-studies the security of this proposed defensive mechanism against return-map attacks, and points out that the security was much over-estimated in the original publication for both ciphertext-only attack and known/chosen-plaintext attacks. It is found that a deterministic relationship exists between the shape of the return map and the modulated parameter, and that such a relationship can be used to dramatically enhance return-map attacks thereby making them quite easy to break the defensive mechanism.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Heterogeneous implementation of a Voronoi cell-based SVP solver

This paper presents a new, heterogeneous CPU+GPU attacks against lattice-based (postquantum) cryptosystems based on the Shortest Vector Problem (SVP), a central problem in lattice-based cryptanalysis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first SVP-attack against lattice-based cryptosystems using CPUs and GPUs simultaneously. We show that Voronoi-cell based CPU+GPU attacks, algorithmically improved in previous work, are suitable for the proposed massively parallel platforms. Results show that 1) heterogeneous platforms are useful in this scenario, as they increment the overall memory available in the system (as GPU's memory can be used effectively), a typical bottleneck for Voronoi-cell algorithms, and we have also been able to increase the performance of the algorithm on such a platform, by successfully using the GPU as a co-processor, 2) this attack can be successfully accelerated using conventional GPUs and 3) we can take advantage of multiple GPUs to attack lattice-based cryptosystems. Experimental results show a speedup up to 7.6× for 2 GPUs hosted by an Intel Xeon E5-2695 v2 CPU (12 cores ×2 sockets) using only 1 core and gains in the order of 20% for 2 GPUs hosted by the same machine using all 22 CPU threads (2 are reserved for orchestrating the GPUs), compared to single-CPU execution using the entire 24 threads available.This work was supported in part by the Instituto de Telecomunicações, in part by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under Grant UID/EEA/50008/2019 and Grant PTDC/EEI-HAC/30485/2017, and in part by the National Funds through the Portuguese Funding Agency, FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, under Grant UID/EEA/50014/2019. The work of A. Mariano was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Grant 382285730

Network layer access control for context-aware IPv6 applications

As part of the Lancaster GUIDE II project, we have developed a novel wireless access point protocol designed to support the development of next generation mobile context-aware applications in our local environs. Once deployed, this architecture will allow ordinary citizens secure, accountable and convenient access to a set of tailored applications including location, multimedia and context based services, and the public Internet. Our architecture utilises packet marking and network level packet filtering techniques within a modified Mobile IPv6 protocol stack to perform access control over a range of wireless network technologies. In this paper, we describe the rationale for, and components of, our architecture and contrast our approach with other state-of-the- art systems. The paper also contains details of our current implementation work, including preliminary performance measurements

Dynamic resiliency analysis of key predistribution in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have been analyzed for more than a decade from operational and security points of view. Several key predistribution schemes have been proposed in the literature. Although valuable and state-of-the-art proposals have been made, their corresponding security analyses have not been performed by considering the dynamic nature of networking behavior and the time dimension. The sole metric used for resiliency analysis of key predistribution schemes is "fraction of links compromised" which is roughly defined as the ratio of secure communication links that the adversary can compromise over all secure links. However, this metric does not consider the dynamic nature of the network; it just analyzes a snapshot of the network without considering the time dimension. For example, possible dead nodes may cause change of routes and some captured links become useless for the attacker as time goes by. Moreover, an attacker cannot perform sensor node capturing at once, but performs over time. That is why a methodology for dynamic security analysis is needed in order to analyze the change of resiliency in time a more realistic way. In this paper, we propose such a dynamic approach to measure the resiliency of key predistribution schemes in sensor networks. We take the time dimension into account with a new performance metric, "captured message fraction". This metric is defined as the percentage of the messages generated within the network to be forwarded to the base station (sink) that are captured and read by the attacker. Our results show that for the cases where the static fraction of links compromised metric indicates approximately 40% of the links are compromised, our proposed captured message fraction metric shows 80% of the messages are captured by the attacker. This clearly proves the limitations of the static resiliency analysis in the literature

HLS-based HW/SW co-design of the post-quantum classic McEliece cryptosystem

While quantum computers are rapidly becoming more powerful, the current cryptographic infrastructure is imminently threatened. In a preventive manner, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has initiated a process to evaluate quantum-resistant cryptosystems, to form the first post-quantum (PQ) cryptographic standard. Classic McEliece (CM) is one of the most prominent cryptosystems considered for standardization in NIST’s PQ cryptography contest. However, its computational cost poses notable challenges to a big fraction of existing computing devices. This work presents an HLS-based, HW/SW co-design acceleration of the CM Key Encapsulation Mechanism (CM KEM). We demonstrate significant maximum speedups of up to 55.2 ×, 3.3 ×, and 8.7 × in the CM KEM algorithms of key generation, encapsulation, and decapsulation respectively, comparing to a SW-only scalar implementation.This research was supported by the European Union Regional Development Fund within the framework of the ERDF Operational Program of Catalonia 2014-2020 with a grant of 50% of the total cost eligible, under the DRAC project [001- P-001723]. It was also supported by the Spanish goverment (grant RTI2018-095094-B-C21 “CONSENT”), by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contracts PID2019- 107255GB-C21, PID2019-107255GB-C21) and by the Catalan Government (contracts 2017-SGR-1414, 2017-SGR-705). This work has also received funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 871467. V. Kostalabros has been partially supported by the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) of the Government of Catalonia under "Ajuts per a la contractació de personal investigador novell" fellowship No. 2019FI B01274. M. Moreto was also partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness under "Ramón y Cajal" fellowship No. RYC-2016-21104.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

TD2SecIoT: Temporal, Data-Driven and Dynamic Network Layer Based Security Architecture for Industrial IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology, which comprises wireless smart sensors and actuators. Nowadays, IoT is implemented in different areas such as Smart Homes, Smart Cities, Smart Industries, Military, eHealth, and several real-world applications by connecting domain-specific sensors. Designing a security model for these applications is challenging for researchers since attacks (for example, zero-day) are increasing tremendously. Several security methods have been developed to ensure the CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability) for Industrial IoT (IIoT). Though these methods have shown promising results, there are still some security issues that are open. Thus, the security and authentication of IoT based applications become quite significant. In this paper, we propose TD2SecIoT (Temporal, Data-Driven and Dynamic Network Layer Based Security Architecture for Industrial IoT), which incorporates Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Nth-degree Truncated Polynomial Ring Units (NTRU) methods to ensure confidentiality and integrity. The proposed method has been evaluated against different attacks and performance measures (quantitative and qualitative) using the Cooja network simulator with Contiki-OS. The TD2SecIoT has shown a higher security level with reduced computational cost and time

Practical implementation and performance analysis on security of sensor networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a network made of thousands of sensing elements called as nodes with wireless capabilities. Their application is varied and diverse ranging from military to domestic and household. As the world of self-organizing sensor networks tip to the edge of maximum utilization, their wider deployment is adding pressure on the security front. Powerful laptops and workstations make it more challenging for small sensors. In addition, there are many security challenges in WSN, e.g- confidentiality, authentication, freshness, integrity etc. Contributions of this work are as follows: “Symmetric” security implementation: This thesis work designs a symmetric-key based security in sensor hardware in the Link layer of sensor network protocols. Link Layer security can protect a wireless network by denying access to the network itself before a user is successfully authenticated. This prevents attacks against the network infrastructure and protects the network from devastating attacks. “Public key” implementation in sensor hardware: Asymmetric key techniques are attractive for authentication data or session keys. Traditional schemes like RSA require considerable amounts of resources which in the past has limited their use. This thesis has implemented Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) in Mica2 hardware, which is an approach to public-key cryptography based on the mathematics of elliptic curves. Quantitative overhead analysis: This thesis work analyzes the wireless communication overhead (No. of packets transmitted) vs the (transmit and receive) energy consumed in mJoules and memory storage overhead (bytes) for ECC as compared to the symmetric counterpart for the implemented WSN security protocols