Mitigating Multi-Target Attacks in Hash-based Signatures

This work introduces XMSS-T, a new hash-based signature scheme with tight security. Previous hash-based signature schemes are facing a loss of security, linear in performance parameters like the total tree height. Our new scheme can use hash functions with a smaller output length at the same security level, immediately leading to a smaller signature size. XMSS-T is stateful, however, the same techniques also apply directly to the recent stateless hash-based signature scheme SPHINCS (Eurocrypt 2015), and the signature size is improved as a result. Being a little more specific and technical, the tight security stems from new multi-target notions of hash-function properties which we define and analyze. We give precise complexity for breaking these security properties under both classical and quantum generic attacks, thus establishing a reliable estimate for the quantum security of XMSS-T. Especially, we prove quantum upper and lower bounds for the query complexity tailored for cryptographic applications, whereas standard techniques in quantum query complexity have limitations such as they usually only consider worst-case complexity. Our proof techniques may be useful elsewhere. We also implement XMSS-T and compare its performance to that of the most recent stateful hash-based signature scheme XMSS (PQCrypto 2011)

Trust-based security for the OLSR routing protocol

International audienceThe trust is always present implicitly in the protocols based on cooperation, in particular, between the entities involved in routing operations in Ad hoc networks. Indeed, as the wireless range of such nodes is limited, the nodes mutually cooperate with their neighbors in order to extend the remote nodes and the entire network. In our work, we are interested by trust as security solution for OLSR protocol. This approach fits particularly with characteristics of ad hoc networks. Moreover, the explicit trust management allows entities to reason with and about trust, and to take decisions regarding other entities. In this paper, we detail the techniques and the contributions in trust-based security in OLSR. We present trust-based analysis of the OLSR protocol using trust specification language, and we show how trust-based reasoning can allow each node to evaluate the behavior of the other nodes. After the detection of misbehaving nodes, we propose solutions of prevention and countermeasures to resolve the situations of inconsistency, and counter the malicious nodes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution taking different simulated attacks scenarios. Our approach brings few modifications and is still compatible with the bare OLSR

IoT Sentinel: Automated Device-Type Identification for Security Enforcement in IoT

With the rapid growth of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), concerns about the security of IoT devices have become prominent. Several vendors are producing IP-connected devices for home and small office networks that often suffer from flawed security designs and implementations. They also tend to lack mechanisms for firmware updates or patches that can help eliminate security vulnerabilities. Securing networks where the presence of such vulnerable devices is given, requires a brownfield approach: applying necessary protection measures within the network so that potentially vulnerable devices can coexist without endangering the security of other devices in the same network. In this paper, we present IOT SENTINEL, a system capable of automatically identifying the types of devices being connected to an IoT network and enabling enforcement of rules for constraining the communications of vulnerable devices so as to minimize damage resulting from their compromise. We show that IOT SENTINEL is effective in identifying device types and has minimal performance overhead