28,948 research outputs found

    On the Impact of Wireless Jamming on the Distributed Secondary Microgrid Control

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    The secondary control in direct current microgrids (MGs) is used to restore the voltage deviations caused by the primary droop control, where the latter is implemented locally in each distributed generator and reacts to load variations. Numerous recent works propose to implement the secondary control in a distributed fashion, relying on a communication system to achieve consensus among MG units. This paper shows that, if the system is not designed to cope with adversary communication impairments, then a malicious attacker can apply a simple jamming of a few units of the MG and thus compromise the secondary MG control. Compared to other denial-of-service attacks that are oriented against the tertiary control, such as economic dispatch, the attack on the secondary control presented here can be more severe, as it disrupts the basic functionality of the MG

    TrustShadow: Secure Execution of Unmodified Applications with ARM TrustZone

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    The rapid evolution of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies has led to an emerging need to make it smarter. A variety of applications now run simultaneously on an ARM-based processor. For example, devices on the edge of the Internet are provided with higher horsepower to be entrusted with storing, processing and analyzing data collected from IoT devices. This significantly improves efficiency and reduces the amount of data that needs to be transported to the cloud for data processing, analysis and storage. However, commodity OSes are prone to compromise. Once they are exploited, attackers can access the data on these devices. Since the data stored and processed on the devices can be sensitive, left untackled, this is particularly disconcerting. In this paper, we propose a new system, TrustShadow that shields legacy applications from untrusted OSes. TrustShadow takes advantage of ARM TrustZone technology and partitions resources into the secure and normal worlds. In the secure world, TrustShadow constructs a trusted execution environment for security-critical applications. This trusted environment is maintained by a lightweight runtime system that coordinates the communication between applications and the ordinary OS running in the normal world. The runtime system does not provide system services itself. Rather, it forwards requests for system services to the ordinary OS, and verifies the correctness of the responses. To demonstrate the efficiency of this design, we prototyped TrustShadow on a real chip board with ARM TrustZone support, and evaluated its performance using both microbenchmarks and real-world applications. We showed TrustShadow introduces only negligible overhead to real-world applications.Comment: MobiSys 201

    Analysis and Mitigation of Remote Side-Channel and Fault Attacks on the Electrical Level

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    In der fortlaufenden Miniaturisierung von integrierten Schaltungen werden physikalische Grenzen erreicht, wobei beispielsweise Einzelatomtransistoren eine mögliche untere Grenze für Strukturgrößen darstellen. Zudem ist die Herstellung der neuesten Generationen von Mikrochips heutzutage finanziell nur noch von großen, multinationalen Unternehmen zu stemmen. Aufgrund dieser Entwicklung ist Miniaturisierung nicht länger die treibende Kraft um die Leistung von elektronischen Komponenten weiter zu erhöhen. Stattdessen werden klassische Computerarchitekturen mit generischen Prozessoren weiterentwickelt zu heterogenen Systemen mit hoher Parallelität und speziellen Beschleunigern. Allerdings wird in diesen heterogenen Systemen auch der Schutz von privaten Daten gegen Angreifer zunehmend schwieriger. Neue Arten von Hardware-Komponenten, neue Arten von Anwendungen und eine allgemein erhöhte Komplexität sind einige der Faktoren, die die Sicherheit in solchen Systemen zur Herausforderung machen. Kryptografische Algorithmen sind oftmals nur unter bestimmten Annahmen über den Angreifer wirklich sicher. Es wird zum Beispiel oft angenommen, dass der Angreifer nur auf Eingaben und Ausgaben eines Moduls zugreifen kann, während interne Signale und Zwischenwerte verborgen sind. In echten Implementierungen zeigen jedoch Angriffe über Seitenkanäle und Faults die Grenzen dieses sogenannten Black-Box-Modells auf. Während bei Seitenkanalangriffen der Angreifer datenabhängige Messgrößen wie Stromverbrauch oder elektromagnetische Strahlung ausnutzt, wird bei Fault Angriffen aktiv in die Berechnungen eingegriffen, und die falschen Ausgabewerte zum Finden der geheimen Daten verwendet. Diese Art von Angriffen auf Implementierungen wurde ursprünglich nur im Kontext eines lokalen Angreifers mit Zugriff auf das Zielgerät behandelt. Jedoch haben bereits Angriffe, die auf der Messung der Zeit für bestimmte Speicherzugriffe basieren, gezeigt, dass die Bedrohung auch durch Angreifer mit Fernzugriff besteht. In dieser Arbeit wird die Bedrohung durch Seitenkanal- und Fault-Angriffe über Fernzugriff behandelt, welche eng mit der Entwicklung zu mehr heterogenen Systemen verknüpft sind. Ein Beispiel für neuartige Hardware im heterogenen Rechnen sind Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), mit welchen sich fast beliebige Schaltungen in programmierbarer Logik realisieren lassen. Diese Logik-Chips werden bereits jetzt als Beschleuniger sowohl in der Cloud als auch in Endgeräten eingesetzt. Allerdings wurde gezeigt, wie die Flexibilität dieser Beschleuniger zur Implementierung von Sensoren zur Abschätzung der Versorgungsspannung ausgenutzt werden kann. Zudem können durch eine spezielle Art der Aktivierung von großen Mengen an Logik Berechnungen in anderen Schaltungen für Fault Angriffe gestört werden. Diese Bedrohung wird hier beispielsweise durch die Erweiterung bestehender Angriffe weiter analysiert und es werden Strategien zur Absicherung dagegen entwickelt

    A Unified Formalism for Physical Attacks

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    Technical reportThe security of cryptographic algorithms can be considered in two contexts. On the one hand, these algorithms can be proven secure mathematically. On the other hand, physical attacks can weaken the implementation of an algorithm yet proven secure. Under the common name of physical attacks, different attacks are regrouped: side channel attacks and fault injection attacks. This paper presents a common formalism for these attacks and highlights their underlying principles. All physical attacks on symmetric algorithms can be described with a 3-step process. Moreover it is possible to compare different physical attacks, by separating the theoretical attack path and the experimental parts of the attacks

    Physical functions : the common factor of side-channel and fault attacks ?

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    International audienceSecurity is a key component for information technologies and communication. Among the security threats, a very important one is certainly due to vulnerabilities of the integrated circuits that implement cryptographic algorithms. These electronic devices (such as smartcards) could fall into the hands of malicious people and then could be sub-ject to "physical attacks". These attacks are generally classified into two categories : fault and side-channel attacks. One of the main challenges to secure circuits against such attacks is to propose methods and tools to estimate as soundly as possible, the efficiency of protections. Numer-ous works attend to provide tools based on sound statistical techniques but, to our knowledge, only address side-channel attacks. In this article, a formal link between fault and side-channel attacks is presented. The common factor between them is what we called the 'physical' function which is an extension of the concept of 'leakage function' widely used in side-channel community. We think that our work could make possible the re-use (certainly modulo some adjustments) for fault attacks of the strong theoretical background developed for side-channel attacks. This work could also make easier the combination of side-channel and fault attacks and thus, certainly could facilitate the discovery of new attack paths. But more importantly, the notion of physical functions opens from now new challenges about estimating the protection of circuits

    Reduction in the Number of Fault Injections for Blind Fault Attack on SPN Block Ciphers

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    In 2014, a new fault analysis called blind fault attack (BFA) was proposed, in which attackers can only obtain the number of different faulty outputs without knowing the public data. The original BFA requires 480,000 fault injections to recover a 128-bit AES key. This work attempts to reduce the number of fault injections under the same attack assumptions. We analyze BFA from an information theoretical perspective and introduce a new probability-based distinguisher. Three approaches are proposed for different attack scenarios. The best one realized a 66.8% reduction of the number of fault injections on AES
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