42,183 research outputs found
Formal Analysis of CRT-RSA Vigilant's Countermeasure Against the BellCoRe Attack: A Pledge for Formal Methods in the Field of Implementation Security
In our paper at PROOFS 2013, we formally studied a few known countermeasures
to protect CRT-RSA against the BellCoRe fault injection attack. However, we
left Vigilant's countermeasure and its alleged repaired version by Coron et al.
as future work, because the arithmetical framework of our tool was not
sufficiently powerful. In this paper we bridge this gap and then use the same
methodology to formally study both versions of the countermeasure. We obtain
surprising results, which we believe demonstrate the importance of formal
analysis in the field of implementation security. Indeed, the original version
of Vigilant's countermeasure is actually broken, but not as much as Coron et
al. thought it was. As a consequence, the repaired version they proposed can be
simplified. It can actually be simplified even further as two of the nine
modular verifications happen to be unnecessary. Fortunately, we could formally
prove the simplified repaired version to be resistant to the BellCoRe attack,
which was considered a "challenging issue" by the authors of the countermeasure
themselves.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1401.817
"On the Road" - Reflections on the Security of Vehicular Communication Systems
Vehicular communication (VC) systems have recently drawn the attention of
industry, authorities, and academia. A consensus on the need to secure VC
systems and protect the privacy of their users led to concerted efforts to
design security architectures. Interestingly, the results different project
contributed thus far bear extensive similarities in terms of objectives and
mechanisms. As a result, this appears to be an auspicious time for setting the
corner-stone of trustworthy VC systems. Nonetheless, there is a considerable
distance to cover till their deployment. This paper ponders on the road ahead.
First, it presents a distillation of the state of the art, covering the
perceived threat model, security requirements, and basic secure VC system
components. Then, it dissects predominant assumptions and design choices and
considers alternatives. Under the prism of what is necessary to render secure
VC systems practical, and given possible non-technical influences, the paper
attempts to chart the landscape towards the deployment of secure VC systems
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Evaluation of software dependability
It has been said that the term software engineering is an aspiration not a description. We would like to be able to claim that we engineer software, in the same sense that we engineer an aero-engine, but most of us would agree that this is not currently an accurate description of our activities. My suspicion is that it never will be.
From the point of view of this essay – i.e. dependability evaluation – a major difference between software and other engineering artefacts is that the former is pure design. Its unreliability is always the result of design faults, which in turn arise as a result of human intellectual failures. The unreliability of hardware systems, on the other hand, has tended until recently to be dominated by random physical failures of components – the consequences of the ‘perversity of nature’. Reliability theories have been developed over the years which have successfully allowed systems to be built to high reliability requirements, and the final system reliability to be evaluated accurately. Even for pure hardware systems, without software, however, the very success of these theories has more recently highlighted the importance of design faults in determining the overall reliability of the final product. The conventional hardware reliability theory does not address this problem at all.
In the case of software, there is no physical source of failures, and so none of the reliability theory developed for hardware is relevant. We need new theories that will allow us to achieve required dependability levels, and to evaluate the actual dependability that has been achieved, when the sources of the faults that ultimately result in failure are human intellectual failures
FairLedger: A Fair Blockchain Protocol for Financial Institutions
Financial institutions are currently looking into technologies for
permissioned blockchains. A major effort in this direction is Hyperledger, an
open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation and backed by a consortium
of over a hundred companies. A key component in permissioned blockchain
protocols is a byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus engine that orders
transactions. However, currently available BFT solutions in Hyperledger (as
well as in the literature at large) are inadequate for financial settings; they
are not designed to ensure fairness or to tolerate selfish behavior that arises
when financial institutions strive to maximize their own profit.
We present FairLedger, a permissioned blockchain BFT protocol, which is fair,
designed to deal with rational behavior, and, no less important, easy to
understand and implement. The secret sauce of our protocol is a new
communication abstraction, called detectable all-to-all (DA2A), which allows us
to detect participants (byzantine or rational) that deviate from the protocol,
and punish them. We implement FairLedger in the Hyperledger open source
project, using Iroha framework, one of the biggest projects therein. To
evaluate FairLegder's performance, we also implement it in the PBFT framework
and compare the two protocols. Our results show that in failure-free scenarios
FairLedger achieves better throughput than both Iroha's implementation and PBFT
in wide-area settings
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