The New South Wales iVote System: Security Failures and Verification Flaws in a Live Online Election

In the world's largest-ever deployment of online voting, the iVote Internet voting system was trusted for the return of 280,000 ballots in the 2015 state election in New South Wales, Australia. During the election, we performed an independent security analysis of parts of the live iVote system and uncovered severe vulnerabilities that could be leveraged to manipulate votes, violate ballot privacy, and subvert the verification mechanism. These vulnerabilities do not seem to have been detected by the election authorities before we disclosed them, despite a pre-election security review and despite the system having run in a live state election for five days. One vulnerability, the result of including analytics software from an insecure external server, exposed some votes to complete compromise of privacy and integrity. At least one parliamentary seat was decided by a margin much smaller than the number of votes taken while the system was vulnerable. We also found protocol flaws, including vote verification that was itself susceptible to manipulation. This incident underscores the difficulty of conducting secure elections online and carries lessons for voters, election officials, and the e-voting research community

Decrypting SSL/TLS traffic for hidden threats detection

The paper presents an analysis of the main mechanisms of decryption of SSL/TLS traffic. Methods and technologies for detecting malicious activity in encrypted traffic that are used by leading companies are also considered. Also, the approach for intercepting and decrypting traffic transmitted over SSL/TLS is developed, tested and proposed. The developed approach has been automated and can be used for remote listening of the network, which will allow to decrypt transmitted data in a mode close to real time.Comment: 4 pages, 1 table, 1 figur

Securing communication within the harms model for use with firefighting robots

Humans and robots must work together in increasingly complex networks to achieve a common goal. In this research, firefighting robots are a part of a larger, decentralized system of humans, agents, robots, machines, and sensors (HARMS). Although communication in a HARMS model has been utilized in previous research, this new study looks at the security considerations of the communications layer of the HARMS model. A network attack known as a man-in-the-middle attack is successfully demonstrated in this paper. Then, a secure communications protocol is proposed to help provide confidentiality and authentication of HARMS actors. This research is applied to any system that utilizes a HARMS network, including firefighting robots, to help ensure malicious entities cannot exploit communications by system actors. Instead, system actors that confirm their identity can communicate securely in a decentralized way for indistinguishable task completion. The results of this experiment are successful, indicating that secure communication can prevent man-in-the-middle attacks with minor differences in operation

Measuring And Securing Cryptographic Deployments

This dissertation examines security vulnerabilities that arise due to communication failures and incentive mismatches along the path from cryptographic algorithm design to eventual deployment. I present six case studies demonstrating vulnerabilities in real-world cryptographic deployments. I also provide a framework with which to analyze the root cause of cryptographic vulnerabilities by characterizing them as failures in four key stages of the deployment process: algorithm design and cryptanalysis, standardization, implementation, and endpoint deployment. Each stage of this process is error-prone and influenced by various external factors, the incentives of which are not always aligned with security. I validate the framework by applying it to the six presented case studies, tracing each vulnerability back to communication failures or incentive mismatches in the deployment process. To curate these case studies, I develop novel techniques to measure both existing and new cryptographic attacks, and demonstrate the widespread impact of these attacks on real-world systems through measurement and cryptanalysis. While I do not claim that all cryptographic vulnerabilities can be described with this framework, I present a non-trivial (in fact substantial) number of case studies demonstrating that this framework characterizes the root cause of failures in a diverse set of cryptographic deployments

Cache-Timing Techniques: Exploiting the DSA Algorithm

Side-channel information is any type of information leaked through unexpected channels due to physical features of a system dealing with data. The memory cache can be used as a side-channel, leakage and exploitation of side-channel information from the executing processes is possible, leading to the recovery of secret information. Cache-based side-channel attacks represent a serious threat to implementations of several cryptographic primitives, especially in shared libraries. This work explains some of the cache-timing techniques commonly used to exploit vulnerable software. Using a particular combination of techniques and exploiting a vulnerability found in the implementation of the DSA signature scheme in the OpenSSL shared library, a cache-timing attack is performed against the DSA’s sliding window exponentiation algorithm. Moreover, the attack is expanded to show that it is possible to perform cache-timing attacks against protocols relying on the DSA signature scheme. SSH and TLS are attacked, leading to a key-recovery attack: 260 SSH-2 handshakes to extract a 1024/160-bit DSA hostkey from an OpenSSH server, and 580 TLS 1.2 handshakes to extract a 2048/256-bit DSA key from an stunnel server

Using Large-Scale Empirical Methods to Understand Fragile Cryptographic Ecosystems

Cryptography is a key component of the security of the Internet. Unfortunately, the process of using cryptography to secure the Internet is fraught with failure. Cryptography is often fragile, as a single mistake can have devastating consequences on security, and this fragility is further complicated by the diverse and distributed nature of the Internet. This dissertation shows how to use empirical methods in the form of Internet-wide scanning to study how cryptography is deployed on the Internet, and shows this methodology can discover vulnerabilities and gain insights into fragile cryptographic ecosystems that are not possible without an empirical approach. I introduce improvements to ZMap, the fast Internet-wide scanner, that allow it to fully utilize a 10 GigE connection, and then use Internet-wide scanning to measure cryptography on the Internet. First, I study how Diffie-Hellman is deployed, and show that implementations are fragile and not resilient to small subgroup attacks. Next, I measure the prevalence of ``export-grade'' cryptography. Although regulations limiting the strength of cryptography that could be exported from the United States were lifted in 1999, Internet-wide scanning shows that support for various forms of export cryptography remains widespread. I show how purposefully weakening TLS to comply with these export regulations led to the FREAK, Logjam, and DROWN vulnerabilities, each of which exploits obsolete export-grade cryptography to attack modern clients. I conclude by discussing how empirical cryptography improved protocol design, and I present further opportunities for empirical research in cryptography.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/149809/1/davadria_1.pd

Towards Secure Identity-Based Cryptosystems for Cloud Computing

The convenience provided by cloud computing has led to an increasing trend of many business organizations, government agencies and individual customers to migrate their services and data into cloud environments. However, once clients’ data is migrated to the cloud, the overall security control will be immediately shifted from data owners to the hands of service providers. When data owners decide to use the cloud environment, they rely entirely on third parties to make decisions about their data and, therefore, the main challenge is how to guarantee that the data is accessible by data owners and authorized users only. Remote user authentication to cloud services is traditionally achieved using a combination of ID cards and passwords/PINs while public key infrastructure and symmetric key encryptions are still the most common techniques for enforcing data security despite the missing link between the identity of data owners and the cryptographic keys. Furthermore, the key management in terms of the generation, distribution, and storage are still open challenges to traditional public-key systems. Identity-Based Cryptosystems (IBCs) are new generations of public key encryptions that can potentially solve the problems associated with key distribution in public key infrastructure in addition to providing a clear link between encryption keys and the identities of data owners. In IBCs, the need for pre-distributed keys before any encryption/decryption will be illuminated, which gives a great deal of flexibility required in an environment such as the cloud. Fuzzy identity-based cryptosystems are promising extensions of IBCs that rely on biometric modalities in generating the encryption and decryption keys instead of traditional identities such as email addresses. This thesis argues that the adoption of fuzzy identity-based cryptosystems seems an ideal option to secure cloud computing after addressing a number of vulnerabilities related to user verification, key generation, and key validation stages. The thesis is mainly concerned with enhancing the security and the privacy of fuzzy identity-based cryptosystems by proposing a framework with multiple security layers. The main contributions of the thesis can be summarised as follows. 1. Improving user verification based on using a Challenge-Response Multifactor Biometric Authentication (CR-MFBA) in fuzzy identity-based cryptosystems that reduce the impacts of impersonators attacks. 2. Reducing the dominance of the “trusted authority” in traditional fuzzy identity-based cryptosystems by making the process of generating the decryption keys a cooperative process between the trusted authority server and data owners. This leads to shifting control over the stored encrypted data from the trusted authority to the data owners. 3. Proposing a key-validity method that relies on employing the Shamir Secret Sharing, which also contributes to giving data owners more control over their data. 4. Further improving the control of data owners in fuzzy identity-based cryptosystems by linking the decryption keys parameters with their biometric modalities. 5. Proposing a new asymmetric key exchange protocol based on utilizing the scheme of fuzzy identity-based cryptosystems to shared encrypted data stored on cloud computing

Secure data sharing in cloud and IoT by leveraging attribute-based encryption and blockchain

“Data sharing is very important to enable different types of cloud and IoT-based services. For example, organizations migrate their data to the cloud and share it with employees and customers in order to enjoy better fault-tolerance, high-availability, and scalability offered by the cloud. Wearable devices such as smart watch share user’s activity, location, and health data (e.g., heart rate, ECG) with the service provider for smart analytic. However, data can be sensitive, and the cloud and IoT service providers cannot be fully trusted with maintaining the security, privacy, and confidentiality of the data. Hence, new schemes and protocols are required to enable secure data sharing in the cloud and IoT. This work outlines our research contribution towards secure data sharing in the cloud and IoT. For secure data sharing in the cloud, this work proposes several novel attribute-based encryption schemes. The core contributions to this end are efficient revocation, prevention of collusion attacks, and multi-group support. On the other hand, for secure data sharing in IoT, a permissioned blockchain-based access control system has been proposed. The system can be used to enforce fine-grained access control on IoT data where the access control decision is made by the blockchain-based on the consensus of the participating nodes”--Abstract, page iv

Security Hazards when Law is Code.

As software continues to eat the world, there is an increasing pressure to automate every aspect of society, from self-driving cars, to algorithmic trading on the stock market. As this pressure manifests into software implementations of everything, there are security concerns to be addressed across many areas. But are there some domains and fields that are distinctly susceptible to attacks, making them difficult to secure? My dissertation argues that one domain in particular—public policy and law— is inherently difficult to automate securely using computers. This is in large part because law and policy are written in a manner that expects them to be flexibly interpreted to be fair or just. Traditionally, this interpreting is done by judges and regulators who are capable of understanding the intent of the laws they are enforcing. However, when these laws are instead written in code, and interpreted by a machine, this capability to understand goes away. Because they blindly fol- low written rules, computers can be tricked to perform actions counter to their intended behavior. This dissertation covers three case studies of law and policy being implemented in code and security vulnerabilities that they introduce in practice. The first study analyzes the security of a previously deployed Internet voting system, showing how attackers could change the outcome of elections carried out online. The second study looks at airport security, investigating how full-body scanners can be defeated in practice, allowing attackers to conceal contraband such as weapons or high explosives past airport checkpoints. Finally, this dissertation also studies how an Internet censorship system such as China’s Great Firewall can be circumvented by techniques that exploit the methods employed by the censors themselves. To address these concerns of securing software implementations of law, a hybrid human-computer approach can be used. In addition, systems should be designed to allow for attacks or mistakes to be retroactively undone or inspected by human auditors. By combining the strengths of computers (speed and cost) and humans (ability to interpret and understand), systems can be made more secure and more efficient than a method employing either alone.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120795/1/ewust_1.pd

Light-Weight Accountable Privacy Preserving Protocol in Cloud Computing Based on a Third-Party Auditor

Cloud computing is emerging as the next disruptive utility paradigm [1]. It provides extensive storage capabilities and an environment for application developers through virtual machines. It is also the home of software and databases that are accessible, on-demand. Cloud computing has drastically transformed the way organizations, and individual consumers access and interact with Information Technology. Despite significant advancements in this technology, concerns about security are holding back businesses from fully adopting this promising information technology trend. Third-party auditors (TPAs) are becoming more common in cloud computing implementations. Hence, involving auditors comes with its issues such as trust and processing overhead. To achieve productive auditing, we need to (1) accomplish efficient auditing without requesting the data location or introducing processing overhead to the cloud client; (2) avoid introducing new security vulnerabilities during the auditing process. There are various security models for safeguarding the CCs (Cloud Client) data in the cloud. The TPA systematically examines the evidence of compliance with established security criteria in the connection between the CC and the Cloud Service Provider (CSP). The CSP provides the clients with cloud storage, access to a database coupled with services. Many security models have been elaborated to make the TPA more reliable so that the clients can trust the third-party auditor with their data. Our study shows that involving a TPA might come with its shortcomings, such as trust concerns, extra overhead, security, and data manipulation breaches; as well as additional processing, which leads to the conclusion that a lightweight and secure protocol is paramount to the solution. As defined in [2] privacy-preserving is making sure that the three cloud stakeholders are not involved in any malicious activities coming from insiders at the CSP level, making sure to remediate to TPA vulnerabilities and that the CC is not deceitfully affecting other clients. In our survey phase, we have put into perspective the privacy-preserving solutions as they fit the lightweight requirements in terms of processing and communication costs, ending up by choosing the most prominent ones to compare with them our simulation results. In this dissertation, we introduce a novel method that can detect a dishonest TPA: The Light-weight Accountable Privacy-Preserving (LAPP) Protocol. The lightweight characteristic has been proven simulations as the minor impact of our protocol in terms of processing and communication costs. This protocol determines the malicious behavior of the TPA. To validate our proposed protocol’s effectiveness, we have conducted simulation experiments by using the GreenCloud simulator. Based on our simulation results, we confirm that our proposed model provides better outcomes as compared to the other known contending methods