2,621 research outputs found
High-level Cryptographic Abstractions
The interfaces exposed by commonly used cryptographic libraries are clumsy,
complicated, and assume an understanding of cryptographic algorithms. The
challenge is to design high-level abstractions that require minimum knowledge
and effort to use while also allowing maximum control when needed.
This paper proposes such high-level abstractions consisting of simple
cryptographic primitives and full declarative configuration. These abstractions
can be implemented on top of any cryptographic library in any language. We have
implemented these abstractions in Python, and used them to write a wide variety
of well-known security protocols, including Signal, Kerberos, and TLS.
We show that programs using our abstractions are much smaller and easier to
write than using low-level libraries, where size of security protocols
implemented is reduced by about a third on average. We show our implementation
incurs a small overhead, less than 5 microseconds for shared key operations and
less than 341 microseconds (< 1%) for public key operations. We also show our
abstractions are safe against main types of cryptographic misuse reported in
the literature
Trojans in Early Design Steps—An Emerging Threat
Hardware Trojans inserted by malicious foundries
during integrated circuit manufacturing have received substantial
attention in recent years. In this paper, we focus on a different
type of hardware Trojan threats: attacks in the early steps of
design process. We show that third-party intellectual property
cores and CAD tools constitute realistic attack surfaces and that
even system specification can be targeted by adversaries. We
discuss the devastating damage potential of such attacks, the
applicable countermeasures against them and their deficiencies
DR.SGX: Hardening SGX Enclaves against Cache Attacks with Data Location Randomization
Recent research has demonstrated that Intel's SGX is vulnerable to various
software-based side-channel attacks. In particular, attacks that monitor CPU
caches shared between the victim enclave and untrusted software enable accurate
leakage of secret enclave data. Known defenses assume developer assistance,
require hardware changes, impose high overhead, or prevent only some of the
known attacks. In this paper we propose data location randomization as a novel
defensive approach to address the threat of side-channel attacks. Our main goal
is to break the link between the cache observations by the privileged adversary
and the actual data accesses by the victim. We design and implement a
compiler-based tool called DR.SGX that instruments enclave code such that data
locations are permuted at the granularity of cache lines. We realize the
permutation with the CPU's cryptographic hardware-acceleration units providing
secure randomization. To prevent correlation of repeated memory accesses we
continuously re-randomize all enclave data during execution. Our solution
effectively protects many (but not all) enclaves from cache attacks and
provides a complementary enclave hardening technique that is especially useful
against unpredictable information leakage
The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third-Party Encryption
A variety of "key recovery," "key escrow," and "trusted third-party" encryption requirements have been suggested in recent years by government agencies seeking to conduct covert surveillance within the changing environments brought about by new technologies. This report examines the fundamental properties of these requirements and attempts to outline the technical risks, costs, and implications of deploying systems that provide government access to encryption keys
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The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third-Party Encryption
A variety of "key recovery," "key escrow," and "trusted third-party" encryption requirements have been suggested in recent years by government agencies seeking to conduct covert surveillance within the changing environments brought about by new technologies. This report examines the fundamental properties of these requirements and attempts to outline the technical risks, costs, and implications of deploying systems that provide government access to encryption keys
HardIDX: Practical and Secure Index with SGX
Software-based approaches for search over encrypted data are still either
challenged by lack of proper, low-leakage encryption or slow performance.
Existing hardware-based approaches do not scale well due to hardware
limitations and software designs that are not specifically tailored to the
hardware architecture, and are rarely well analyzed for their security (e.g.,
the impact of side channels). Additionally, existing hardware-based solutions
often have a large code footprint in the trusted environment susceptible to
software compromises. In this paper we present HardIDX: a hardware-based
approach, leveraging Intel's SGX, for search over encrypted data. It implements
only the security critical core, i.e., the search functionality, in the trusted
environment and resorts to untrusted software for the remainder. HardIDX is
deployable as a highly performant encrypted database index: it is logarithmic
in the size of the index and searches are performed within a few milliseconds
rather than seconds. We formally model and prove the security of our scheme
showing that its leakage is equivalent to the best known searchable encryption
schemes. Our implementation has a very small code and memory footprint yet
still scales to virtually unlimited search index sizes, i.e., size is limited
only by the general - non-secure - hardware resources
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