cynicalsecurity @cynicalsecurity

@munin and we shall continue with Wintel because this "is what people want and know".

Not one voice going "perhaps we need a deeper solution", not one, just a "moar patches", "moar complexity". Will SGX fix any of this? Of course not, but we can still sell it as "security".

http://eprint.iacr.org/2017/583

Side-Channel Attacks on BLISS Lattice-Based Signatures: Exploiting Branch Tracing Against strongSwan and Electromagnetic Emanations in Microcontrollers

Thomas Espitau et al.

…we investigate the security of the BLISS lattice-based signature scheme, one of the most promising candidates for post-quantum-secure signatures, against side-channel attacks…We turn to more traditional side-channel analysis, and describe several attacks that can yield a full key recovery…

http://eprint.iacr.org/2017/577

Boot Attestation: Secure Remote Reporting with Off-The-Shelf IoT Sensors

Steffen Schulz et al.

…In this work, we propose a novel remote attestation scheme, named Boot Attestation, that is particularly optimized for low-cost and resource-constrained embedded devices. In Boot Attestation, software integrity measurements are immediately committed to during boot, thus relaxing the traditional requirement for secure storage and reporting…

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.06261

LightBox: SGX-assisted Secure Network Functions at Near-native Speed

Huayi Duan et al.

…In this paper, after systematically addressing key challenges brought to the fore, we design and build a secure SGX-assisted system, LightBox, which supports secure and generic middlebox functions, efficient networking, and most notably, low-overhead stateful processing…

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08042

Cloud Storage Forensics: Analysis of Data Remnants on SpiderOak, JustCloud, and pCloud

SeyedHossein Mohtasebi et al.

… In this paper, we describe investigation of three STaaS platforms namely SpiderOak, JustCloud, and pCloud on Windows 8.1 and iOS 8.1.1 devices. Moreover, possible changes on uploaded and downloaded files metadata on these platforms would be tracked and their forensics value would be investigated…

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08003

OS Fingerprinting: New Techniques and a Study of Information Gain and Obfuscation

Blake Anderson, David McGrew

…We present an effective approach for passive fingerprinting that uses data features from TLS as well as the TCP/IP and HTTP protocols in a multi-session model, which is applicable whenever several sessions can be observed within a time window…

http://eprint.iacr.org/2017/608

Your Rails Cannot Hide From Localized EM: How Dual-Rail Logic Fails on FPGAs

Vincent Immler et al.

…While previous works show a significant security gain when using such logic on FPGAs, we demonstrate this only holds for power-analysis. In contrast, our attack using high-resolution electromagnetic analysis is able to exploit local characteristics of the placement and routing such that only a marginal security gain remains, therefore creating a severe threat…

http://eprint.iacr.org/2017/613

Illusion and Dazzle: Adversarial Optical Channel Exploits against Lidars for Automotive Applications

Hocheol Shin et al.

…In this work, we present a spoofing by relaying attack, which can not only induce illusions in the lidar output but can also cause the illusions to appear closer than the location of a spoofing device…Additionally, we present a novel saturation attack against lidars, which can completely incapacitate a lidar from sensing a certain direction.

You know all the ITsec stuff about setting an NVRAM password on your Macs? Really rather useful when, years later, you need to run hardware diagnostics and cannot recall it…

So now I have a MacPro, randomly hanging or logging me out and no way to diagnose except by taking to the Genius Bar. I do have AppleCare, it is not a huge drama but… I could have run the hardware testing suite and then changed RAM if necessary, for example.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.06381

KeyDrown: Eliminating Keystroke Timing Side-Channel Attacks

Michael Schwarz et al.

…KeyDrown injects a large number of fake keystrokes in the kernel to prevent interrupt-based attacks and Prime+Probe attacks on the kernel. All keystrokes, including fake keystrokes, are carefully propagated through the shared library in order to hide any cache activity and thus to prevent Flush+Reload attacks…

http://eprint.iacr.org/2017/600

Bit-Sliding: A Generic Technique for Bit-Serial Implementations of SPN-based Primitives: Applications to AES, PRESENT and SKINNY

Jeremy Jean et al.

…In this article, we propose the first strategy to obtain extremely small bit-serial ASIC implementations of SPN primitives. Our technique, which we call bit-sliding, is generic and offers many new interesting implementation trade-offs…

http://eprint.iacr.org/2015/806

Using State Space Encoding To Counter Biased Fault Attacks on AES Countermeasures

Sikhar Patranabis et al.

Biased fault attacks such as the Differential Fault Intensity Analysis (DFIA) have been a major threat to cryptosystems in recent times…In this work, we propose a countermeasure strategy that combines the principles of redundancy with that of fault space transformation to achieve security against both classical and biased fault attacks…

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.07257

A survey of Hardware-based Control Flow Integrity (CFI)

Ruan de Clercq, Ingrid Verbauwhede

CFI is a computer security technique that detects runtime attacks by monitoring a program's branching behavior. This work presents a detailed analysis of the security policies enforced by 21 recent hardware-based CFI architectures…We show that many architectures are not suitable for widespread adoption… or they implement policies which provide only limited security.

http://eprint.iacr.org/2017/598

Quantum Resource Estimates for Computing Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms

Martin Roetteler et al.

We give precise quantum resource estimates for Shor's algorithm to compute discrete logarithms on elliptic curves over prime fields…
The results also confirm estimates given earlier by Proos and Zalka and indicate that… the number of qubits required to tackle elliptic curves is less than for attacking RSA, suggesting that indeed ECC is an easier target than RSA.

http://eprint.iacr.org/2017/596

A Side-Channel Assisted Cryptanalytic Attack Against QcBits

Melissa Rossi et al.

QcBits is a code-based public key algorithm based on a problem thought to be resistant to quantum computer attacks…In this paper, we present a key recovery attack against QcBits… Solving this system of equations gave us the entire key. Finally, we propose a simple but effective countermeasure against the power analysis used during the syndrome calculation.

http://eprint.iacr.org/2017/594

Single-Trace Side-Channel Attacks on Masked Lattice-Based Encryption

Robert Primas et al.

Although lattice-based cryptography has proven to be a particularly efficient approach to post-quantum cryptography, its security against side-channel attacks is still a very open topic… We use leakage coming from the Number Theoretic Transform, which is at the heart of almost all efficient lattice-based implementations…

http://eprint.iacr.org/2017/592

Speeding up lattice sieve with Xeon Phi coprocessor

Anja Becker and Dusan Kostic

Major substep in a lattice sieve algorithm which solves the Euclidean shortest vector problem (SVP) is the computation of sums and Euclidean norms of many vector pairs… We optimize the main subfunction of a sieve for the regular main processor and for the co-processor to speed up the algorithm in total…

http://eprint.iacr.org/2017/591

On the Security of Carrier Phase-based Ranging

Hildur Olafsdottir et al.

… We show that phase-based ranging, as well as its implementations, are vulnerable to a variety of distance reduction attacks… Specifically, we successfully reduced the estimated range to less than 3 m even though the devices were more than 50 m apart.