#researchpapers — Public Fediverse posts

The time has come to talk of many things… today's selection is again quite varied covering topics from ChatGPT security to CHERI allocators via near-ultrasound attacks on Alexa, issues with Signal groups and a fascinating "automatic repair" for speculative execution attacks with a smattering of Belgian remote voting!

* "Beyond the Safeguards: Exploring the Security Risks of ChatGPT"
* "DNN-Defender: An in-DRAM Deep Neural Network Defense Mechanism for Adversarial Weight Attack"
* "ChargeX: Exploring State Switching Attack on Electric Vehicle Charging Systems"
* "Picking a CHERI Allocator: Security and Performance Considerations"
* "Analyzing and Improving Eligibility Verifiability of the Proposed Belgian Remote Voting System"
* "Comprehensively Analyzing the Impact of Cyberattacks on Power Grids"
* "NUANCE: Near Ultrasound Attack On Networked Communication Environments"
* "Automatic and Incremental Repair for Speculative Information Leaks"
* "Poster: No safety in numbers: traffic analysis of sealed-sender groups in Signal"

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #ChatGPT #SpeculativeExecution #Signal #Alexa #PowerGrids #CHERI #DNN #BelgiumRemoteVoting

This one is a long one and rather eclectic as I've gone off and picked up some ancient arXiv links I had saved for a rainy day (it is beautifully sunny here but with climate change that's the way it is…).

First of all some 2018 vintage papers which are still interesting:

* "A Survey of Mobile Computing for the Visually Impaired"
* "The dry history of liquid computers"

After you whet your appetite with the above here are the others:

* "Visualising Personal Data Flows: Insights from a Case Study of Booking.com"
* "How Secure is Code Generated by ChatGPT?"
* "Maybenot: A Framework for Traffic Analysis Defenses"
* "Censoring chemical data to mitigate dual use risk" [this one is "very cynicalsecurity", sorry...]
* "Money Over Morals: A Business Analysis of Conti Ransomware"

The usual "tag cloud" for searching…

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #MobileComputing #VisuallyImpaired #LiquidComputers #PersonalDataFlows #Privacy #ChatGPT #TrafficAnalysis #DualUseTechnology #ArmsControl #Ransomware

The papers for this review:

* "Active TLS Stack Fingerprinting: Characterizing TLS Server Deployments at Scale"
* "HyPFuzz: Formal-Assisted Processor Fuzzing"
* "FPGA-Patch: Mitigating Remote Side-Channel Attacks on FPGAs using Dynamic Patch Generation"
* "30 Years of Synthetic Data"
* "On the Limits of Cross-Authentication Checks for GNSS Signals"
* "New Ways to Garble Arithmetic Circuits"
* "Exploration of Quantum Computer Power Side-Channels"
* "Side-Channel Analysis of Integrate-and-Fire Neurons within Spiking Neural Networks"
* "Those Aren't Your Memories, They're Somebody Else's: Seeding Misinformation in Chat Bot Memories"
* "Multi-step Jailbreaking Privacy Attacks on ChatGPT"
* "Measuring and Evading Turkmenistan's Internet Censorship: A Case Study in Large-Scale Measurements of a Low-Penetration Country"

#IACR #arXiv #ResearchPapers #TLS #Fuzzing #FPGA #SideChannelAttacks #SyntheticData #GNSS #GPS #GarbledCircuits #QuantumComputers #PowerSideChannelAttacks #NeuralNetworks #SpikingNeuralNetworks #ChatBots #ChatGPT #CensorshipResistance

M. Albrecht et al., "Four Attacks and a Proof for Telegram"¹

We study the use of symmetric cryptography in the MTProto 2.0 protocol, Telegram's equivalent of the TLS record protocol. We give positive and negative results. On the one hand, we formally and in detail model a slight variant of Telegram's "record protocol" and prove that it achieves security in a suitable bidirectional secure channel model, albeit under unstudied assumptions; this model itself advances the state-of-the-art for secure channels. On the other hand, we first motivate our modelling deviation from MTProto as deployed by giving two attacks – one of practical, one of theoretical interest – against MTProto without our modifications. We then also give a third attack exploiting timing side channels, of varying strength, in three official Telegram clients. On its own this attack is thwarted by the secrecy of salt and id fields that are established by Telegram's key exchange protocol. We chain the third attack with a fourth one against the implementation of the key exchange protocol on Telegram's servers. This fourth attack breaks the authentication properties of Telegram's key exchange, allowing a MitM attack. More mundanely, it also recovers the id field, reducing the cost of the plaintext recovery attack to guessing the 64-bit salt field. In totality, our results provide the first comprehensive study of MTProto's use of symmetric cryptography, as well as highlight weaknesses in its key exchange.

#IACR #ResearchPapers #Telegram #MTProto #ProvableSecurity #SecureMessaging #BiDirectionalChannels #SecurityAnalysis

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¹ https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/469

D. Soni et al., "RPU: The Ring Processing Unit"¹

Ring-Learning-with-Errors (RLWE) has emerged as the foundation of many important techniques for improving security and privacy, including homomorphic encryption and post-quantum cryptography. While promising, these techniques have received limited use due to their extreme overheads of running on general-purpose machines. In this paper, we present a novel vector Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and microarchitecture for accelerating the ring-based computations of RLWE. The ISA, named B512, is developed to meet the needs of ring processing workloads while balancing high-performance and general-purpose programming support. Having an ISA rather than fixed hardware facilitates continued software improvement post-fabrication and the ability to support the evolving workloads. We then propose the ring processing unit (RPU), a high-performance, modular implementation of B512. The RPU has native large word modular arithmetic support, capabilities for very wide parallel processing, and a large capacity high-bandwidth scratchpad to meet the needs of ring processing. We address the challenges of programming the RPU using a newly developed SPIRAL backend. A configurable simulator is built to characterize design tradeoffs and quantify performance. The best performing design was implemented in RTL and used to validate simulator performance. In addition to our characterization, we show that a RPU using 20.5mm2 of GF 12nm can provide a speedup of 1485x over a CPU running a 64k, 128-bit NTT, a core RLWE workload

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #RLWE #microarchitectures #ISA #HardwareAcceleration
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¹ https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.17118

J. Vilalonga et al., "TorKameleon: Improving Tor's Censorship Resistance With K-anonimization and Media-based Covert Channels"¹

The use of anonymity networks such as Tor and similar tools can greatly enhance the privacy and anonymity of online communications. Tor, in particular, is currently the most widely used system for ensuring anonymity on the Internet. However, recent research has shown that Tor is vulnerable to correlation attacks carried out by state-level adversaries or colluding Internet censors. Therefore, new and more effective solutions emerged to protect online anonymity. Promising results have been achieved by implementing covert channels based on media traffic in modern anonymization systems, which have proven to be a reliable and practical approach to defend against powerful traffic correlation attacks. In this paper, we present TorKameleon, a censorship evasion solution that better protects Tor users from powerful traffic correlation attacks carried out by state-level adversaries. TorKameleon can be used either as a fully integrated Tor pluggable transport or as a standalone anonymization system that uses K-anonymization and encapsulation of user traffic in covert media channels. Our main goal is to protect users from machine and deep learning correlation attacks on anonymization networks like Tor. We have developed the TorKameleon prototype and performed extensive validations to verify the accuracy and experimental performance of the proposed solution in the Tor environment, including state-of-the-art active correlation attacks. As far as we know, we are the first to develop and study a system that uses both anonymization mechanisms described above against active correlation attacks.

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #TorKameleon #Tor #CensorshipResistance #Privacy #CovertChannels
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¹ https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.17544

V. Narayanan et al., "emote attestation of SEV-SNP confidential VMs using e-vTPMs"¹

Departing from "your data is safe with us" model where the cloud infrastructure is trusted, cloud tenants are shifting towards a model in which the cloud provider is not part of the trust domain. Both silicon and cloud vendors are trying to address this shift by introducing confidential computing - an umbrella term that provides mechanisms for protecting the data in-use through encryption below the hardware boundary of the CPU, e.g., Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), AMD secure encrypted virtualization (SEV), Intel trust domain extensions (TDX), etc.
In this work, we design and implement a virtual trusted platform module (vTPM) that virtualizes the hardware root-of-trust without requiring to trust the cloud provider. To ensure the security of a vTPM in a provider-controlled environment, we leverage unique isolation properties of the SEV-SNP hardware and a novel approach to ephemeral TPM state management. Specifically, we develop a stateless ephemeral vTPM that supports remote attestation without persistent state. This allows us to pair each confidential VM with a private instance of a vTPM that is completely isolated from the provider-controlled environment and other VMs. We built our prototype entirely on open-source components - Qemu, Linux, and Keylime. Though our work is AMD-specific, a similar approach could be used to build remote attestation protocol on other trusted execution environments (TEE).

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #SEV-SNP #TPM #TDX #SGX #RemoteAttestation #Intel #AMD

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¹ https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.16463

R. Heinrich et al., "Targeted Adversarial Attacks on Wind Power Forecasts"¹

In recent years, researchers proposed a variety of deep learning models for wind power forecasting. These models predict the wind power generation of wind farms or entire regions more accurately than traditional machine learning algorithms or physical models. However, latest research has shown that deep learning models can often be manipulated by adversarial attacks. Since wind power forecasts are essential for the stability of modern power systems, it is important to protect them from this threat. In this work, we investigate the vulnerability of two different forecasting models to targeted, semitargeted, and untargeted adversarial attacks. We consider a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network for predicting the power generation of a wind farm and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for forecasting the wind power generation throughout Germany. Moreover, we propose the Total Adversarial Robustness Score (TARS), an evaluation metric for quantifying the robustness of regression models to targeted and semi-targeted adversarial attacks. It assesses the impact of attacks on the model's performance, as well as the extent to which the attacker's goal was achieved, by assigning a score between 0 (very vulnerable) and 1 (very robust). In our experiments, the LSTM forecasting model was fairly robust and achieved a TARS value of over 0.81 for all adversarial attacks investigated. The CNN forecasting model only achieved TARS values below 0.06 when trained ordinarily, and was thus very vulnerable. Yet, its robustness could be significantly improved by adversarial training, which always resulted in a TARS above 0.46.

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #LongShortTermMemory #MachineLearning #WindPower #PredictionModels
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¹ https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.16633

S. Haskins and T. Stevado, "Unlocking doors from half a continent away: A relay attack against HID Seos"¹

HID Global is a major vendor of physical access control systems. In 2012, it introduced Seos, its newest and most secure contactless RFID credential technology, successfully remediating known flaws in predecessors iCLASS and Prox. Seos has been widely deployed to secure sensitive assets and facilities. To date, no published research has demonstrated a security flaw in Seos. We present a relay attack developed with inexpensive COTS hardware, including the Proxmark 3 RDV4. Our attack is capable of operating over extremely long ranges as it uses the Internet as a communications backbone. We have tested multiple real-world attack scenarios and are able to unlock a door in our lab with a card approximately 1960 km away. Our attack is covert and does not require long-term access to the card. Further, our attack is generic and is potentially applicable to other protocols that, like Seos, use ISO/IEC 14443A to communicate. We discuss several mitigations capable of thwarting our attack that could be introduced in future credential systems or as an update to Seos-compatible readers' firmware; these rely on rejecting cards that take too long to reply.

#IACR #ResearchPapers #HIDGlobal #RFID #RelayAttack #Cryptanalysis #PhysicalAccessControl #ISO14443
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¹ https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/450

P.-C. Cheng et al., "Intel TDX Demystified: A Top-Down Approach"¹

Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) is a new architectural extension in the 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processor that supports confidential computing. TDX allows the deployment of virtual machines in the Secure-Arbitration Mode (SEAM) with encrypted CPU state and memory, integrity protection, and remote attestation. TDX aims to enforce hardware-assisted isolation for virtual machines and minimize the attack surface exposed to host platforms, which are considered to be untrustworthy or adversarial in the confidential computing's new threat model. TDX can be leveraged by regulated industries or sensitive data holders to outsource their computations and data with end-to-end protection in public cloud infrastructure.
This paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of TDX to potential adopters, domain experts, and security researchers looking to leverage the technology for their own purposes. We adopt a top-down approach, starting with high-level security principles and moving to low-level technical details of TDX. Our analysis is based on publicly available documentation and source code, offering insights from security researchers outside of Intel.

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #Intel #TDX #TrustDomainExtension

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¹ https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15540

E. Cambiaso and L. Caviglione, "Scamming the Scammers: Using ChatGPT to Reply Mails for Wasting Time and Resources"¹

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support cybersecurity operations is now a consolidated practice, e.g., to detect malicious code or configure traffic filtering policies. The recent surge of AI, generative techniques and frameworks with efficient natural language processing capabilities dramatically magnifies the number of possible applications aimed at increasing the security of the Internet. Specifically, the ability of ChatGPT to produce textual contents while mimicking realistic human interactions can be used to mitigate the plague of emails containing scams. Therefore, this paper investigates the use of AI to engage scammers in automatized and pointless communications, with the goal of wasting both their time and resources. Preliminary results showcase that ChatGPT is able to decoy scammers, thus confirming that AI is an effective tool to counteract threats delivered via mail. In addition, we highlight the multitude of implications and open research questions to be addressed in the perspective of the ubiquitous adoption of AI.

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #ArtificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #EmailScammers
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¹ https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.13521

M. Gross et al., "CPU to FPGA Power Covert Channel in FPGA-SoCs"¹

FPGA-SoCs are a popular platform for accelerating a wide
range of applications due to their performance and flexibility. From a
security point of view, these systems have been shown to be vulnerable
to various attacks, especially side-channel attacks where an attacker can
obtain the secret key of a cryptographic algorithm via laboratory mea-
surement equipment or even remotely with sensors implemented inside
the FPGA logic itself. Fortunately, a variety of countermeasures on the
algorithmic level have been proposed to mitigate this threat. Beyond side-
channel attacks, covert channels constitute another threat which enables
communication through a hidden channel. In this work, we demonstrate
the possibility of implementing a covert channel between the CPU and
an FPGA by modulating the usage of the Power Distribution Network.
We show that this resource is especially vulnerable since it can be easily
controlled and observed, resulting in a stealthy communication and a
high transmission data rate. The power usage is modulated using simple
and inconspicuous instructions executed on the CPU. Additionally, we
use Time-to-Digital Converter sensors to observe these power variations.
The sensor circuits are programmed into the FPGA fabric using only
standard logic components. Our covert channel achieves a transmission
rate of up to 16.7 kbit/s combined with an error rate of 2.3%. Besides
a good transmission quality, our covert channel is also stealthy and can
be used as an activation function for a hardware trojan.

#IACR #ResearchPapers #FPGA-SoCs #CovertChannels #PowerDistributionNetwork #OnChipPowerSensors #HardwareTrojan
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¹ https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/429

O. Dunkelman et al., "Practical-Time Related-Key Attack on GOST with Secret S-boxes"¹

The block cipher GOST 28147-89 was the Russian Federation encryption standard for over 20 years, and is still one of its two standard block ciphers. GOST is a 32-round Feistel construction, whose security benefits from the fact that the S-boxes used in the design are kept secret. In the last 10 years, several attacks on the full 32-round GOST were presented. However, they all assume that the S-boxes are known. When the S-boxes are secret, all published attacks either target a small number of rounds, or apply for small sets of weak keys.
In this paper we present the first practical-time attack on GOST with secret S-boxes. The attack works in the related-key model and is faster than all previous attacks in this model which assume that the S-boxes are known. The complexity of the attack is less than 2^27 encryptions. It was fully verified, and runs in a few seconds on a PC. The attack is based on a novel type of related-key differentials of GOST, inspired by local collisions.
Our new technique may be applicable to certain GOST-based hash functions as well. To demonstrate this, we show how to find a collision on a Davies-Meyer construction based on GOST with an arbitrary initial value, in less than 2^10 hash function evaluations.

#ResearchPapers #Cryptography #Cryptanalysis #IACR #RelatedKeyDifferentialAnalysis #GOST #LocalCollision
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¹ https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/374

C. Li et al., "SALSA PICANTE: a machine learning attack on LWE with binary secrets"¹

The Learning With Errors (LWE) problem is one of the major hard problems in post-quantum cryptography. For example, 1) the only Key Exchange Mechanism KEM standardized by NIST [14] is based on LWE; and 2) current publicly available Homomorphic Encryption (HE) libraries are based on LWE. NIST KEM schemes use random secrets, but homomorphic encryption schemes use binary or ternary secrets, for efficiency reasons. In particular, sparse binary secrets have been proposed, but not standardized [2], for HE.
Prior work SALSA [49] demonstrated a new machine learning attack on sparse binary secrets for the LWE problem in small dimensions (up to n = 128) and low Hamming weights (up to h = 4). However, this attack assumed access to millions of LWE samples, and was not scaled to higher Hamming weights or dimensions.
Our attack, PICANTE, reduces the number of samples required to just m = 4n samples. Moreover, it can recover secrets with much larger dimensions (up to 350) and Hamming weights (roughly n/10, or h = 33 for n = 300). To achieve this, we introduce a preprocessing step which allows us to generate the training data from a linear number of samples and changes the distribution of the training data to improve transformer training. We also improve the distinguisher/secret recovery methods of SALSA and introduce a novel cross-attention recovery mechanism which allows us to read-off the secret directly from the trained models.

#ResearchPapers #IACR #LWE #Cryptanalysis
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¹ https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/340

N. Mouha and C. Celi, "A Vulnerability in Implementations of SHA-3, SHAKE, EdDSA, and Other NIST-Approved Algorithm"¹

This paper describes a vulnerability in several implementations of the Secure Hash Algorithm 3 (SHA-3) that have been released by its designers. The vulnerability has been present since the final-round update of Keccak was submitted to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) SHA-3 hash function competition in January 2011, and is present in the eXtended Keccak Code Package (XKCP) of the Keccak team. It affects all software projects that have integrated this code, such as the scripting languages Python and PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP). The vulnerability is a buffer overflow that allows attacker-controlled values to be eXclusive-ORed (XORed) into memory (without any restrictions on values to be XORed and even far beyond the location of the original buffer), thereby making many standard protection measures against buffer overflows (e.g., canary values) completely ineffective. First, we provide Python and PHP scripts that cause segmentation faults when vulnerable versions of the interpreters are used. Then, we show how this vulnerability can be used to construct second preimages and preimages for the implementation, and we provide a specially constructed file that, when hashed, allows the attacker to execute arbitrary code on the victim's device. The vulnerability applies to all hash value sizes, and all 64-bit Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems, and may also impact cryptographic algorithms that require SHA-3 or its variants, such as the Edwards-curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA) when the Edwards448 curve is used. We introduce the Init-Update-Final Test (IUFT) to detect this vulnerability in implementations.

#ResearchPapers #IACR #Cryptanalysis #CVE202237454 #SHA3 #Keccak #HashFunction #Vulnerability
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¹ https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/331

E. Barlas et al., "Exploiting Input Sanitization for Regex Denial of Service"¹

Web services use server-side input sanitization to guard against harmful input. Some web services publish their sanitization logic to make their client interface more usable, e.g., allowing clients to debug invalid requests locally. However, this usability practice poses a security risk. Specifically, services may share the regexes they use to sanitize input strings -- and regex-based denial of service (ReDoS) is an emerging threat. Although prominent service outages caused by ReDoS have spurred interest in this topic, we know little about the degree to which live web services are vulnerable to ReDoS.
In this paper, we conduct the first black-box study measuring the extent of ReDoS vulnerabilities in live web services. We apply the Consistent Sanitization Assumption: that client-side sanitization logic, including regexes, is consistent with the sanitization logic on the server-side. We identify a service's regex-based input sanitization in its HTML forms or its API, find vulnerable regexes among these regexes, craft ReDoS probes, and pinpoint vulnerabilities. We analyzed the HTML forms of 1,000 services and the APIs of 475 services. Of these, 355 services publish regexes; 17 services publish unsafe regexes; and 6 services are vulnerable to ReDoS through their APIs (6 domains; 15 subdomains). Both Microsoft and Amazon Web Services patched their web services as a result of our disclosure. Since these vulnerabilities were from API specifications, not HTML forms, we proposed a ReDoS defense for a popular API validation library, and our patch has been merged. To summarize: in client-visible sanitization logic, some web services advertise ReDoS vulnerabilities in plain sight. Our results motivate short-term patches and long-term fundamental solutions.

#ResearchPapers #ReDoS #RegexDenialOfService #Regex #InputSanitisation
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¹ https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01996

M. Macchetti, "A Novel Related Nonce Attack for ECDSA"¹

We describe a new related nonce attack able to extract the
original signing key from a small collection of ECDSA signatures generated with weak PRNGs. Under suitable conditions on the modulo order
of the PRNG, we are able to attack linear, quadratic, cubic as well as
arbitrary degree recurrence relations (with unknown coefficients) with
few signatures and in negligible time. We also show that for any collection of randomly generated ECDSA nonces, there is one more nonce that
can be added following the implicit recurrence relation, and that would
allow retrieval of the private key; we exploit this fact to present a novel
rogue nonce attack against ECDSA. Up to our knowledge, this is the
first known attack exploiting generic and unknown high-degree algebraic
relations between nonces that do not require assumptions on the value
of single bits or bit sequences (e.g. prefixes and suffixes).

#IACR #ResearchPapers #ECDSA #NonceAttack #PRNG #Cryptanalysis
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¹ https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/305

D. Kaplan, "Optimization and Amplification of Cache Side Channel Signals"¹

In cache-based side channel attacks, an attacker infers information about the victim based on the presence, or lack thereof, of one or more cachelines. Determining a cacheline's presence, which we refer to as "reading the signal", typically requires testing the access time of the line using a suitably high precision timer. In this paper we introduce novel gadgets which leverage CPU speculation to enable modification of these signals, before they are read, for a variety of purposes. First, these gadgets enable an attacker to optimize cache-based side channel attacks by evaluating arbitrary logic functions on cacheline signals prior to their measurement. Second, we demonstrate amplification techniques that enable an attacker to read a signal even if no high precision timer is available. Combined, these techniques can be used to improve existing side channel attacks even if timer access is limited. We evaluate the effectiveness of these techniques on a modern x86 CPU and demonstrate that when properly tuned, cache side channel signals can be reliably modified with near 100% accuracy and are able to be read with a timer as coarse as 100ms or more.

#ResearchPapers #arXiv #CacheSideChannelAttacks #SideChannelAttacks #X86
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¹ https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.00122

F. Liu et al., "Analysis of RIPEMD-160: New Collision Attacks and Finding Characteristics with MILP"¹

The hash function RIPEMD-160 is an ISO/IEC standard and is being used to generate the bitcoin address together with SHA-256. Despite the fact that many hash functions in the MD-SHA hash family have been broken, RIPEMD-160 remains secure and the best collision attack could only reach up to 34 out of 80 rounds, which was published at CRYPTO 2019. In this paper, we propose a new collision attack on RIPEMD-160 that can reach up to 36 rounds with time complexity 2^ 64.5. This new attack is facilitated by a new strategy to choose the message differences and new techniques to simultaneously handle the differential conditions on both branches. Moreover, different from all the previous work on RIPEMD-160, we utilize a MILP-based method to search for differential characteristics, where we construct a model to accurately describe the signed difference transitions through its round function. As far as we know, this is the first model targeting the signed difference transitions for the MD-SHA hash family. Indeed, we are more motivated to design this model by the fact that many automatic tools to search for such differential characteristics are not publicly available and implementing them from scratch is too time-consuming and difficult. Hence, we expect that this can be an alternative easy tool for future research, which only requires to write down some simple linear inequalities.

#ResearchPapers #IACR #Cryptanalysis #RIPEMD-160 #CollisionAttack #ModularDifference #SignedDifference #MILP
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¹ https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/277

D. Bilika et al., "Hello Me, Meet the Real Me: Audio Deepfake Attacks on Voice Assistants"¹

The radical advances in telecommunications and computer science have enabled a myriad of applications and novel seamless interaction with computing interfaces. Voice Assistants (VAs) have become a norm for smartphones, and millions of VAs incorporated in smart devices are used to control these devices in the smart home context. Previous research has shown that they are prone to attacks, leading vendors to countermeasures. One of these measures is to allow only a specific individual, the device's owner, to perform possibly dangerous tasks, that is, tasks that may disclose personal information, involve monetary transactions etc. To understand the extent to which VAs provide the necessary protection to their users, we experimented with two of the most widely used VAs, which the participants trained. We then utilised voice synthesis using samples provided by participants to synthesise commands that were used to trigger the corresponding VA and perform a dangerous task. Our extensive results showed that more than 30\% of our deepfake attacks were successful and that there was at least one successful attack for more than half of the participants. Moreover, they illustrate statistically significant variation among vendors and, in one case, even gender bias. The outcomes are rather alarming and require the deployment of further countermeasures to prevent exploitation, as the number of VAs in use is currently comparable to the world population.

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #DeepFake #DeepFakeAttacks #VoiceAssistants #Privacy
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¹ https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10328

E. Liu et al., "Forward Pass: On the Security Implications of Email Forwarding Mechanism and Policy"¹

The critical role played by email has led to a range of extension protocols (e.g., SPF, DKIM, DMARC) designed to protect against the spoofing of email sender domains. These protocols are complex as is, but are further complicated by automated email forwarding -- used by individual users to manage multiple accounts and by mailing lists to redistribute messages. In this paper, we explore how such email forwarding and its implementations can break the implicit assumptions in widely deployed anti-spoofing protocols. Using large-scale empirical measurements of 20 email forwarding services (16 leading email providers and four popular mailing list services), we identify a range of security issues rooted in forwarding behavior and show how they can be combined to reliably evade existing anti-spoofing controls. We show how this allows attackers to not only deliver spoofed email messages to prominent email providers (e.g., Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, and Zoho), but also reliably spoof email on behalf of tens of thousands of popular domains including sensitive domains used by organizations in government (e.g., http://state.gov/), finance (e.g., http://transunion.com/), law (e.g., http://perkinscoie.com/) and news (e.g., http://washingtonpost.com/) among others.

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #SPF #DKIM #DMARC #EmailForwarding
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¹ https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.07287

M. Saß et al., "Oops..! I Glitched It Again! How to Multi-Glitch the Glitching-Protections on ARM TrustZone-M"¹

Voltage Fault Injection (VFI), also known as power glitching, has proven to be a severe threat to real-world systems. In VFI attacks, the adversary disturbs the power-supply of the target-device forcing the device to illegitimate behavior. Various countermeasures have been proposed to address different types of fault injection attacks at different abstraction layers, either requiring to modify the underlying hardware or software/firmware at the machine instruction level. Moreover, only recently, individual chip manufacturers have started to respond to this threat by integrating countermeasures in their products. Generally, these countermeasures aim at protecting against single fault injection (SFI) attacks, since Multiple Fault Injection (MFI) is believed to be challenging and sometimes even impractical. In this paper, we present {\mu}-Glitch, the first Voltage Fault Injection (VFI) platform which is capable of injecting multiple, coordinated voltage faults into a target device, requiring only a single trigger signal. We provide a novel flow for Multiple Voltage Fault Injection (MVFI) attacks to significantly reduce the search complexity for fault parameters, as the search space increases exponentially with each additional fault injection. We evaluate and showcase the effectiveness and practicality of our attack platform on four real-world chips, featuring TrustZone-M: The first two have interdependent backchecking mechanisms, while the second two have additionally integrated countermeasures against fault injection. Our evaluation revealed that {\mu}-Glitch can successfully inject four consecutive faults within an average time of one day. Finally, we discuss potential countermeasures to mitigate VFI attacks and additionally propose two novel attack scenarios for MVFI.

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #Glitching #VoltageFaultInjection #MultipleVoltageFaultInjection #TEE #ARM #Trustzone
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¹ https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06932

F. Spagnolo et al., "ERMES: Efficient Racetrack Memory Emulation System based on FPGA"¹

With the scaling of CMOS technology almost over, non-volatile memories based on emerging technologies are gain- ing considerable popularity. Particularly, spintronic-based Race- track memories (RTMs) exhibit unprecedented storage capacity, as well as reduced energy per operation and high write en- durance, which make them promising candidates to revolutionize the architecture of memory sub-systems. However, since RTM exploits shifting of magnetic domains to align the required data with the access port, its read/write latency is not constant. Due to this behaviour, several performance optimizations related to the target application may be introduced either on memory architecture or data placement or both. To this purpose, specific tools able to emulate the timing characteristics of RTMs are highly desired. Unfortunately, existing software-based simulators show poor flexibility and run-time. To address such limitations, this paper presents a new emulation system for RTMs based on heterogeneous FPGA-CPU Systems-on-Chips (SoCs). Thanks to its high flexibility, the proposed emulator can be easily configured to evaluate different memory architectures. In addition, the CPU can be used to stimulate the RTM architecture under test with appropriate benchmarks, thus providing a fast self- contained evaluation environment. As case study, ERMES has been implemented within the Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale XCUZ9EG SoC to evaluate performances of several memory configurations when running benchmark applications from the MiBench suite, experiencing a speed-up higher than ×146 over software-based simulators.

#ResearchPapers #RacetrackMemory #Semiconductors #RTMs #Spintronics
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¹ https://cfaed.tu-dresden.de/publications?pubId=3385

R. Bagnara et al., "C-rusted: The Advantages of Rust, in C, without the Disadvantages" ¹

C-rusted is an innovative technology whereby C programs can be (partly) annotated so as to express: ownership, exclusivity and shareability of language, system and user-defined resources; dynamic properties of objects and the way they evolve during program execution. The (partially) annotated C programs can be translated with unmodified versions of any compilation toolchain capable of processing ISO~C code. The annotated C program parts can be validated by static analysis: if the static analyzer flags no error, then the annotations are provably coherent among themselves and with respect to annotated C code, in which case said annotated parts are provably exempt from a large class of logic, security, and run-time errors.

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #Rust #CProgrammingLanguage
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¹ https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.05331

G. Lasry et al., "Deciphering Mary Stuart’s lost letters from 1578-1584"¹

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), has left an extensive corpus of letters held in various archive collections. There is evidence, however that other letters from Mary Stuart are missing from those collections, such as letters referenced in other sources but not found elsewhere. In Under the Molehill – an Elizabethan Spy Story, John Bossy writes that a secret correspondence with her associates and allies, prior to its compromise in mid-1583, was “kept so secure that none of it has survived, and we don’t know what was in it.” We have found over 55 letters fully in cipher in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which, after we broke the code and deciphered the letters, unexpectedly turned out to be letters from Mary Stuart, addressed mostly to Michel de Castelnau Mauvissière, the French ambassador to England. Written between 1578 and 1584, those newly deciphered letters are most likely part of the aforementioned secret correspondence considered to have been lost, and they constitute a voluminous body of new primary material on Mary Stuart – about 50,000 words in total, shedding new light on some of her years of captivity in England.

#Cryptologia #ResearchPapers #Codebreaking #FrenchCiphers #HomophonicCiphers #MaryStuart
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¹ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2022.2160677

M. Akhtar et al., "A high-fidelity quantum matter-link between ion-trap microchip modules"¹

System scalability is fundamental for large-scale quantum computers (QCs) and is being pursued over a variety of hardware platforms. For QCs based on trapped ions, architectures such as the quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) are used to scale the number of qubits on a single device. However, the number of ions that can be hosted on a single quantum computing module is limited by the size of the chip being used. Therefore, a modular approach is of critical importance and requires quantum connections between individual modules. Here, we present the demonstration of a quantum matter-link in which ion qubits are transferred between adjacent QC modules. Ion transport between adjacent modules is realised at a rate of 2424 s−1 and with an infidelity associated with ion loss during transport below 7 × 10−8. Furthermore, we show that the link does not measurably impact the phase coherence of the qubit. The quantum matter-link constitutes a practical mechanism for the interconnection of QCCD devices. Our work will facilitate the implementation of modular QCs capable of fault-tolerant utility-scale quantum computation.

#ResearchPapers #QCCD #QuantumComputers #QuantumConnections

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¹ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35285-3

B. Sá et al., "CVA6 RISC-V Virtualization: Architecture, Microarchitecture, and Design Space Exploration"¹

Virtualization is a key technology used in a wide range of applications, from cloud computing to embedded systems. Over the last few years, mainstream computer architectures were extended with hardware virtualization support, giving rise to a set of virtualization technologies (e.g., Intel VT, Arm VE) that are now proliferating in modern processors and SoCs. In this article, we describe our work on hardware virtualization support in the RISC-V CVA6 core. Our contribution is multifold and encompasses architecture, microarchitecture, and design space exploration. In particular, we highlight the design of a set of microarchitectural enhancements (i.e., G-Stage Translation Lookaside Buffer (GTLB), L2 TLB) to alleviate the virtualization performance overhead. We also perform a design space exploration (DSE) and accompanying post-layout simulations (based on 22nm FDX technology) to assess performance, power and area (PPA). Further, we map design variants on an FPGA platform (Genesys 2) to assess the functional performance-area trade-off. Based on the DSE, we select an optimal design point for the CVA6 with hardware virtualization support. For this optimal hardware configuration, we collected functional performance results by running the MiBench benchmark on Linux atop Bao hypervisor for a single-core configuration. We observed a performance speedup of up to 16\% (approx. 12.5\% on average) compared with virtualization-aware non-optimized design, at the minimal cost of 0.78\% in area and 0.33\% in power.

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #RISCV #Virtualisation #CVA6
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¹ https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02969

C.-A. Staicu et al., "Bilingual Problems: Studying the Security Risks Incurred by Native Extensions in Scripting Languages"¹

Scripting languages are continuously gaining popularity due to their ease of use and the flourishing software ecosystems that surround them. These languages offer crash and memory safety by design, thus, developers do not need to understand and prevent low-level security issues like the ones plaguing the C code. However, scripting languages often allow native extensions, which are a way for custom C/C++ code to be invoked directly from the high-level language. While this feature promises several benefits such as increased performance or the reuse of legacy code, it can also break the language's guarantees, e.g., crash-safety. In this work, we first provide a comparative analysis of the security risks of native extension APIs in three popular scripting languages. Additionally, we discuss a novel methodology for studying the misuse of the native extension API. We then perform an in-depth study of npm, an ecosystem which is most exposed to threats introduced by native extensions. We show that vulnerabilities in extensions can be exploited in their embedding library by producing reads of uninitialized memory, hard crashes or memory leaks in 33 npm packages, simply by invoking their API with well-crafted inputs. Moreover, we identify six open-source web applications in which such exploits can be deployed remotely by a weak adversary. Finally, we were assigned seven security advisories for the work presented in this paper, most labeled as high severity.

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #ScriptingLanguages #NativeExtensions #Programming #Security
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.11169

C.-A. Staicu et al., "Bilingual Problems: Studying the Security Risks Incurred by Native Extensions in Scripting Languages"¹

Scripting languages are continuously gaining popularity due to their ease of use and the flourishing software ecosystems that surround them. These languages offer crash and memory safety by design, thus, developers do not need to understand and prevent low-level security issues like the ones plaguing the C code. However, scripting languages often allow native extensions, which are a way for custom C/C++ code to be invoked directly from the high-level language. While this feature promises several benefits such as increased performance or the reuse of legacy code, it can also break the language's guarantees, e.g., crash-safety. In this work, we first provide a comparative analysis of the security risks of native extension APIs in three popular scripting languages. Additionally, we discuss a novel methodology for studying the misuse of the native extension API. We then perform an in-depth study of npm, an ecosystem which is most exposed to threats introduced by native extensions. We show that vulnerabilities in extensions can be exploited in their embedding library by producing reads of uninitialized memory, hard crashes or memory leaks in 33 npm packages, simply by invoking their API with well-crafted inputs. Moreover, we identify six open-source web applications in which such exploits can be deployed remotely by a weak adversary. Finally, we were assigned seven security advisories for the work presented in this paper, most labeled as high severity.

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #ScriptingLanguages #NativeExtensions #Programming #Security
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.11169

C.-A. Staicu et al., "Bilingual Problems: Studying the Security Risks Incurred by Native Extensions in Scripting Languages"¹

Scripting languages are continuously gaining popularity due to their ease of use and the flourishing software ecosystems that surround them. These languages offer crash and memory safety by design, thus, developers do not need to understand and prevent low-level security issues like the ones plaguing the C code. However, scripting languages often allow native extensions, which are a way for custom C/C++ code to be invoked directly from the high-level language. While this feature promises several benefits such as increased performance or the reuse of legacy code, it can also break the language's guarantees, e.g., crash-safety. In this work, we first provide a comparative analysis of the security risks of native extension APIs in three popular scripting languages. Additionally, we discuss a novel methodology for studying the misuse of the native extension API. We then perform an in-depth study of npm, an ecosystem which is most exposed to threats introduced by native extensions. We show that vulnerabilities in extensions can be exploited in their embedding library by producing reads of uninitialized memory, hard crashes or memory leaks in 33 npm packages, simply by invoking their API with well-crafted inputs. Moreover, we identify six open-source web applications in which such exploits can be deployed remotely by a weak adversary. Finally, we were assigned seven security advisories for the work presented in this paper, most labeled as high severity.

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #ScriptingLanguages #NativeExtensions #Programming #Security
__
https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.11169

C.-A. Staicu et al., "Bilingual Problems: Studying the Security Risks Incurred by Native Extensions in Scripting Languages"¹

Scripting languages are continuously gaining popularity due to their ease of use and the flourishing software ecosystems that surround them. These languages offer crash and memory safety by design, thus, developers do not need to understand and prevent low-level security issues like the ones plaguing the C code. However, scripting languages often allow native extensions, which are a way for custom C/C++ code to be invoked directly from the high-level language. While this feature promises several benefits such as increased performance or the reuse of legacy code, it can also break the language's guarantees, e.g., crash-safety. In this work, we first provide a comparative analysis of the security risks of native extension APIs in three popular scripting languages. Additionally, we discuss a novel methodology for studying the misuse of the native extension API. We then perform an in-depth study of npm, an ecosystem which is most exposed to threats introduced by native extensions. We show that vulnerabilities in extensions can be exploited in their embedding library by producing reads of uninitialized memory, hard crashes or memory leaks in 33 npm packages, simply by invoking their API with well-crafted inputs. Moreover, we identify six open-source web applications in which such exploits can be deployed remotely by a weak adversary. Finally, we were assigned seven security advisories for the work presented in this paper, most labeled as high severity.

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #ScriptingLanguages #NativeExtensions #Programming #Security
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.11169

G. Hu and R. Lee, "Protecting Cache States Against Both Speculative Execution Attacks and Side-channel Attacks"¹

Cache side-channel attacks and speculative execution attacks that leak information through cache states are stealthy and dangerous attacks on hardware that must be mitigated. Unfortunately, defenses proposed for cache side-channel attacks do not mitigate all cache-based speculative execution attacks and vice versa. Since both classes of attacks must be addressed, we propose comprehensive cache architectures to do this.
We show a framework to analyze the security of a secure cache. We identify same-domain speculative execution attacks, and show they evade cache side-channel defenses. We present new hardware security mechanisms that address target attacks and reduce performance overhead. We design two Speculative and Timing Attack Resilient (STAR) caches that defeat both cache side-channel attacks and cache-based speculative execution attacks. These comprehensive defenses have low performance overhead of 6.6% and 8.8%.

#arXiv #ResearchPapers #SideChannelAttacks #Microarchitecture #SpeculativeExecution
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¹ https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.00732