Biblio

The utilization of Third-party modules is very common nowadays. Hence, combating Hardware Trojans affecting the applications' functionality and data security becomes inevitably essential. This paper focuses on the detection/masking of Hardware Trojans' undesirable effects concerned with spying and information leakage due to the growing care about applications' data confidentiality. It is assumed here that the Trojan-infected system consists mainly of a Microprocessor module (MP) followed by an encryption module and then a Medium Access Control (MAC) module. Also, the system can be application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) based or Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) based. A general solution, including encryption, CRC encoder/decoder, and zero padding modules, is presented to handle such Trojans. Special cases are then discussed carefully to prove that Trojans will be detected/masked with a corresponding overhead that depends on the Trojan's location, and the system's need for encryption. An implementation of the CRC encoder along with the zero padding module is carried out on an Altera Cyclone IV E FPGA to illustrate the extra resource utilization required by such a system, given that it is already using encryption.

Lin et al.'s scheme is a hash function Message Authentication Codes (MAC) block cipher based scheme that's composed of the compression function. Fixed point messages have been found on SMALLPRESENT-[s] algorithm. The vulnerability of block cipher algorithm against fixed point attacks can affect the vulnerability of block cipher based hash function schemes. This paper applies fixed point attack against Lin et al.'s modified scheme based on SMALLPRESENT-[8] algorithm. Fixed point attack was done using fixed point message from SMALLPRESENT-[8] algorithm which used as Initial Value (IV) on the scheme branch. The attack result shows that eight fixed point messages are successfully discovered on the B1 branch. The fixed point messages discovery on B1 and B2 branches form 18 fixed point messages on Lin et al.'s modified scheme with different IVs and keys. The discovery of fixed point messages shows that Lin et al.'s modified scheme is vulnerable to fixed point attack.

Modern operating systems for personal computers (including Linux, MAC, and Windows) provide user-level APIs for an application to access the I/O paths of another application. This design facilitates information sharing between applications, enabling applications such as screenshots. However, it also enables user-level malware to log a user's keystrokes or scrape a user's screen output. In this work, we explore a design called SwitchMan to protect a user's I/O paths against user-level malware attacks. SwitchMan assigns each user with two accounts: a regular one for normal operations and a protected one for inputting and outputting sensitive data. Each user account runs under a separate virtual terminal. Malware running under a user's regular account cannot access sensitive input/output under a user's protected account. At the heart of SwitchMan lies a secure protocol that enables automatic account switching when an application requires sensitive input/output from a user. Our performance evaluation shows that SwitchMan adds acceptable performance overhead. Our security and usability analysis suggests that SwitchMan achieves a better tradeoff between security and usability than existing solutions.

This paper considers the use of Combined Free/Demand Assignment Multiple Access (CFDAMA) for Underwater Acoustic Networks (UANs). The long propagation delay places severe constraints on the trade-off between end-to-end delay and the achievable channel utilisation. Free assignment is shown to offer close to the theoretical minimum end-to-end delay at low channel loads. Demand assignment is shown to have a much greater tolerance to increasing channel load over virtually the entire channel utilisation range, but with longer delay. CFDAMA is shown to exhibit significantly enhanced performance with respect to minimising end-to-end delay and maximising channel utilisation.

The design of medium access control (MAC) protocols for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) pose many challenges due to low bandwidth and high propagation delay. In this paper, a new medium access control (MAC) protocol called Handshake Triggered Chained-Concurrent MAC (HTCC) is proposed for large-scale applications in UWSNs. The main idea of HTCC is to establish a chained concurrent transmission accomplishing spatial reuse. The novelties of HTCC lie in: firstly, the protocol allows multi-direction handshake with different nodes simultaneously; secondly, a random access mechanism is integrated with the handshake mechanism for improve channel utilization. Simulation results show that HTCC outperforms extended version of Slotted floor acquisition multiple accesses (Ext-sFAMA) in terms of network throughput, the RTS efficiency, as well as fairness in representative scenarios.

This paper analyzes the authenticated encryption algorithm ACORN, a candidate in the CAESAR cryptographic competition. We identify weaknesses in the state update function of ACORN which result in collisions in the internal state of ACORN. This paper shows that for a given set of key and initialization vector values we can construct two distinct input messages which result in a collision in the ACORN internal state. Using a standard PC the collision can be found almost instantly when the secret key is known. This flaw can be used by a message sender to create a forged message which will be accepted as legitimate.