Biblio

This paper shows that stochastic heuristic approach for implicitly solving addition chain problem (ACP) in public-key cryptosystem (PKC) enhances the efficiency of the PKC and improves the security by blinding the multiplications/squaring operations involved against side-channel attack (SCA). We show that while the current practical heuristic approaches being deterministic expose the fixed pattern of the operations, using stochastic method blinds the pattern by being unpredictable and generating diffident pattern of operation for the same exponent at a different time. Thus, if the addition chain (AC) is generated implicitly every time the exponentiation operation is being made, needless for such approaches as padding by insertion of dummy operations and the operation is still totally secured against the SCA. Furthermore, we also show that the stochastic approaches, when carefully designed, further reduces the length of the operation than state-of-the-art practical methods for improving the efficiency. We demonstrated our investigation by implementing RSA cryptosystem using the stochastic approach and the results benchmarked with the existing current methods.

Cloud computing presents unlimited prospects for Information Technology (IT) industry and business enterprises alike. Rapid advancement brings a dark underbelly of new vulnerabilities and challenges unfolding with alarming regularity. Although cloud technology provides a ubiquitous environment facilitating business enterprises to conduct business across disparate locations, security effectiveness of this platform interspersed with threats which can bring everything that subscribes to the cloud, to a halt raises questions. However advantages of cloud platforms far outweighs drawbacks and study of new challenges helps overcome drawbacks of this technology. One such emerging security threat is of ransomware attack on the cloud which threatens to hold systems and data on cloud network to ransom with widespread damaging implications. This provides huge scope for IT security specialists to sharpen their skillset to overcome this new challenge. This paper covers the broad cloud architecture, current inherent cloud threat mechanisms, ransomware vulnerabilities posed and suggested methods to mitigate it.