Biblio

Ransomware have observed a steady growth over the years with several concerning trends that indicate efficient, targeted attacks against organizations and individuals alike. These opportunistic attackers indiscriminately target both public and private sector entities to maximize gain. In this article, we highlight the criticality of key management in ransomware's cryptosystem in order to facilitate building effective solutions against this threat. We introduce the ransomware kill chain to elucidate the path our adversaries must take to attain their malicious objective. We examine current solutions presented against ransomware in light of this kill chain and specify which constraints on ransomware are being violated by the existing solutions. Finally, we present the notion of memory attacks against ransomware's key management and present our initial experiments with dynamically extracting decryption keys from real-world ransomware. Results of our preliminary research are promising and the extracted keys were successfully deployed in subsequent data decryption.

Scan design is a universal design for test (DFT) technology to increase the observability and controllability of the circuits under test by using scan chains. However, it also leads to a potential security problem that attackers can use scan design as a backdoor to extract confidential information. Researchers have tried to address this problem by using secure scan structures that usually have some keys to confirm the identities of users. However, the traditional methods to store intermediate data or keys in memory are also under high risk of being attacked. In this paper, we propose a dynamic-key secure DFT structure that can defend scan-based and memory attacks without decreasing the system performance and the testability. The main idea is to build a scan design key generator that can generate the keys dynamically instead of storing and using keys in the circuit statically. Only specific patterns derived from the original test patterns are valid to construct the keys and hence the attackers cannot shift in any other patterns to extract correct internal response from the scan chains or retrieve the keys from memory. Analysis results show that the proposed method can achieve a very high security level and the security level will not decrease no matter how many guess rounds the attackers have tried due to the dynamic nature of our method.