Biblio

There are several security requirements identification methods proposed by researchers in up-front requirements engineering (RE). However, in open source software (OSS) projects, developers use lightweight representation and refine requirements frequently by writing comments. They also tend to discuss security aspect in comments by providing code snippets, attachments, and external resource links. Since most security requirements identification methods in up-front RE are based on textual information retrieval techniques, these methods are not suitable for OSS projects or just-in-time RE. In our study, we propose a new model based on logistic regression to identify security requirements in OSS projects. We used five metrics to build security requirements identification models and tested the performance of these metrics by applying those models to three OSS projects. Our results show that four out of five metrics achieved high performance in intra-project testing.

Detecting software security vulnerabilities and distinguishing vulnerable from non-vulnerable code is anything but simple. Most of the time, vulnerabilities remain undisclosed until they are exposed, for instance, by an attack during the software operational phase. Software metrics are widely-used indicators of software quality, but the question is whether they can be used to distinguish vulnerable software units from the non-vulnerable ones during development. In this paper, we perform an exploratory study on software metrics, their interdependency, and their relation with security vulnerabilities. We aim at understanding: i) the correlation between software architectural characteristics, represented in the form of software metrics, and the number of vulnerabilities; and ii) which are the most informative and discriminative metrics that allow identifying vulnerable units of code. To achieve these goals, we use, respectively, correlation coefficients and heuristic search techniques. Our analysis is carried out on a dataset that includes software metrics and reported security vulnerabilities, exposed by security attacks, for all functions, classes, and files of five widely used projects. Results show: i) a strong correlation between several project-level metrics and the number of vulnerabilities, ii) the possibility of using a group of metrics, at both file and function levels, to distinguish vulnerable and non-vulnerable code with a high level of accuracy.

Dynamic spectrum sharing techniques applied in the UHF TV band have been developed to allow secondary WiFi transmission in areas with active TV users. This technique of dynamically controlling the exclusion zone enables vastly increasing secondary spectrum re-use, compared to the "TV white space" model where TV transmitters determine the exclusion zone and only "idle" channels can be re-purposed. However, in current such dynamic spectrum sharing systems, the sensitive operation parameters of both primary TV users (PUs) and secondary users (SUs) need to be shared with the spectrum database controller (SDC) for the purpose of realizing efficient spectrum allocation. Since such SDC server is not necessarily operated by a trusted third party, those current systems might cause essential threatens to the privacy requirement from both PUs and SUs. To address this privacy issue, this paper proposes a privacy-preserving spectrum sharing system between PUs and SUs, which realizes the spectrum allocation decision process using efficient multi-party computation (MPC) technique. In this design, the SDC only performs secure computation over encrypted input from PUs and SUs such that none of the PU or SU operation parameters will be revealed to SDC. The evaluation of its performance illustrates that our proposed system based on efficient MPC techniques can perform dynamic spectrum allocation process between PUs and SUs efficiently while preserving users' privacy.

Digital forensic investigators today are faced with numerous problems when recovering footprints of criminal activity that involve the use of computer systems. Investigators need the ability to recover evidence in a forensically sound manner, even when criminals actively work to alter the integrity, veracity, and provenance of data, applications and software that are used to support illicit activities. In many ways, operating systems (OS) can be strengthened from a technological viewpoint to support verifiable, accurate, and consistent recovery of system data when needed for forensic collection efforts. In this paper, we extend the ideas for forensic-friendly OS design by proposing the use of a practical form of computing on encrypted data (CED) and computing with encrypted functions (CEF) which builds upon prior work on component encryption (in circuits) and white-box cryptography (in software). We conduct experiments on sample programs to provide analysis of the approach based on security and efficiency, illustrating how component encryption can strengthen key OS functions and improve tamper-resistance to anti-forensic activities. We analyze the tradeoff space for use of the algorithm in a holistic approach that provides additional security and comparable properties to fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).

This tutorial will present a systematic overview of \$\backslash$em kleptography\: stealing information subliminally from black-box cryptographic implementations; and \$\backslash$em cliptography\: defending mechanisms that clip the power of kleptographic attacks via specification re-designs (without altering the underlying algorithms). Despite the laudatory history of development of modern cryptography, applying cryptographic tools to reliably provide security and privacy in practice is notoriously difficult. One fundamental practical challenge, guaranteeing security and privacy without explicit trust in the algorithms and implementations that underlie basic security infrastructure, remains. While the dangers of entertaining adversarial implementation of cryptographic primitives seem obvious, the ramifications of such attacks are surprisingly dire: it turns out that – in wide generality – adversarial implementations of cryptographic (both deterministic and randomized) algorithms may leak private information while producing output that is statistically indistinguishable from that of a faithful implementation. Such attacks were formally studied in Kleptography. Snowden revelations has shown us how security and privacy can be lost at a very large scale even when traditional cryptography seems to be used to protect Internet communication, when Kleptography was not taken into consideration. We will first explain how the above-mentioned Kleptographic attacks can be carried out in various settings. We will then introduce several simple but rigorous immunizing strategies that were inspired by folklore practical wisdoms to protect different algorithms from implementation subversion. Those strategies can be applied to ensure security of most of the fundamental cryptographic primitives such as PRG, digital signatures, public key encryptions against kleptographic attacks when they are implemented accordingly. Our new design principles may suggest new standardization methods that help reducing the threats of subverted implementation. We also hope our tutorial to stimulate a community-wise efforts to further tackle the fundamental challenge mentioned at the beginning.

iOS devices are steadily obtaining popularity of the majority of users because of its some unique advantages in recent years. They can do many things that have been done on a desktop computer or laptop. With the increase in the use of mobile devices by individuals, organizations and government, there are many problems with information security especially some sensitive data related to users. As we all known, encryption algorithm play a significant role in data security. In order to prevent data being intercepted and being leaked during communication, in this paper, we adopted DES encryption algorithm that is fast, simple and suitable for large amounts of data of encryption to encrypt the data of iOS client and adopted the ECC encryption algorithms that was used to overcome the shortcoming of exchanging keys in a securing way before communications. In addition, we should also consider the application isolation and security mechanism of iOS that these features also protect the data securing to some extent. Namely, we propose an encryption algorithm combined the strengths of DES and ECC and make full use of the advantages of hybrid algorithm. Then, we tested and evaluated the performances of the suggested cryptography mechanism within the mobile platform of iOS. The results show that the algorithm has fairly efficiency in practical applications and strong anti-attack ability and it also improves the security and efficiency in data transmission.

Side channel attacks have been used to extract critical data such as encryption keys and confidential user data in a variety of adversarial settings. In practice, this threat is addressed by adhering to a constant-time programming discipline, which imposes strict constraints on the way in which programs are written. This introduces an additional hurdle for programmers faced with the already difficult task of writing secure code, highlighting the need for solutions that give the same source-level guarantees while supporting more natural programming models. We propose a novel type system for verifying that programs correctly implement constant-resource behavior. Our type system extends recent work on automatic amortized resource analysis (AARA), a set of techniques that automatically derive provable upper bounds on the resource consumption of programs. We devise new techniques that build on the potential method to achieve compositionality, precision, and automation. A strict global requirement that a program always maintains constant resource usage is too restrictive for most practical applications. It is sufficient to require that the program's resource behavior remain constant with respect to an attacker who is only allowed to observe part of the program's state and behavior. To account for this, our type system incorporates information flow tracking into its resource analysis. This allows our system to certify programs that need to violate the constant-time requirement in certain cases, as long as doing so does not leak confidential information to attackers. We formalize this guarantee by defining a new notion of resource-aware noninterference, and prove that our system enforces it. Finally, we show how our type inference algorithm can be used to synthesize a constant-time implementation from one that cannot be verified as secure, effectively repairing insecure programs automatically. We also show how a second novel AARA system that computes lower bounds on reso- rce usage can be used to derive quantitative bounds on the amount of information that a program leaks through its resource use. We implemented each of these systems in Resource Aware ML, and show that it can be applied to verify constant-time behavior in a number of applications including encryption and decryption routines, database queries, and other resource-aware functionality.

This research in progress paper describes the role of cyber security measures undertaken in an ICT system for integrating electric storage technologies into the grid. To do so, it defines security requirements for a communications gateway and gives detailed information and hands-on configuration advice on node and communication line security, data storage, coping with backend M2M communications protocols and examines privacy issues. The presented research paves the road for developing secure smart energy communications devices that allow enhancing energy efficiency. The described measures are implemented in an actual gateway device within the HORIZON 2020 project STORY, which aims at developing new ways to use storage and demonstrating these on six different demonstration sites.

Protection of information achieves keeping confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the data. These features are essential for the proper operation of modern industrial technologies, like Smart Grid. The complex grid system integrates many electronic devices that provide an efficient way of exploiting the power systems but cause many problems due to their vulnerabilities to attacks. The aim of the work is to propose a solution to the privacy problem in Smart Grid communication network between the customers and Control center. It consists in using the relatively new cryptographic task - quantum key distribution (QKD). The solution is based on choosing an appropriate quantum key distribution method out of all the conventional ones by performing an assessment in terms of several parameters. The parameters are: key rate, operating distances, resources, and trustworthiness of the devices involved. Accordingly, we discuss an answer to the privacy problem of the SG network with regard to both security and resource economy.

This paper proposes a novel privacy-preserving smart metering system for aggregating distributed smart meter data. It addresses two important challenges: (i) individual users wish to publish sensitive smart metering data for specific purposes, and (ii) an untrusted aggregator aims to make queries on the aggregate data. We handle these challenges using two main techniques. First, we propose Fourier Perturbation Algorithm (FPA) and Wavelet Perturbation Algorithm (WPA) which utilize Fourier/Wavelet transformation and distributed differential privacy (DDP) to provide privacy for the released statistic with provable sensitivity and error bounds. Second, we leverage an exponential ElGamal encryption mechanism to enable secure communications between the users and the untrusted aggregator. Standard differential privacy techniques perform poorly for time-series data as it results in a Θ(n) noise to answer n queries, rendering the answers practically useless if n is large. Our proposed distributed differential privacy mechanism relies on Gaussian principles to generate distributed noise, which guarantees differential privacy for each user with O(1) error, and provides computational simplicity and scalability. Compared with Gaussian Perturbation Algorithm (GPA) which adds distributed Gaussian noise to the original data, the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed FPA and WPA by adding noise to the transformed coefficients.

Named Data Networks provide a clean-slate redesign of the Future Internet for efficient content distribution. Because Internet of Things are expected to compose a significant part of Future Internet, most content will be managed by constrained devices. Such devices are often equipped with limited CPU, memory, bandwidth, and energy supply. However, the current Named Data Networks design neglects the specific requirements of Internet of Things scenarios and many data structures need to be further optimized. The purpose of this research is to provide an efficient strategy to route in Named Data Networks by constructing a Forwarding Information Base using Iterated Bloom Filters defined as I(FIB)F. We propose the use of content names based on iterative hashes. This strategy leads to reduce the overhead of packets. Moreover, the memory and the complexity required in the forwarding strategy are lower than in current solutions. We compare our proposal with solutions based on hierarchical names and Standard Bloom Filters. We show how to further optimize I(FIB)F by exploiting the structure information contained in hierarchical content names. Finally, two strategies may be followed to reduce: (i) the overall memory for routing or (ii) the probability of false positives.

The growing popularity of Android and the increasing amount of sensitive data stored in mobile devices have lead to the dissemination of Android ransomware. Ransomware is a class of malware that makes data inaccessible by blocking access to the device or, more frequently, by encrypting the data; to recover the data, the user has to pay a ransom to the attacker. A solution for this problem is to backup the data. Although backup tools are available for Android, these tools may be compromised or blocked by the ransomware itself. This paper presents the design and implementation of RANSOMSAFEDROID, a TrustZone based backup service for mobile devices. RANSOMSAFEDROID is protected from malware by leveraging the ARM TrustZone extension and running in the secure world. It does backup of files periodically to a secure local persistent partition and pushes these backups to external storage to protect them from ransomware. Initially, RANSOMSAFEDROID does a full backup of the device filesystem, then it does incremental backups that save the changes since the last backup. As a proof-of-concept, we implemented a RANSOMSAFEDROID prototype and provide a performance evaluation using an i.MX53 development board.

The symmetric block ciphers, which represent a core element for building cryptographic communications systems and protocols, are used in providing message confidentiality, authentication and integrity. Various limitations in hardware and software resources, especially in terminal devices used in mobile communications, affect the selection of appropriate cryptosystem and its parameters. In this paper, an implementation of three symmetric ciphers (DES, 3DES, AES) used in different operating modes are analyzed on Android platform. The cryptosystems' performance is analyzed in different scenarios using several variable parameters: cipher, key size, plaintext size and number of threads. Also, the influence of parallelization supported by multi-core CPUs on cryptosystem performance is analyzed. Finally, some conclusions about the parameter selection for optimal efficiency are given.

Interchange of information through cell phones, Tabs and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) is the new trend in the era of digitization. In day-to-day activities, sensitive information through mobile phones is exchanged among the users. This sensitive information can be in the form of text messages, images, location, etc. The research on Android mobile applications was done at the MIT, and found that applications are leaking enormous amount of information to the third party servers. 73 percent of 55 Android applications were detected to leak personal information of the users [8]. Transmission of files securely on Android is a big issue. Therefore it is important to shield the privacy of user data on Android operating system. The main motive of this paper is to protect the privacy of data on Android Platform by allowing transmission of textual data, location, pictures in encrypted format. By doing so, we achieved intimacy and integrity of data.

This paper presents a new fractional-order hidden strange attractor generated by a chaotic system without equilibria. The proposed non-equilibrium fractional-order chaotic system (FOCS) is asymmetric, dissimilar, topologically inequivalent to typical chaotic systems and challenges the conventional notion that the presence of unstable equilibria is mandatory to ensure the existence of chaos. The new fractional-order model displays rich bifurcation undergoing a period doubling route to chaos, where the fractional order α is the bifurcation parameter. Study of the hidden attractor dynamics is carried out with the aid of phase portraits, sensitivity to initial conditions, fractal Lyapunov dimension, maximum Lyapunov exponents spectrum and bifurcation analysis. The minimum commensurate dimension to display chaos is determined. With a view to utilizing it in chaos based cryptology and coding information, a synchronisation control scheme is designed. Finally the theoretical analyses are validated by numerical simulation results which are in good agreement with the former.

This paper proposed a feedback shift register structure which can be split, it is based on a research of operating characteristics about 70 kinds of cryptographic algorithms and the research shows that the “different operations similar structure” reconfigurable design is feasible. Under the configuration information, the proposed structure can implement the multiplication in finite field GF(2n), the multiply/divide linear feedback shift register and other operations. Finally, this paper did a logic synthesis based on 55nm CMOS standard-cell library and the results show that the proposed structure gets a hardware resource saving of nearly 32%, the average power consumption saving of nearly 55% without the critical delay increasing significantly. Therefore, the “different operations similar structure” reconfigurable design is a new design method and the proposed feedback shift register structure can be an important processing unit for coarse-grained reconfigurable cryptologic array.

The challenge of maintaining confidentiality of stored and processed data in a remote database or cloud is quite urgent. Using homomorphic encryption may solve the problem, because it allows to compute some functions over encrypted data without preliminary deciphering of data. Fully homomorphic encryption schemes have a number of limitations such as accumulation of noise and increase of ciphertext extension during performing operations, the range of operations is limited. Nowadays a lot of homomorphic encryption schemes and their modifications have been investigated, so more than 25 reports on homomorphic encryption schemes have already been published on Cryptology ePrint Archive for 2016. We propose an overview of current Fully Homomorphic Encryption Schemes and analyze specific operations for databases which homomorphic cryptosystems allow to perform. We also investigate the possibility of sorting over encrypted data and present our approach to compare data encrypted by Multi-bit FHE scheme.

Cryptography is the fascinating science that deals with constructing and destructing the secret codes. The evolving digitization in this modern era possesses cryptography as one of its backbones to perform the transactions with confidentiality and security wherever the authentication is required. With the modern technology that has evolved, the use of codes has exploded, enriching cryptology and empowering citizens. One of the most important things that encryption provides anyone using any kind of computing device is `privacy'. There is no way to have true privacy with strong security, the method with which we are dealing with is to make the cipher text more robust to be by-passed. In current work, the well known and renowned Caesar cipher and Rail fence cipher techniques are combined with a cross language cipher technique and the detailed comparative analysis amongst them is carried out. The simulations have been carried out on Eclipse Juno version IDE for executions and Java, an open source language has been used to implement these said techniques.

We have proposed a method of designing embedded clock-cycle-sensitive Hardware Trojans (HTs) to manipulate finite state machine (FSM). By using pipeline to choose and customize critical path, the Trojans can facilitate a series of attack and need no redundant circuits. One cannot detect any malicious architecture through logic analysis because the proposed circuitry is the part of FSM. Furthermore, this kind of HTs alerts the trusted systems designers to the importance of clock tree structure. The attackers may utilize modified clock to bypass certain security model or change the circuit behavior.

A5-1 algorithm is a stream cipher used to encrypt voice data in GSM, which needs to be realized with high performance due to real-time requirements. Traditional implementation on FPGA or ASIC can't obtain a trade-off among performance, cost and flexibility. To this aim, this paper introduces CGRCA to implement A5-1, and in order to optimize the performance and resource consumption, this paper proposes a resource-based path seeking (RPS) algorithm to develop an advanced implementation. Experimental results show that final optimal throughput of A5-1 implemented on CGRCA is 162.87Mbps when the frequency is 162.87MHz, and the set-up time is merely 87 cycles, which is optimal among similar works.

Robust Trojans are inserted in outsourced products resulting in security vulnerabilities. Post-silicon testing is done mandatorily to detect such malicious inclusions. Logic testing becomes obsolete for larger circuits with sequential Trojans. For such cases, side channel analysis is an effective approach. The major challenge with the side channel analysis is reduction in hardware Trojan detection sensitivity due to process variation (process variation could lead to false positives and false negatives and it is unavoidable during a manufacturing stage). In this paper Self Referencing method is proposed that measures leakage power of the circuit at four different time windows that hammers the Trojan into triggering and also help to identify/eliminate false positives/false negatives due to process variation.

Security of sensible data for ultraconstrained IoT smart devices is one of the most challenging task in modern design. The needs of CPA-resistant cryptographic devices has to deal with the demanding requirements of small area and small impact on the overall power consumption. In this work, a novel current-mode feedback suppressor as on-chip analog-level CPA countermeasure is proposed. It aims to suppress differences in power consumption due to data-dependency of CMOS cryptographic devices, in order to counteract CPA attacks. The novel countermeasure is able to improve MTD of unprotected CMOS implementation of at least three orders of magnitude, providing a ×1.1 area and ×1.7 power overhead.

Cloud computing offers many advantages as flexibility or resource efficiency and can significantly reduce costs. However, when sensitive data is outsourced to a cloud provider, classified records can leak. To protect data owners and application providers from a privacy breach data must be encrypted before it is uploaded. In this work, we present a distributed key management scheme that handles user-specific keys in a single-tenant scenario. The underlying database is encrypted and the secret key is split into parts and only reconstructed temporarily in memory. Our scheme distributes shares of the key to the different entities. We address bootstrapping, key recovery, the adversary model and the resulting security guarantees.

Accurate, precise, and unambiguous definitions of software weaknesses (bugs) and clear descriptions of software vulnerabilities are vital for building the foundations of cybersecurity. The Bugs Framework (BF) comprises rigorous definitions and (static) attributes of bug classes, along with their related dynamic properties, such as proximate, secondary and tertiary causes, consequences, and sites. This paper presents an overview of previously developed BF classes and the new cryptography related classes: Encryption Bugs (ENC), Verification Bugs (VRF), and Key Management Bugs (KMN). We analyze corresponding vulnerabilities and provide their clear descriptions by applying the BF taxonomy. We also discuss the lessons learned and share our plans for expanding BF.

Often considered as the brain of an industrial process, Industrial control systems are presented as the vital part of today's critical infrastructure due to their crucial role in process control and monitoring. Any failure or error in the system will have a considerable damage. Their openness to the internet world raises the risk related to cyber-attacks. Therefore, it's necessary to consider cyber security challenges while designing an ICS in order to provide security services such as authentication, integrity, access control and secure communication channels. To implement such services, it's necessary to provide an efficient key management system (KMS) as an infrastructure for all cryptographic operations, while preserving the functional characteristics of ICS. In this paper we will analyze existing KMS and their suitability for ICS, then we propose a new KMS based on Identity Based Cryptography (IBC) as a better alternative to traditional KMS. In our proposal, we consider solving two security problems in IBC which brings it up to be more suitable for ICS.