A Secure Shuffling Mechanism for White-Box Attack-Resistant Unmanned Vehicles

Abstract

Unmanned Vehicles (UVs) have been being utilized for various applications, such as surveillance, search/rescue, and monitoring. The information they transmit is critical for decision-making. However, UVs are vulnerable to white-box attacks due to improvements in reverse engineering techniques and the openness of their software. Therefore, attackers with sufficient knowledge of a target UV can steal secret information stored in the UV by exploiting its vulnerabilities. Recently, several white-box cryptography techniques have been introduced to protect secret keys from being extracted by converting them into large look-up tables. However, none of them provide approaches to securely update the look-up tables. Thus, once a remote attacker succeeds in extracting the static look-up table from a UV, he/she can use it to decrypt past/future communications or to send false information to the control station by impersonating the UV. In this paper, we propose a look-up table shuffling mechanism that supports white-box cryptography with dynamics. The mechanism makes it hard for attackers to determine the positions of the table entries, and thus to decrypt/encrypt ciphertexts/plaintexts. To show the practicality of the block cipher with our mechanism, we implemented it on a board equipped with a GPU and show its GPU-accelerated performance.