Leakage Attacks Research Articles

A Secure Authentication Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks Based on DAC and Intel SGX

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely implemented in military, intelligent medical, intelligent transportation, space exploration, and other fields. However, the authentication and communication of WSNs are carried out in the harsh external environment via a public channel, which is more vulnerable to various attacks than the traditional networks. Authentication is the key technology of security measures, but a common authentication scheme is not suitable for WSNs due to limitations of memory, computing, and energy consumption. Therefore, designing a secure and efficient authentication scheme is essential in WSNs. In recent years, several studies proved that the dynamic authentication credential (DAC) is efficient for enhancing the security of the authentication scheme. This article designs a secure authentication scheme for WSNs based on DAC and Intel software guard extensions (SGX). Compared with other DAC authentication schemes, our scheme provides the confirmation action of DAC rotation, which can effectively prevent the asynchronous update problem caused by packet loss. In order to resist the privileged user attack and the authentication table leakage attack, we choose the SGX, which can protect the data in use, as the trusted execution environment in the gateway node, and we adopt SGX to store the master key for protecting the authentication table. Finally, the security of our authentication scheme is verified by BAN logic, the simulation tool AVISPA, and informal security analysis. Through the consumption overhead analysis, the NS3 simulation result, and detailed comparison with other recent schemes, we conclude that our scheme is practical and achieves better security with less overhead.

Fully Secure ID-Based Signature Scheme with Continuous Leakage Resilience

The side channel attacks will lead to the destruction of the security of the traditional cryptographic scheme. Leakage-resilient identity-based signature has attracted great attention. Based on the dual system encryption technology, we construct an identity-based signature scheme that can resist continuous private key leakage. In the standard model, the security of the scheme is proved. The key points of our leakage-resilient signature scheme are as follows: (1) The private key can be extended according to the security requirements. In other words, when the leakage is serious, we can select a bigger value n, where n is a parameter related to the leakage rate. (2) An elaborate key update algorithm makes the scheme resist continuous leakage attacks. Furthermore, the updated private key has the same distribution as the previous private key. (3) The proposed scheme is fully secure in the standard model rather than in the random oracle model or in the general group model. In order to achieve this goal, we use dual system encryption technology. Thus, the security of the constructed scheme does not depend on the number of queries of the attacker.

A CCA-PKE Secure-Cryptosystem Resilient to Randomness Reset and Secret-Key Leakage

In recent years, several new notions of security have begun receiving consideration for public-key cryptosystems, beyond the standard of security against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack (CCA2). Among these are security against randomness reset attacks, in which the randomness used in encryption is forcibly set to some previous value, and against constant secret-key leakage attacks, wherein the constant factor of a secret key’s bits is leaked. In terms of formal security definitions, cast as attack games between a challenger and an adversary, a joint combination of these attacks means that the adversary has access to additional encryption queries under a randomness of his own choosing along with secret-key leakage queries. This implies that both the encryption and decryption processes of a cryptosystem are being tampered under this security notion. In this paper, we attempt to address this problem of a joint combination of randomness and secret-key leakage attacks through two cryptosystems that incorporate hash proof system and randomness extractor primitives. The first cryptosystem relies on the random oracle model and is secure against a class of adversaries, called non-reversing adversaries. We remove the random oracle oracle assumption and the non-reversing adversary requirement in our second cryptosystem, which is a standard model that relies on a proposed primitive called LM lossy functions. These functions allow up to M lossy branches in the collection to substantially lose information, allowing the cryptosystem to use this loss of information for several encryption and challenge queries. For each cryptosystem, we present detailed security proofs using the game-hopping procedure. In addition, we present a concrete instantation of LM lossy functions in the end of the paper—which relies on the DDH assumption.

Towards Communication-Efficient and Attack-Resistant Federated Edge Learning for Industrial Internet of Things

Federated Edge Learning (FEL) allows edge nodes to train a global deep learning model collaboratively for edge computing in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), which significantly promotes the development of Industrial 4.0. However, FEL faces two critical challenges: communication overhead and data privacy. FEL suffers from expensive communication overhead when training large-scale multi-node models. Furthermore, due to the vulnerability of FEL to gradient leakage and label-flipping attacks, the training process of the global model is easily compromised by adversaries. To address these challenges, we propose a communication-efficient and privacy-enhanced asynchronous FEL framework for edge computing in IIoT. First, we introduce an asynchronous model update scheme to reduce the computation time that edge nodes wait for global model aggregation. Second, we propose an asynchronous local differential privacy mechanism, which improves communication efficiency and mitigates gradient leakage attacks by adding well-designed noise to the gradients of edge nodes. Third, we design a cloud-side malicious node detection mechanism to detect malicious nodes by testing the local model quality. Such a mechanism can avoid malicious nodes participating in training to mitigate label-flipping attacks. Extensive experimental studies on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework can not only improve communication efficiency but also mitigate malicious attacks while its accuracy is comparable to traditional FEL frameworks.

An Efficient Certificateless Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol Resistant to Ephemeral Key Leakage Attack for V2V Communication in IoV

The emergence of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has enhanced the comfort and safety of driving by right of the intelligent transportation system, and communication among devices and infrastructures. However, the messages exchanged between them are mainly through wireless networks, which also makes the devices of IoV vulnerable. In an effort to cope with this problem, many authenticated key exchange protocols tailored for the IoV have been proposed. However, the existing similar protocols are either insufficiently secure or suffer from efficiency issues. Therefore, we propose a new security property named non-full key escrow. Furthermore, we put forward a non-full key escrow authenticated key exchange protocol tailored for V2V communication, which can resist the ephemeral key leakage attack. Then, we perform the security proof in the eCK model and carry out a performance analysis through a series of experiments. The results provide evidence that the proposed protocol is superior in terms of efficiency while compared with existing authenticated key exchange protocols for IoV.

An Insider Data Leakage Detection Using One-Hot Encoding, Synthetic Minority Oversampling and Machine Learning Techniques.

Insider threats are malicious acts that can be carried out by an authorized employee within an organization. Insider threats represent a major cybersecurity challenge for private and public organizations, as an insider attack can cause extensive damage to organization assets much more than external attacks. Most existing approaches in the field of insider threat focused on detecting general insider attack scenarios. However, insider attacks can be carried out in different ways, and the most dangerous one is a data leakage attack that can be executed by a malicious insider before his/her leaving an organization. This paper proposes a machine learning-based model for detecting such serious insider threat incidents. The proposed model addresses the possible bias of detection results that can occur due to an inappropriate encoding process by employing the feature scaling and one-hot encoding techniques. Furthermore, the imbalance issue of the utilized dataset is also addressed utilizing the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE). Well known machine learning algorithms are employed to detect the most accurate classifier that can detect data leakage events executed by malicious insiders during the sensitive period before they leave an organization. We provide a proof of concept for our model by applying it on CMU-CERT Insider Threat Dataset and comparing its performance with the ground truth. The experimental results show that our model detects insider data leakage events with an AUC-ROC value of 0.99, outperforming the existing approaches that are validated on the same dataset. The proposed model provides effective methods to address possible bias and class imbalance issues for the aim of devising an effective insider data leakage detection system.

Full encryption

In this paper, we present a novel mechanism called Full Encryption (FE) in GaussDB. FE-in-GaussDB provides column-level encryption for sensitive data, and secures the asset from any malicious cloud administrator or information leakage attack. It ensures not only the security of operations on ciphertext data, but also the efficiency of query execution, by combining the advantages of cryptography algorithms (i.e. software mode) and Trusted Execution Environment (i.e. hardware mode). With this, FE-in-GaussDB supports full-scene query processing including the matching, the comparison and other rich computing functionalities. We demonstrate the prototype of FE-in-GaussDB and an experimental performance evaluation to prove its availability and effectiveness.

Flaw and amendment of a two-party authenticated key agreement protocol for post-quantum environments

Recent advances in quantum computers challenge the security of key agreement protocol that are designed with the intractability assumptions of discrete logarithmic problem and integer factorization problem. Hence, motivated to develop the key agreement protocol that is secure in post-quantum era, recently Islam proposed a provably secure two-party authenticated key agreement (2PAKA) protocol. The protocol is based on the intractability assumption of the famous Ring Learning With Error (RLWE) problem. In this work, we show that Islam’s two-party key agreement is vulnerable to the modified version of the signal leakage attack (SLA) which is termed as improved-signal leakage attack (i-SLA) in this article. Using i-SLA, the attacker can successfully recover the long term private key of the honest user by instantiating utmost q number of key exchange sessions with the honest user using q number of malformed public keys. To overcome the attack, we provide a countermeasure without changing the original design of the protocol.

A new construction of leakage-resilient CCA secure IBE scheme

Leakage of private information has become a threat to the security of cryptography systems. It has become a common security requirement that a cryptography scheme should withstand various leakage attacks. The non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) argument system, one-time lossy filter (OT-LF) and one-time signature were widely used to create the generic constructions of leakage-resilient identity-based encryption (IBE) scheme with chosen-ciphertext attack (CCA) security. However, the computational efficiency of the corresponding generic construction is low because the underlying cryptographic tool is low. Thus, to solve the above problem, a new cryptographic primitive, called identity-based hash proof system with two encapsulated-key (T-IB-HPS), is proposed. The new generic constructions of leakage resilient IBE scheme with CCA security is created from the T-IB-HPS and message authentication code (MAC), and the security of the above proposed scheme is proved from the security of the underlying cryptographic tool. To further show the practicability, an instantiation of T-IB-HPS is constructed, and the formal security proof of the above instantiation is shown based on the decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) assumption. Compared with the previous generic constructions of leakage resilient IBE scheme with CCA security, since the underlying cryptographic tools with low computational efficiency are not used, our generic construction has high computational efficiency.

Continuous Leakage-Amplified Public-Key Encryption With CCA Security

Abstract Secret key leakage has become a security threat in computer systems, and it is crucial that cryptographic schemes should resist various leakage attacks, including the continuous leakage attacks. In the literature, some research progresses have been made in designing leakage resistant cryptographic primitives, but there are still some remaining issues unsolved, e.g. the upper bound of the permitted leakage is fixed. In actual applications, the leakage requirements may vary; thus, the leakage parameter with fixed size is not sufficient against various leakage attacks. In this paper, we introduce some novel idea of designing a continuous leakage-amplified public-key encryption scheme with security against chosen-ciphertext attacks. In our construction, the leakage parameter can have an arbitrary length, i.e. the length of the permitted leakage can be flexibly adjusted according to the specific leakage requirements. The security of our proposed scheme is formally proved based on the classic decisional Diffie–Hellman assumption.

Formula omitted]: Privacy-preserving localized hybrid authentication scheme for large scale vehicular ad hoc networks

Existing authentication schemes for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are not scalable to high-density and safety-critical VANETs. These schemes ignore the very important and unique VANET characteristics such as frequent path disconnections due to high-mobility, bandwidth-limited channel, applications entailing ultra-low latency, high channel-error rate, etc., in their design. Specifically, their approach of entrusting the job of issuing signing key material to remote trusted authorities introduces centralized dependency and high latency for vehicles requesting the key material. Furthermore, acquiring or frequently updating the key material demands substantial network resources including high bandwidth as well as longer and frequent connections to remote authorities. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient privacy-preserving localized hybrid authentication scheme (PLHAS) modeled on two public key cryptosystems: PKI and CL-PKC. We distribute the key management task among multiple PKI-certified local semi-trusted road-side units (RSUs) to minimize centralized dependency, and entrust identity management to a central Transport Registration Authority (TRA) to ensure role separation. We further reduce the dependency on RSUs and TRA by offloading their tasks of supplying the signing key material. Instead, vehicle's on-board unit (OBU) derives it locally from minimal long-term secret keys acquired from TRA and a local RSU. Besides, vehicles utilize a novel efficient certificate-less signature (CLS) scheme to authenticate their outgoing messages. To protect the long-term secret keys from possible side-channel leakage attacks on OBU, we fashion our critical cryptographic operations in such a manner that bounds and randomizes the leakage of secret keys. Considering the multiple semi-trusted authority setup, we also propose a modified adversarial model for CLS scheme, and show that PLHAS is provably secure, in random oracle model, against modified Type-I/II forgery attacks, certificate forgery attack and vehicle impersonation attack. The results obtained from extensive performance analysis also confirm its efficient nature as compared to the related authentication schemes.

Integrity Verification Mechanism of Sensor Data Based on Bilinear Map Accumulator

With the explosive growth in the number of IoT devices, ensuring the integrity of the massive data generated by these devices has become an important issue. Due to the limitation of hardware, most past data integrity verification schemes randomly select partial data blocks and then perform integrity validation on those blocks instead of examining the entire dataset. This will result in that unsampled data blocks cannot be detected even if they are tampered with. To solve this problem, we propose a new and effective integrity auditing mechanism of sensor data based on a bilinear map accumulator. Using the proposed approach will examine all the data blocks in the dataset, not just some of the data blocks, thus, eliminating the possibility of any cloud manipulation. Compared with other schemes, our proposed solution has been proved to be highly secure for all necessary security requirements, including tag forgery, data deletion, replacement, replay, and data leakage attacks. The solution reduces the computational and storage costs of cloud storage providers and verifiers, and also supports dynamic operations for data owners to insert, delete, and update data by using a tag index table (TIT). Compared with existing schemes based on RSA accumulator, our scheme has the advantages of fast verification and witness generation and no need to map data blocks to prime numbers. The new solution supports all the characteristics of a data integrity verification scheme.

On the Local Leakage Resilience of Linear Secret Sharing Schemes

We consider the following basic question: to what extent are standard secret sharing schemes and protocols for secure multiparty computation that build on them resilient to leakage? We focus on a simple local leakage model, where the adversary can apply an arbitrary function of a bounded output length to the secret state of each party, but cannot otherwise learn joint information about the states. We show that additive secret sharing schemes and high-threshold instances of Shamir’s secret sharing scheme are secure under local leakage attacks when the underlying field is of a large prime order and the number of parties is sufficiently large. This should be contrasted with the fact that any linear secret sharing scheme over a small characteristic field is clearly insecure under local leakage attacks, regardless of the number of parties. Our results are obtained via tools from Fourier analysis and additive combinatorics. We present two types of applications of the above results and techniques. As a positive application, we show that the “GMW protocol” for honest-but-curious parties, when implemented using shared products of random field elements (so-called “Beaver Triples”), is resilient in the local leakage model for sufficiently many parties and over certain fields. This holds even when the adversary has full access to a constant fraction of the views. As a negative application, we rule out multiparty variants of the share conversion scheme used in the 2-party homomorphic secret sharing scheme of Boyle et al. (in: Crypto, 2016).

WSN-SLAP: Secure and Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are widely used to provide users with convenient services such as health-care, and smart home. To provide convenient services, sensor nodes in WSN environments collect and send the sensing data to the gateway. However, it can suffer from serious security issues because susceptible messages are exchanged through an insecure channel. Therefore, secure authentication protocols are necessary to prevent security flaws in WSN. In 2020, Moghadam et al. suggested an efficient authentication and key agreement scheme in WSN. Unfortunately, we discover that Moghadam et al.’s scheme cannot prevent insider and session-specific random number leakage attacks. We also prove that Moghadam et al.’s scheme does not ensure perfect forward secrecy. To prevent security vulnerabilities of Moghadam et al.’s scheme, we propose a secure and lightweight mutual authentication protocol for WSNs (WSN-SLAP). WSN-SLAP has the resistance from various security drawbacks, and provides perfect forward secrecy and mutual authentication. We prove the security of WSN-SLAP by using Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, Real-or-Random (ROR) model, and Automated Verification of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation. In addition, we evaluate the performance of WSN-SLAP compared with existing related protocols. We demonstrate that WSN-SLAP is more secure and suitable than previous protocols for WSN environments.

Continuous leakage-resilient certificate-based signcryption scheme and application in cloud computing

Leakage of private information, e.g. the secret keys, has become a serious threat to the security of computing systems. It has become a common requirement that real-world security applications should withstand various leakage attacks, such as side-channel attacks, cold-boot attacks, etc. For example, the above leakage attacks are very common in cloud computing nowadays. Hence, we need a novel method to protect the security of data storage and authorization even if a certain amount of leakage information with respect to the secret state can be obtained by any adversary. In order to achieve the above goal, in this paper, we introduce a continuous leakage-resilient certificate-based signcryption (CBS) scheme, and we prove that our proposed scheme achieves the chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCA) security based on the discrete logarithm assumption and the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption. Our proposed scheme not only has the ability to resist the continuous leakage attacks, but also enjoys very low computational overheads. Moreover, two concrete continuous leakage-resilient data storage and authorization protocols are generated from the above continuous leakage-resilient CBS scheme: one has a single key generation center and the other generates the keys in a distributed form. Therefore, our protocols with continuous leakage resilience are particularly suitable for data storage and authorization in cloud computing system.

IGCACS-IoD: An Improved Certificate-Enabled Generic Access Control Scheme for Internet of Drones Deployment

Due to wide-spread use of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and Internet of Things (IoT) enabled smart devices, called unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) (popularly known as drones), a lot of potential applications of Internet of Drones (IoD) are available ranging from the military to civilian applications. Access control mechanism is an important potential security service that is needed to secure communication among the drones in their respective flying zones, and also among the drones and the Ground Service Station (GSS). In 2021, Chaudhry et al. proposed a certificate based generic access control scheme for IoD environment, called GCACS-IoD. Their claims about the possible security attacks resistant of GCACS-IoD is not justified. In fact, we first prove that GCACS-IoD is unable to protect the disclosure of the private key r <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CR</sub> of the trusted control room (CR), which is extremely unfortunate careless design flaw and it leads to compromise the entire network. Using the disclosed private key r <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CR</sub> , we further show that GCACS-IoD is completely insecure against other serious attacks, such as malicious drones deployment attack, drone/GSS impersonation attacks and Ephemeral Secret Leakage (ESL) attack, which lead to compromise the session key between any two drones communicating in a particular flying zone. We thus feel that there is a strong need to remedy such serious weaknesses found in Chaudhry et al.'s GCACS-IoD. An improved certificate-enabled generic access control scheme for IoD deployment, called as iGCACS-IoD, has been suggested, which overcomes the weaknesses found in the previous GCACS-IoD. The practical demonstration of iGCACS-IoD has been done through formal security verification and also through NS2 simulation study.

On the Security of a Secure and Lightweight Authentication Scheme for Next Generation IoT Infrastructure

In recent years, the Internet of things (IoT) has become an encouraging communication paradigm that has numerous applications including smart city, smart home and intelligent transportation system. The information sensed by several IoT smart devices can be security stored at the (cloud) servers. An external user, being a client, can access the services from a server for the sensing information, provided that a mutual authentication happens among them. Using the established session key among the user and the server, encrypted information with the help of session key can be delivered to the user by the server securely. Recently, Rana et al. proposed a smart-card based remote user authentication scheme using user password. In this comment paper, we carefully analyzed the scheme of Rana et al. and tracked down that their scheme is insecure against serious attacks, including stolen smart card attack, privileged-insider attack, user impersonation attack, password change attack and Ephemeral Secret Leakage (ESL) attack. Furthermore, their scheme does not preserve untraceability feature. To remedy these security pitfalls, we also provide some remedies that can help in building more secure and effective user authentication scheme to apply in securing next generation IoT infrastructure.

Mitigating Data-only Attacks by Protecting Memory-resident Sensitive Data

Gaining reliable arbitrary code execution through the exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities is becoming increasingly more difficult in the face of modern exploit mitigations. Facing this challenge, adversaries have started shifting their attention to data leakage attacks, which can lead to equally damaging outcomes, such as the disclosure of private keys or other sensitive data. In this work, we present a compiler-level defense against data leakage attacks for user-space applications. Our approach strikes a balance between the manual effort required to protect sensitive application data, and the performance overhead of achieving strong data confidentiality. To that end, we require developers to simply annotate those variables holding sensitive data, after which our framework automatically transforms only the fraction of the entire program code that is related to sensitive data operations. We implemented this approach by extending the LLVM compiler, and used it to protect memory-resident private keys in the MbedTLS server, ssh-agent, and a Libsodium-based file signing program, as well as user passwords for Lighttpd and Memcached. Our results demonstrate the feasibility and practicality of our technique: a modest runtime overhead (e.g., 13% throughput reduction for MbedTLS) that is on par with, or better than, existing state-of-the-art memory safety approaches for selective data protection.

WITHDRAWN: QABA: A privacy model to reduce adversary attacks for cloud storage

The evolution of data storage paradigms from centralized systems to hire and use model based cloud computing are the recent transition and developments in business, retail, government and healthcare organizations. The cloud is deceptive and vulnerable to data leakage attacks during transit or at passive state. The recent malware attacks are live examples to describe data breach instances. To protect the privacy and enhance data hiding for sensitive data pertain to healthcare data is at jeopardize. The proposed QABA algorithm enhances privacy and reduces the uniqueness of records to camouflage sensitive data from re-identity disclosure attacks. The experiments conducted on standard dataset and evaluated the privacy. The proposed algorithm exhibit efficiency and robustness in implementing pseudonymity.

Orthogonal obfuscation based key management for multiple IP protection

With the development of system-on-chip (SoC) chips, more and more design houses are cooperating with each other's. How to achieve benefit sharing and key management for multiple intellectual properties (IPs) has become an emergency problem. This work proposes an orthogonal obfuscation method to protect multiple IPs. The proposed method permits cooperators to control the project using different security keys, protects the patterns with an orthogonal key, and be convenient for the user to manage the key. For reasons of increased security, the proposed method hides the original keys to prevent information leakage. Multi-port Physical Unclonable Function (MPUF) circuit is used as the additional orthogonal key to cluster membership. It protects the IPs from hardware attacks such as brute-force attack, member leakage attack, reverse engineering and so on. The security analyzes results show that the proposed method reduces the key retrieval time by 36.3% over the baseline. The proposed obfuscation methods have been successfully applied to ISCAS′89 benchmark circuits and cryptographic algorithms. Experimental results indicate that the orthogonal obfuscation only increases the area by 3.43% and consumes 2.77% more power than the baseline.