Trojan Attacks Research Articles

Two new Controlled not Gate Based Quantum Secret Sharing Protocols without Entanglement Attenuation

In this paper, we propose two new controlled not gate based quantum secret sharing protocols. In these two protocols, each photon only travels once, which guarantees the agents located in long distance can be able to derive the dealer’s secret without suffering entanglement attenuation problem. The protocols are secure against trojan horse attack, intercept-resend attack, entangle-measure attack and entanglement-swapping attack. The theoretical efficiency for qubits of these two protocols can approach 100 %, except those used for eavesdropping checking, all entangled states can be used for final secret sharing.

A qutrit quantum key distribution protocol using Bell inequalities with larger violation capabilities

The Ekert quantum key distribution protocol [1] uses pairs of entangled qubits and performs checks based on a Bell inequality to detect eavesdropping. The 3DEB protocol [2] uses instead pairs of entangled qutrits to achieve better noise resistance than the Ekert protocol. It performs checks based on a Bell inequality for qutrits named CHSH-3 and found in [3, 4]. In this paper, we present a new protocol, which also uses pairs of entangled qutrits, but gaining advantage of a Bell inequality which achieves better noise resistance than the one used in 3DEB. The latter inequality is called here hCHSH-3 and was discovered in [5]. For each party, the hCHSH-3 inequality involves four observables already used in CHSH-3 but also two products of observables which do not commute. We explain how the parties can measure the observables corresponding to these products and thus are able to check the violation of hCHSH-3. In the presence of noise, this violation guarantees the security against a local Trojan horse attack. We also designed a version of our protocol which is secure against individual attacks.

IIPS: Infrastructure IP for Secure SoC Design

Security is becoming an increasingly important parameter in current system-on-chip (SoC) design due to diverse hardware security attacks that can affect manufacturers, system designers or end users. To effectively address the security issues, design-time considerations, e.g. incorporation of design-for-security (DfS) features, are becoming essential. However, DfS measures for diverse security threats require specific design modifications to achieve target security level, which significantly increases design effort thus time-to-market, and usually incurs considerable design overhead. In addition, the general heterogeneous architecture of current SoCs makes many core-level DfS mechanisms unusable at SoC level. In this paper, we propose a centralized on-chip infrastructure IP for SoC security (IIPS), which alleviates the SoC designers from separately addressing different security issues through design modifications in multiple cores. It also provides ease of integration and functional scalability. We consider a specific implementation of IIPS that provides protection against: (1) scan-based attack for information leakage through low-overhead authentication; (2) counterfeiting attacks through integration of a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF); and (3) hardware Trojan attacks through a test infrastructure for trust validation. To make the IP amenable for plug-and-play during SoC design, working protocols of the security functions are designed to comply with IEEE 1500 Standard for Embedded Core Test (SECT). Since IIPS resides outside the functional modules, it does not incur functional performance or power overhead. Simulations and experiments on example SoC designs validate the effectiveness of IIPS in providing protections against diverse attacks at a low hardware overhead.

How Secure Are Printed Circuit Boards Against Trojan Attacks?

Hardware Trojan attacks at the integrated circuit (IC) level have been studied extensively in recent times. Researchers have analyzed the impact of these attacks and explored possible countermeasures for ICs. However, vulnerability with respect to hardware Trojan attacks at higher levels of system abstraction, e.g., at printed circuit board (PCB) level, have not been reported earlier. Previous studies have covered security of PCBs against piracy and various post-fabrication tampering attacks. JTAG (Joint Test Access Group) and other field programmability features, e.g., probe pins, unused sockets and USB have been extensively exploited by hackers to gain access to internal features of the designs as well as snooping of secret key, collection of test responses, and manipulating JTAG test pins. One instance demonstrated that Xbox can be hacked by disabling the Digital Rights Management (DRM) policy using JTAG. The emerging business model of PCB design and fabrication that favors extensive outsourcing and integration of untrusted components/entities in the PCB life-cycle to lower manufacturing cost, makes hardware Trojan attacks in PCBs highly feasible.

A Look at Trojan Attack, Pruning, and Dependability

A Look at Trojan Attack, Pruning, and Dependability

Hardware Trojan Attacks: Threat Analysis and Countermeasures

Security of a computer system has been traditionally related to the security of the software or the information being processed. The underlying hardware used for information processing has been considered trusted. The emergence of hardware Trojan attacks violates this root of trust. These attacks, in the form of malicious modifications of electronic hardware at different stages of its life cycle, pose major security concerns in the electronics industry. An adversary can mount such an attack with an objective to cause operational failure or to leak secret information from inside a chip-e.g., the key in a cryptographic chip, during field operation. Global economic trend that encourages increased reliance on untrusted entities in the hardware design and fabrication process is rapidly enhancing the vulnerability to such attacks. In this paper, we analyze the threat of hardware Trojan attacks; present attack models, types, and scenarios; discuss different forms of protection approaches, both proactive and reactive; and describe emerging attack modes, defenses, and future research pathways.

Hardware Trojan Detection by Multiple-Parameter Side-Channel Analysis

Hardware Trojan attack in the form of malicious modification of a design has emerged as a major security threat. Sidechannel analysis has been investigated as an alternative to conventional logic testing to detect the presence of hardware Trojans. However, these techniques suffer from decreased sensitivity toward small Trojans, especially because of the large process variations present in modern nanometer technologies. In this paper, we propose a novel noninvasive, multiple-parameter side-channel analysisbased Trojan detection approach. We use the intrinsic relationship between dynamic current and maximum operating frequency of a circuit to isolate the effect of a Trojan circuit from process noise. We propose a vector generation approach and several design/test techniques to improve the detection sensitivity. Simulation results with two large circuits, a 32-bit integer execution unit (IEU) and a 128-bit advanced encryption standard (AES) cipher, show a detection resolution of 1.12 percent amidst ±20 percent parameter variations. The approach is also validated with experimental results. Finally, the use of a combined side-channel analysis and logic testing approach is shown to provide high overall detection coverage for hardware Trojan circuits of varying types and sizes.

A Sensor-Assisted Self-Authentication Framework for Hardware Trojan Detection

Detecting hardware Trojan attacks often rely on availability of pre-verified golden chips. In this article, authors propose an efficient Trojan detection approach using sequence of path delay traces that eliminate such a need.

Securing Processors Against Insider Attacks: A Circuit-Microarchitecture Co-Design Approach

Modification to traditional SoC design flow can enable effective protection against maliciously inserted rogue functionality during design and fabrication. This article presents a joint circuit-architecture-level design approach that helps in preventing or detecting Trojan attacks.

The Probability of Trojan Attacks on Multi-level Security Strategy based Network

The network information system based on multi-level security strategy (MLSS) is adopted by many organizations, as it reflects features of mandatory access control. Meanwhile, the network has also attracted a growing number of Trojan horses’ attacks. Considering the relationship between defend ability and security levels, the paper discusses that the Trojan horses’ attacks have a dependency on data path in the network and establishes three attacking probability models of single source node to single target node by single-path, single source node to single target node by multi-path and multi-source nodes to single target node by multi-path. Furthermore the paper describes the defend ability of the non-adjacent nodes with a new model. Finally the model is applied to a military network information system, and the results are reasonable.

Security Against Hardware Trojan Attacks Using Key-Based Design Obfuscation

Malicious modification of hardware in untrusted fabrication facilities, referred to as hardware Trojan, has emerged as a major security concern. Comprehensive detection of these Trojans during post-manufacturing test has been shown to be extremely difficult. Hence, it is important to develop design techniques that provide effective countermeasures against hardware Trojans by either preventing Trojan attacks or facilitating detection during test. Obfuscation is a technique that is conventionally employed to prevent piracy of software and hardware intellectual property (IP). In this work, we propose a novel application of key-based circuit structure and functionality obfuscation to achieve protection against hardware Trojans triggered by rare internal circuit conditions. The proposed obfuscation scheme is based on judicious modification of the state transition function, which creates two distinct functional modes: normal and obfuscated. A circuit transitions from the obfuscated to the normal mode only upon application of a specific input sequence, which defines the key. We show that it provides security against Trojan attacks in two ways: (1) it makes some inserted Trojans benign, i.e. they become effective only in the obfuscated mode; and (2) it prevents an adversary from exploiting the true rare events in a circuit to insert hard-to-detect Trojans. The proposed design methodology can thus achieve simultaneous protection from hardware Trojans and hardware IP piracy. Besides protecting ICs against Trojan attacks in foundry, we show that it can also protect against malicious modifications by untrusted computer-aided design (CAD) tools in both SoC and FPGA design flows. Simulation results for a set of benchmark circuits show that the scheme is capable of achieving high levels of security against Trojan attacks at modest area, power and delay overhead.

Trojan attack on tumour cells

Trojan attack on tumour cells

Crimes in Cyber Age and its Response by Indian Judiciary

The advent of the third millennium has brought in an era of information society. The new era is the result of rapid changes brought about by the new technology and the cyber world. Obviously the information society offers vast scope and opportunities to human beings to identify information, to evaluate information, and to exchange information for the benefits of the citizens the world over. The in formation technology provides for a new environment, new work culture, new business links and trading networks. It allows information and knowledge based work to be located anywhere. It is virtually transforming and revolutionizing the world. The information technology is a double-edged sword, consistently presenting us with benefits and disadvantages. The increasing opportunities for productivities, efficiency and worldwide communications brought additional users in droves. Today, die internet is a utility, analogous to the electric company and '.com' has become a household expression. The reliability and availability of the internet are critical operational considerations. Activities that threaten these attributes like spamming, spoofing, etc, have grave impacts on its user community. Any illegal act, for which knowledge of computer technology is essential for its perpetration, investigation, or prosecution, is known as cyber crime. Among the various problems emerging out of the internet are the menace of hackers, cyber terrorism, spamming, Trojan horse attacks, denial of service attacks, pornography, cyber stalking etc. Through this paper the researcher will try to study the problem of cyber stalking, cyber defamation, various types of data theft and the laws relating to it. An effort is also made to look into the loopholes of the Information Technology Act, in addition to this the researcher will also try to recommend some suggestions to fight these dangerous problems, with the response of Indian judiciary to it.

Deterministic quantum key distribution based on random phase coding

We propose a new quantum key distribution scheme based on random phase coding. In this scheme, the sender and the receiver can share the secret information without basis reconciliation,and besides, this scheme is more efficient. As the phase of the qubit is coded randomly, this protocol is robust even when the source is not a prefect single photon. We show theoretically that it has higher security against the attacks, such as the photon-number-splitting, the impersonation attack, and the Trojan attack, etc., than the previous QKD scheme.

Implementing CAP

As the increase in pharming, phishing and Trojan attacks leaves bank accounts vulnerable to online fraud, banks continue to search for ways to reduce the impact on their customer base. Separately, the rollout of Chip & PIN is causing card fraud to migrate away from point-of-sale terminals towards cardholder-not-present transactions, which can be conducted online, over the phone or via mail order. Although a variety of approaches exist to address these issues, two-factor authentication mechanisms are emerging as a favourite, with the Chip Authentication Program (CAP) the clear front-runner in the field. Dr Jonathan Tuliani, UK technical director of Cryptomathic, tells CTT how CAP works and details the steps issuers need to take in order to deploy a successful

A highly stable differential phase shift key distribution QKD system

We propose and demonstrate an improved differential phase shift key distribution scheme. Alice uses a pulsed laser source and two cascaded fiber loops to get coherent pulses, then modulates them randomly under differential phase shift scheme, which compensates for the random polarization mode dispersion and phase shift. An interferometer made up of two Faraday mirrors is employed to detect single photon under gate mode. In one-way transmission, QKD is free from Trojan attack. Our experiment at setup can work stably for a long time (at least 24h) with an error ratio of 3%. The stable scheme is efficient, economical and favorable for practical application.

Dilemmas of prolonging life of elderly patients in terminal system failure

Biological research from well back into antiquity has looked for ways to prolong youth and delay old age, in the hope that if debility and illness accompanying aging is deferred, individual and social benefits could ensue. The significant advances in life expectancy in the earlier phases of life achieved in the past few decades have resulted mostly from decreases in infant and adolescent mortality and from a recent reduction of cardiovascular deaths in mid-life in the developed countries. More recently, increases in average life expectancy of one to two years at very old ages have occurred in these same countries; although small in additional years, these increases represent, nevertheless, prolongations of residual life of the individual of 20% to 40% at the age of 85 [1]. The maximum possible length of life, however, of about one hundred and ten years has changed little in spite of advances in the prevention and treatment of the major diseases of later years. Three groups of diseases, vascular, neoplastic and musculoskeletal, are responsible for the termination of life of most human beings beyond the 60s; commonly, infection, like a Trojan horse's attack from within, will bring a swift end to an otherwise