1. usenix.org
Yan Xiong, Cheng Shu, Wenchao Hung, Fuyou Miao, Wansen Wang, and Hengyi Ouyang

Current formal approaches have been successfully used to find design flaws in many security protocols. However, it is still challenging to automatically analyze protocols due to their large or infinite state spaces. In this paper, we propose SmartVerif, a novel and general framework that pushes the limit of automation capability of state-of-the-art verification approaches. The primary technical contribution is the dynamic strategy inside SmartVerif, which can be used to smartly search proof paths. Different from the non-trivial and error-prone design of existing static strategies, the design of our dynamic strategy is simple and flexible: it can automatically optimize itself according to the security protocols without any human intervention. With the optimized strategy, SmartVerif can localize and prove supporting lemmata, which leads to higher probability of success in verification. The insight of designing the strategy is that the node representing a supporting lemma is on an incorrect proof path with lower probability, when a random strategy is given. Hence, we implement the strategy around the insight by introducing a reinforcement learning algorithm. We also propose several methods to deal with other technical problems in implementing SmartVerif. Experimental results show that SmartVerif can automatically verify all security protocols studied in this paper. The case studies also validate the efficiency of our dynamic strategy.

2. usenix.org
Samuel Weiser, David Schrammel, Lukas Bodner, and Raphael Spreitzer

Side-channel attacks exploiting (EC)DSA nonce leakage easily lead to full key recovery. Although (EC)DSA implementations have already been hardened against side-channel leakage using the constant-time paradigm, the long-standing cat-and-mouse-game of attacks and patches continues. In particular, current code review is prone to miss less obvious side channels hidden deeply in the call stack. To solve this problem, a systematic study of nonce leakage is necessary. We present a systematic analysis of nonce leakage in cryptographic implementations. In particular, we expand DATA, an open-source side-channel analysis framework, to detect nonce leakage. Our analysis identified multiple unknown nonce leakage vulnerabilities across all essential computation steps involving nonces. Among others, we uncover inherent problems in Bignumber implementations that break claimed constant-time guarantees of (EC)DSA implementations if secrets are close to a word boundary. We found that lazy resizing of Bignumbers in OpenSSL and LibreSSL yields a highly accurate and easily exploitable side channel, which has been acknowledged with two CVEs. Surprisingly, we also found a tiny but expressive leakage in the constant-time scalar multiplication of OpenSSL and BoringSSL. Moreover, in the process of reporting and patching, we identified newly introduced leakage with the support of our tool, thus preventing another attack-patch cycle. We open-source our tool, together with an intuitive graphical user interface we developed.

3. tpm.fail
Daniel Moghimi, Berk Sunar, Thomas Eisenbarth, and Nadia Heninger

Trusted Platform Module (TPM) serves as a hardware-based root of trust that protects cryptographic keys from privileged system and physical adversaries. In this work, we per-form a black-box timing analysis of TPM 2.0 devices deployed on commodity computers. Our analysis reveals thatsome of these devices feature secret-dependent execution times during signature generation based on elliptic curves. In particular, we discovered timing leakage on an Intel firmware-based TPM as well as a hardware TPM. We show how this information allows an attacker to apply lattice techniques torecover 256-bit private keys for ECDSA and EC Schnorr signatures. On Intel fTPM, our key recovery succeeds after about1,300 observations and in less than two minutes. Similarly, weextract the private ECDSA key from a hardware TPM manufactured by STMicroelectronics, which is certified at Common Criteria (CC) EAL 4+, after fewer than 40,000 observations.We further highlight the impact of these vulnerabilities by demonstrating a remote attack against a StrongSwan IPsecVPN that uses a TPM to generate the digital signatures for authentication. In this attack, the remote client recovers the server’s private authentication key by timing only 45,000authentication handshakes via a network connection.The vulnerabilities we have uncovered emphasize the difficulty of correctly implementing known constant-time techniques, and show the importance of evolutionary testing and transparent evaluation of cryptographic implementations.Even certified devices that claim resistance against attacks require additional scrutiny by the community and industry, as we learn more about these attacks.

4. usenix.org
Sahar Mazloom, Phi Hung Le, Samuel Ranellucci, and Dov Gordon

We revisit the problem of performing secure computation of graph-parallel algorithms, focusing on the applications of securely outsourcing matrix factorization, and histograms. Leveraging recent results in low-communication secure multi-party computation, and a security relaxation that allows the computation servers to learn some differentially private leakage about user inputs, we construct a new protocol that reduces overall runtime by 320X, reduces the number of AES calls by 750X , and reduces the total communication by 200X . Our system can securely compute histograms over 300 million items in about 4 minutes, and it can perform sparse matrix factorization, which is commonly used in recommendation systems, on 20 million records in about 6 minutes. Furthermore, in contrast to prior work, our system is secure against a malicious adversary that corrupts one of the computing servers.

5. eprint.iacr.org
Manu Drijvers, Sergey Gorbunov, Gregory Neven, and Hoeteck Wee

In Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and permissioned blockchains, a committee of verifiers agrees and sign every new block of transactions. These blocks are validated, propagated, and stored by all users in the network. However, posterior corruptions pose a common threat to these designs, because the adversary can corrupt committee verifiers after they certified a block and use their signing keys to certify a different block. Designing efficient and secure digital signatures for use in PoS blockchains can substantially reduce bandwidth, storage and computing requirements from nodes, thereby enabling more efficient applications.

We present Pixel, a pairing-based forward-secure multi-signature scheme optimized for use in blockchains, that achieves substantial savings in bandwidth, storage requirements, and verification effort. Pixel signatures consist of two group elements, regardless of the number of signers, can be verified using three pairings and one exponentiation, and support non-interactive aggregation of individual signatures into a multi-signature. Pixel signatures are also forward-secure and let signers evolve their keys over time, such that new keys cannot be used to sign on old blocks, protecting against posterior corruptions attacks on blockchains. We show how to integrate Pixel into any PoS blockchain. Next, we evaluate Pixel in a real-world PoS blockchain implementation, showing that it yields notable savings in storage, bandwidth, and block verification time. In particular, Pixel signatures reduce the size of blocks with 1500 transactions by 35% and reduce block verification time by 38%.

6. eprint.iacr.org
Daniel J. Bernstein

Recent results have shown that some post-quantum cryptographic systems have encryption and decryption performance comparable to fast elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) or even better. However, this performance metric is considering only CPU time and ignoring bandwidth and storage. High-confidence post-quantum encryption systems have much larger keys than ECC. For example, the code-based cryptosystem recommended by the PQCRYPTO project uses public keys of 1MB.

Fast key erasure (to provide “forward secrecy”) requires new public keys to be constantly transmitted. Either the server needs to constantly generate, store, and transmit large keys, or it needs to receive, store, and use large keys from the clients. This is not necessarily a problem for overall bandwidth, but it is a problem for storage and computation time on tiny network servers. All straightforward approaches allow easy denial-of-service attacks.

This paper describes a protocol, suitable for today’s networks and tiny servers, in which clients transmit their code-based one-time public keys to servers. Servers never store full client public keys but work on parts provided by the clients, without having to maintain any per-client state. Intermediate results are stored on the client side in the form of encrypted cookies and are eventually combined by the server to obtain the ciphertext. Requirements on the server side are very small: storage of one long-term private key, which is much smaller than a public key, and a few small symmetric cookie keys, which are updated regularly and erased after use. The protocol is highly parallel, requiring only a few round trips, and involves total bandwidth not much larger than a single public key. The total number of packets sent by each side is 971, each fitting into one IPv6 packet of less than 1280 bytes.

The protocol makes use of the structure of encryption in code-based cryptography and benefits from small ciphertexts in code-based cryptography.

7. eprint.iacr.org
Mihir Bellare and Igors Stepanovs

At the core of Apple’s iMessage is a signcryption scheme that involves symmetric encryption of a message under a key that is derived from the message itself. This motivates us to formalize a primitive we call Encryption under Message-Derived Keys (EMDK). We prove security of the EMDK scheme underlying iMessage. We use this to prove security of the signcryption scheme itself, with respect to definitions of signcryption we give that enhance prior ones to cover issues peculiar to messaging protocols. Our provable-security results are quantitative, and we discuss the practical implications for iMessage.

8. eprint.iacr.org
Benny Pinkas, Mike Rosulek and Ni Trieu and Avishay Yanai

We present a 2-party private set intersection (PSI) protocol which provides security against malicious participants, yet is almost as fast as the fastest known semi-honest PSI protocol of Kolesnikov et al. (CCS 2016).

Our protocol is based on a new approach for two-party PSI, which can be instantiated to provide security against either malicious or semi-honest adversaries. The protocol is unique in that the only difference between the semi-honest and malicious versions is an instantiation with different parameters for a linear error-correction code. It is also the first PSI protocol which is concretely efficient while having linear communication and security against malicious adversaries, while running in the OT-hybrid model (assuming a non-programmable random oracle).

State of the art semi-honest PSI protocols take advantage of cuckoo hashing, but it has proven a challenge to use cuckoo hashing for malicious security. Our protocol is the first to use cuckoo hashing for malicious-secure PSI. We do so via a new data structure, called a probe-and-XOR of strings (PaXoS), which may be of independent interest. This abstraction captures important properties of previous data structures, most notably garbled Bloom filters. While an encoding by a garbled Bloom filter is larger by a factor of $O(\lambda)$ than the original data, we describe a significantly improved PaXoS based on cuckoo hashing that achieves constant rate while being no worse in other relevant efficiency measures.

9. eprint.iacr.org

Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs (ZKP) have received wide attention, focusing on non-interactivity, short proof size, and fast verification time. We focus on the fastest total proof time, in particular for large Boolean circuits. Under this metric, Garbled Circuit (GC)-based ZKP (Jawurek et al., [JKO], CCS 2013) remained the state-of-the-art technique due to the low-constant linear scaling of computing the garbling. We improve GC-ZKP for proof statements with conditional clauses. Our communication is proportional to the longest branch rather than to the entire proof statement. This is most useful when the number m of branches is large, resulting in up to factor $m\times$ improvement over JKO. In our proof-of-concept illustrative application, prover P demonstrates knowledge of a bug in a codebase consisting of any number of snippets of actual C code. Our computation cost is linear in the size of the codebase and communication is constant in the number of snippets. That is, we require only enough communication for a single largest snippet! Our conceptual contribution is stacked garbling for ZK, a privacy-free circuit garbling scheme that can be used with the JKO GC-ZKP protocol to construct more efficient ZKP. Given a Boolean circuit C and computational security parameter $\kappa$, our garbling is $L \cdot \kappa$ bits long, where $L$ is the length of the longest execution path in C. All prior concretely efficient garbling schemes produce garblings of size $|C| \cdot \kappa$. The computational cost of our scheme is not increased over prior state-of-the-art. We implement our GC-ZKP and demonstrate significantly improved ($m\times$ over JKO) ZK performance for functions with branching factor $m$. Compared with recent ZKP (STARK, Libra, KKW, Ligero, Aurora, Bulletproofs), our scheme offers much better proof times for larger circuits ($35-1000\times$ or more, depending on circuit size and compared scheme). For our illustrative application, we consider four C code snippets, each of about 30-50 LOC; one snippet allows an invalid memory dereference. The entire proof takes 0.15 seconds and communication is 1.5 MB.

10. tches.iacr.org
Gildas Avoine, Loïc Ferreira

We describe in this paper how to perform a padding oracle attack against
the GlobalPlatform SCP02 protocol. SCP02 is implemented in smart cards and
used by transport companies, in the banking world and by mobile network operators
(UICC/SIM cards). The attack allows an adversary to efficiently retrieve plaintext
bytes from an encrypted data field. We provide results of our experiments done
with 10 smart cards from six different card manufacturers, and show that, in our
experimental setting, the attack is fully practical. Given that billions SIM cards are
produced every year, the number of affected cards, although difficult to estimate,
is potentially high. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first successful attack
against SCP02.

11. eprint.iacr.org
Andrew Miller, Yu Xia, Kyle Croman, Elaine Shi, Dawn Song

The surprising success of cryptocurrencies has led to a surge of interest in deploying large scale, highly robust, Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) proto- cols for mission-critical applications, such as finan- cial transactions. Although the conventional wisdom is to build atop a (weakly) synchronous protocol such as PBFT (or a variation thereof), such protocols rely critically on network timing assumptions, and only guarantee liveness when the network behaves as ex- pected. We argue these protocols are ill-suited for this deployment scenario.

We present an alternative, HoneyBadgerBFT, the first practical asynchronous BFT protocol, which guarantees liveness without making any timing as- sumptions. We base our solution on a novel atomic broadcast protocol that achieves optimal asymptotic efficiency. We present an implementation and ex- perimental results to show our system can achieve throughput of tens of thousands of transactions per second, and scales to over a hundred nodes on a wide area network. We even conduct BFT experi- ments over Tor, without needing to tune any parame- ters. Unlike the alternatives, HoneyBadgerBFT sim- ply does not care about the underlying network.

12. people.cs.georgetown.edu
Loi Luu, Viswesh Narayanan, Chaodong Zheng, Kunal Baweja, Seth Gilbert, Prateek Saxena

Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and 250 similar alt-coins, embody at their core a blockchain protocol — a mechanism for a distributed network of computational nodes to periodically agree on a set of new transactions. Designing a secure blockchain protocol relies on an open challenge in security, that of designing a highly-scalableagreement protocol open to manipulation by byzantine or arbitrarily malicious nodes. Bitcoin’s blockchain agreement protocol exhibits security, but does not scale: it processes 3–7 transactions per second at present, irrespective of the available computation capacity at hand.

In this paper, we propose a new distributed agreement protocol for permission-less blockchains called ELASTICO. ELASTICO scales transaction rates almost linearly with available computation for mining: the more the computation power in the network, the higher the number of transaction blocks selected per unit time. ELASTICO is efficient in its network messages and tolerates byzantine adversaries of up to one-fourth of the total computational power. Technically, ELASTICO uniformly partitions or parallelizes the mining network (securely) into smaller committees, each of which processes a disjoint set of transactions (or “shards”). While sharding is common in non-byzantine settings, ELASTICO is the first candidate for a secure sharding protocol with presence of byzantine adversaries. Our scalability experiments on Amazon EC2 with up to $1, 600$ nodes confirm ELASTICO’s theoretical scaling properties.

13. eprint.iacr.org
Arthur Gervais, Ghassan O. Karame, Karl Wüst, Vasileios Glykantzis, Hubert Ritzdorf, Srdjan Capkun

Proof of Work (PoW) powered blockchains currently account for more than 90% of the total market capitalization of existing digital currencies. Although the security provisions of Bitcoin have been thoroughly analysed, the security guarantees of variant (forked) PoW blockchains (which were instantiated with different parameters) have not received much attention in the literature.

In this paper, we introduce a novel quantitative framework to analyse the security and performance implications of various consensus and network parameters of PoW blockchains. Based on our framework, we devise optimal adversarial strategies for double-spending and selfish mining while taking into account real world constraints such as network propagation, different block sizes, block generation intervals, information propagation mechanism, and the impact of eclipse attacks. Our framework therefore allows us to capture existing PoW-based deployments as well as PoW blockchain variants that are instantiated with different parameters, and to objectively compare the tradeoffs between their performance and security provisions.

14. eprint.iacr.org
Ghous Amjad, Seny Kamara, Tarik Moataz

Motivated by the problem of data breaches, we formalize a notion of security for dynamic structured encryption (STE) schemes that guarantees security against a snapshot adversary; that is, an adversary that receives a copy of the encrypted structure at various times but does not see the transcripts related to any queries. In particular, we focus on the construction of dynamic encrypted multi-maps which are used to build efficient searchable symmetric encryption schemes, graph encryption schemes and encrypted relational databases. Interestingly, we show that a form of snapshot security we refer to as breach resistance implies previously-studied notions such as a (weaker version) of history independence and write-only obliviousness. Moreover, we initiate the study of dual-secure dynamic STE constructions: schemes that are forward-private against a persistent adversary and breach-resistant against a snapshot adversary. The notion of forward privacy guarantees that updates to the encrypted structure do not reveal their association to any query made in the past. As a concrete instantiation, we propose a new dual-secure dynamic multi-map encryption scheme that outperforms all existing constructions; including schemes that are not dual-secure. Our construction has query complexity that grows with the selectivity of the query and the number of deletes since the client executed a linear-time rebuild protocol which can be de-amortized. We implemented our scheme (with the de-amortized rebuild protocol) and evaluated its concrete efficiency empirically. Our experiments show that it is highly efficient with queries taking less than 1 microsecond per label/value pair.

15. eprint.iacr.org
Laura Blackstone, Seny Kamara, Tarik Moataz

Encrypted search algorithms (ESA) are cryptographic algorithms that support search over encrypted data. ESAs can be designed with various primitives including searchable/structured symmetric encryption (SSE/STE) and oblivious RAM (ORAM). Leakage abuse attacks attempt to recover client queries using knowledge of the client’s data. An important parameter for any leakage-abuse attack is its known-data rate; that is, the fraction of client data that must be known to the adversary.

In this work, we revisit leakage abuse attacks in several ways. We first highlight some practical limitations and assumptions underlying the well-known IKK (Islam et al. NDSS ’12) and Count (Cash et al., CCS ’15) attacks. We then design four new leakage-abuse attacks that rely on much weaker assumptions. Three of these attacks are volumetric in the sense that they only exploit leakage related to document sizes. In particular, this means that they work not only on SSE/STE-based ESAs but also against ORAM-based solutions. We also introduce two volumetric injection attack which use adversarial file additions to recover queries even from ORAM-based solutions. As far as we know, these are the first attacks of their kind.

We evaluated all our attacks empirically and considered many experimental settings including different data collections, query selectivities, known-data rates, query space size and composition. From our experiments, we observed that the only setting that resulted in reasonable recovery rates under practical assumptions was the case of high-selectivity queries with a leakage profile that includes the response identity pattern (i.e., the identifiers of the matching documents) and the volume pattern (i.e., the size of the matching documents). All other attack scenarios either failed or relied on unrealistic assumptions (e.g., very high known-data rates). For this specific setting, we propose several suggestions and countermeasures including the use of schemes like PBS (Kamara et al, CRYPTO ’18), VLH/AVLH (Kamara and Moataz, Eurocrypt ’19 ), or the use of padding techniques like the ones recently proposed by Bost and Fouque (Bost and Fouque, IACR ePrint 2017/1060).

16. apps.dtic.mil
Benjamin Fuller, Darby Mitchell, Robert Cunningham, Uri Blumenthal, Patrick Cable, Ariel Hamlin, Lauren Milechin, Mark Rabe, Nabil Schear Richard Shay Mayank Varia Sophia Yakoubov Arkady Yerukhimovich

17. eprint.iacr.org
Evgenios M. Kornaropoulos and Charalampos Papamanthou and Roberto Tamassia

Recent foundational work on leakage-abuse attacks on encrypted databases has broadened our understanding of what an adversary can accomplish with a standard leakage profile. Nevertheless, all known value reconstruction attacks succeed under strong assumptions that may not hold in the real world. The most prevalent assumption is that queries are issued uniformly at random by the client. We present the first value reconstruction attacks that succeed without any knowledge about the query or data distribution. Our approach uses the search-pattern leakage, which exists in all known structured encryption schemes but has not been fully exploited so far. At the core of our method lies a support size estimator, a technique that utilizes the repetition of search tokens with the same response to estimate distances between encrypted values without any assumptions about the underlying distribution. We develop distribution-agnostic reconstruction attacks for both range queries and k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) queries based on information extracted from the search-pattern leakage. Our new range attack follows a different algorithmic approach than state-of-the-art attacks, which are fine-tuned to succeed under the uniformly distributed queries. Instead, we reconstruct plaintext values under a variety of skewed query distributions and even outperform the accuracy of previous approaches under the uniform query distribution. Our new k-NN attack succeeds with far fewer samples than previous attacks and scales to much larger values of k. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our attacks by experimentally testing them on a wide range of query distributions and database densities, both unknown to the adversary.

18. drownattack.com
Nimrod Aviram, Sebastian Schinzel, Juraj Somorovsky, Nadia Heninger, Maik Dankel, Jens Steube, Luke Valenta, David Adrian, J. Alex Halderman, Viktor Dukhovni, Emilia Käsper, Shaanan Cohney, Susanne Engels, Christof Paar, and Yuval Shavitt

We present DROWN, a novel cross-protocol attack on TLS that uses a server supporting SSLv2 as an oracle to decrypt modern TLS connections.
We introduce two versions of the attack. The more general form exploits multiple unnoticed protocol flaws in SSLv2 to develop a new and stronger variant of the Bleichenbacher RSA padding-oracle attack. To decrypt a 2048-bit RSA TLS ciphertext, an attacker must observe
1,000 TLS handshakes, initiate 40,000 SSLv2 connections, and perform 2^50 offline work. The victim client never initiates SSLv2 connections. We implemented the attack and can decrypt a TLS 1.2 handshake using 2048-bit RSA in under 8 hours, at a cost of $440 on Amazon EC2. Using Internet-wide scans, we find that 33% of all HTTPS servers and 22% of those with browser-trusted certificates are vulnerable to this protocol-level attack due to widespread key and certificate reuse. For an even cheaper attack, we apply our new techniques together with a newly discovered vulnerability in OpenSSL that was present in releases from 1998 to early 2015. Given an unpatched SSLv2 server to use as an oracle, we can decrypt a TLS ciphertext in one minute on a single CPU - fast enough to enable man-in-the-middle attacks against modern browsers. We find that 26% of HTTPS servers are vulnerable to this attack. We further observe that the QUIC protocol is vulnerable to a variant of our attack that allows an attacker to impersonate a server indefinitely after performing as few as 2^17 SSLv2 connections and 2^58 offline work. We conclude that SSLv2 is not only weak, but actively harmful to the TLS ecosystem. 19. petsymposium.org Ankush Singla, Syed Rafiul Hussain, Omar Chowdhury, Elisa Bertino, Ninghui Li This paper focuses on protecting the cellular paging protocol — which balances between the quality-of-service and battery consumption of a device— against security and privacy attacks. Attacks against this protocol can have severe repercussions, for instance,allowing attacker to infer a victim’s location, leak a victim’s IMSI, and inject fabricated emergency alerts.To secure the protocol, we first identify the underlying design weaknesses enabling such attacks and then pro-pose efficient and backward-compatible approaches to address these weaknesses. We also demonstrate the deployment feasibility of our enhanced paging protocol by implementing it on an open-source cellular protocol library and commodity hardware. Our evaluation demonstrates that the enhanced protocol can thwart attacks without incurring substantial overhead. 20. petsymposium.org Guillaume Celosia, Mathieu Cunche Apple Continuity protocols are the underlying network component of Apple Continuity services which allow seamless nearby applications such as activity and file transfer, device pairing and sharing a network connection. Those protocols rely on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to exchange information between devices: Apple Continuity messages are embedded in the pay-load of BLE advertisement packets that are periodically broadcasted by devices. Recently, Martin et al. identified [1] a number of privacy issues associated with Apple Continuity protocols; we show that this was just the tip of the iceberg and that Apple Continuity protocols leak a wide range of personal information. In this work, we present a thorough reverse engineering of Apple Continuity protocols that we use to uncover a collection of privacy leaks. We introduce new artifacts, including identifiers, counters and battery levels, that can be used for passive tracking, and describe a novel active tracking attack based on Handoff messages. Beyond tracking issues, we shed light on severe privacy flaws. First, in addition to the trivial exposure of device characteristics and status, we found that HomeKit accessories betray human activities in a smarthome. Then, we demonstrate that AirDrop and Nearby Action protocols can be leveraged by passive observers to recover e-mail addresses and phone numbers of users. Finally, we exploit passive observations on the advertising traffic to infer Siri voice commands of a user. 21. acmccs.github.io Vladimir Kolesnikov, Naor Matania, Benny Pinkas, Mike Rosulek, and Ni Trieu We present a new paradigm for multi-party private set intersection (PSI) that allows$n\$ parties to compute the intersection of their datasets without revealing any additional information. We explore a variety of instantiations of this paradigm. Our protocols avoid computationally expensive public-key operations and are secure in the presence of any number of semi-honest participants (i.e., without an honest majority).

We demonstrate the practicality of our protocols with an implementation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementation of a multi-party PSI protocol. For 5 parties with data-sets of 220 items each, our protocol requires only 72 seconds. In an optimization achieving a slightly weaker variant of security (augmented semi-honest model), the same task requires only 22 seconds.

The technical core of our protocol is oblivious evaluation of a programmable pseudorandom function (OPPRF), which we instantiate in three different ways. We believe our new OPPRF abstraction and constructions may be of independent interest.

22. petsymposium.org
Andreas Fischer, Benny Fuhry, Florian Kerschbaum, and Eric Bodden

Encrypting data before sending it to the cloud protects it against hackers and malicious insiders, but requires the cloud to compute on encrypted data. Trusted (hardware) modules, e.g., secure enclaves like Intel’s SGX, can very efficiently run entire programs in encrypted memory. However, it already has been demonstrated that software vulnerabilities give an attacker ample opportunity to insert arbitrary code into the program. This code can then modify the data flow of the program and leak any secret in the program to an observer in the cloud via SGX side-channels. Since any larger program is rife with software vulnerabilities, it is not a good idea to outsource entire programs to an SGX enclave. A secure alternative with a small trusted code base would be fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) – the holy grail of encrypted computation. However, due to its high computational complexity it is unlikely to be adopted in the near future. As a result researchers have made several proposals for transforming programs to perform encrypted computations on less powerful encryption schemes. Yet, current approaches fail on programs that make control-flow decisions based on encrypted data. In this paper, we introduce the concept of data flow authentication (DFAuth). DFAuth prevents an adversary from arbitrarily deviating from the data flow of a program. Hence, an attacker cannot perform an attack as outlined before on SGX. This enables that all programs, even those including operations on control-flow decision variables, can be computed on encrypted data. We implemented DFAuth using a novel authenticated homomorphic encryption scheme, a Java bytecode-to-bytecode compiler producing fully executable programs, and SGX enclaves. A transformed neural network that performs machine learning on sensitive medical data can be evaluated on encrypted inputs and encrypted weights in 0.86 seconds.

23. acmccs.github.io
Peter Rindal and Mike Rosulek

Private set intersection (PSI) allows two parties, who each hold a set of items, to compute the intersection of those sets without revealing anything about other items. Recent advances in PSI have significantly improved its performance for the case of semi-honest security, making semi-honest PSI a practical alternative to insecure methods for computing intersections. However, the semi-honest security model is not always a good fit for real-world problems.

In this work we introduce a new PSI protocol that is secure in the presence of malicious adversaries. Our protocol is based entirely on fast symmetric-key primitives and inherits important techniques from state-of-the-art protocols in the semi-honest setting. Our novel technique to strengthen the protocol for malicious adversaries is inspired by the dual execution technique of Mohassel & Franklin (PKC 2006). Our protocol is optimized for the random-oracle model, but can also be realized (with a performance penalty) in the standard model.

We demonstrate our protocol’s practicality with a prototype implementation. To securely compute the intersection of two sets of size 220 requires only 13 seconds with our protocol, which is ~12x faster than the previous best malicious-secure protocol (Rindal & Rosulek, Eurocrypt 2017), and only 3x slower than the best semi-honest protocol (Kolesnikov et al., CCS 2016).

24. fc17.ifca.ai
Matthew Smith, Daniel Moser, Martin Strohmeier, Vincent Lenders, Ivan Martinovic

Recent research has shown that a number of existing wireless avionic systems lack encryption and are thus vulnerable to eavesdropping and message injection attacks. The Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) is no exception to this rule with 99% of the traffic being sent in plaintext. However, a small portion of the traffic coming mainly from privately-owned and government aircraft is encrypted, indicating a stronger requirement for security and privacy by those users. In this paper, we take a closer look at this protected communication and analyze the cryptographic solution being used. Our results show that the cipher used for this encryption is a mono-alphabetic substitution cipher, broken with little effort. We assess the impact on privacy and security to its unassuming users by characterizing months of real-world data, decrypted by breaking the cipher and recovering the keys. Our results show that the decrypted data leaks privacy sensitive information including existence, intent and status of aircraft owners.

25. fc17.ifca.ai
Helger Lipmaa, Kateryna Pavlyk

In PETS 2015, Kiayias, Leonardos, Lipmaa, Pavlyk, and Tang proposed the first (n, 1)-CPIR protocol with rate 1−𝑜(1). They use advanced techniques from multivariable calculus (like the Newton-Puiseux algorithm) to establish optimal rate among a large family of different CPIR protocols. It is only natural to ask whether one can achieve similar rate but with a much simpler analysis. We propose parameters to the earlier (n, 1)-CPIR protocol of Lipmaa (ISC 2005), obtaining a CPIR protocol that is asymptotically almost as communication-efficient as the protocol of Kiayias et al. However, for many relevant parameter choices, it is slightly more communication-efficient, due to the cumulative rounding errors present in the protocol of Kiayias et al. Moreover, the new CPIR protocol is simpler to understand, implement, and analyze. The new CPIR protocol can be used to implement (computationally inefficient) FHE with rate 1−𝑜(1).