All posts by Marios O. Choudary

Efficient multivariate statistical techniques for extracting secrets from electronic devices

Academic papers, Hardware & signals, Processors

That’s the title of my PhD thesis, supervised by Markus Kuhn, which has become available recently as CL tech report 878:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-878.html

In this thesis I provide a detailed presentation of template attacks, which are considered the most powerful kind of side-channel attacks, and I present several methods for implementing and evaluating this attack efficiently in different scenarios.

These contributions may allow evaluation labs to perform their evaluations faster, show that we can determine almost perfectly an 8-bit target value even when this value is manipulated by a single LOAD instruction (may be the best published results of this kind), and show how to cope with differences across devices, among others.

Some of the datasets used in my experiments along with MATLAB scripts for reproducing my results are available here:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/datasets/grizzly/

 

Analysis of FileVault 2 (Apple's full disk encryption)

Academic papers, Authentication, Cryptology, Useful software

With the launch of Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), Apple has introduced a volume encryption mechanism known as FileVault 2.

During the past year Joachim Metz, Felix Grobert and I have been analysing this encryption mechanism. We have identified most of the components in FileVault 2’s architecture and we have also built an open source tool that can read volumes encrypted with FileVault 2. This tool can be useful to forensic investigators (who know the encryption password or recovery token) that need to recover some files from an encrypted volume but cannot trust or load the MAC OS that was used to encrypt the data. We have also made an analysis of the security of FileVault 2.

A few weeks ago we have made public this paper on eprint describing our work. The tool to recover data from encrypted volumes is available here.

Three paper Thursday: Shamir x3 at Eurocrypt

Academic papers, Cryptology, Three Paper Thursday

For the past 4 days Cambridge has been hosting Eurocrypt 2012.

There were many talks, probably interesting, but I will only comment on 3 talks given by Adi Shamir, 1 during the official conference and 2 during the rump session.
Among the other sessions I mention that the best paper was given to this paper by Antoine Joux and Vanessa Vitse for the enhancement of index calculus to break elliptic curves.

Official Talk: Minimalism in cryptography, the Even-Mansour scheme revisited

In this work, Adi et al. presented an analysis on the Even-Mansour scheme:

E(P) = F(P ⊕ K1) ⊕ K2

Such scheme, some times referred to as key whitening, is used in the DESX construction and in the AES-XTS mode of operation (just a few examples).

Adi et al. shown a new slide attack, called SLIDEX, which has been used to prove a tight bound on the security of the Even-Mansour scheme.

Even more, they show that using K1 = K2 you can achieve the same security.

Rump talk 1: security of multiple key encryption

Here Adi considered the case of encrypting data multiple times with multiple keys, as in 3DES:
data -> c1 = E_k1(data) ->  c2 = E_k2(c1) -> c3 = E_k3(c2) -> c4 = E_k3(c3) …. and so on.

The general approach to break a scheme where a key is used 2 times or 3 times (2DES, 3DES for e.g.) is the meet-in-the-middle attack, where you encrypt from one side and then decrypt from the other side, and by storing a table of the size of the key space (say n bits) you can eventually find the keys used in a scheme using only a few pairs of plaintext/ciphertext. For 2 keys such an attack would require 2^{n} time, for 3 keys 2^{2n}. Therefore some people may assume that increasing the number of keys by 1 (i.e. to use 4 keys) may increase the security of this scheme. This is in fact not true.

Adi shown that once we go beyond 3 keys (e.g. 4, 5, 6, etc…) the security only increases once every few keys. If you think of it, using 4 keys you can just apply the meet-in-the-middle attack in 2^{2n} time to the left 2 encryptions and also in 2^{2n} time to the right 2 decryptions. After this, he shown how to use the meet-in-the-middle attack to solve the knapsack problem and proposed the idea of using such an algorithm to solve other problems as well.

Rump talk 2: the cryptography of John Nash

Apparently John Nash, member of MIT during the 1950s, wrote some letters to the NSA in 1955 explaining the implications of computational complexity for security (this wasn’t known at the time).

John Nach also sent a proposal for an encryption scheme that is similar with today’s stream ciphers. However the NSA’s replied saying that the scheme didn’t match the security requirements of the US.
Adi Shamir and Ron Rivest then analysed the scheme and found that in the known plaintext model it would require something like 2^{sqrt(n)} time to break (which John Nach considered not to be a polynomial time, and therefore assumed would be secure).

The letters are now declassified. This blog also comments on the story.

Three Paper Thursday: full disk encryption

Cryptology, Three Paper Thursday

Information is often an important asset and today’s information is commonly stored as digital data (bytes). We store this data in our computers local hard disks and in our laptops disks. Many organisations wish to keep the data stored in their computers and laptops confidential. Therefore a natural desire is that a stolen disk or laptop should not be readable by an external person (an attacker in general terms). For this reason we use encryption.

A hard disk is commonly logically organised in multiple sections, often referred to as either partitions or volumes. These volumes can be used for various purposes, and they are often structured according to a file system format (e.g. NTFS, FAT, HFS, etc.). It is possible to have a single disk with 3 volumes, where the first volume is formatted with NTFS and contains a Windows operating system, the second volume is formatted with EXT3 file system and contains an installation of a Linux distribution, while the third volume is formatted with FAT file system and only contains data (no operating system).

Volume encryption is a mechanism used to encrypt the contents of an entire volume. This is sometimes referred as “full disk encryption”, which is misleading, since a physical disk can actually contain multiple volumes, each encrypted independently.  However, since the term has become very popular, I will continue to refer to this kind of encryption as “full disk encryption” but the reader should keep the above distinction in mind.

There are several products that offer full disk encryption, e.g. PGP Whole Disk Encryption, TrueCrypt, Sophos SafeGuard, or Check Point FDE. Bitlocker is the full disk encryption integrated with the Windows OS and Apple has recently introduced FileVault 2 as full disk encryption from MAC OS X 10.7.

There are several limitations that affect the encryption of an entire disk. These have to do with 3 important aspects among others: a) encryption must be fast (a user should not notice any extra latency); b) the operating system is encrypted as well (so there must be some way of bootstrapping the decryption process when the computer boots)  c) the encryption mechanism should not reduce the available storage space noticeable (that is, we cannot use an extra block of data for every few encrypted blocks).

The following 3 papers explain in detail these limitations. Two of them relate to currently deployed full disk encryption systems.

Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: full disk encryption →

Make noise and whisper: a solution to relay attacks

Academic papers, Authentication, Banking security, Hardware & signals, Protocols

About a moth ago I’ve presented at the Security Protocols Workshop a new idea to detect relay attacks, co-developed with Frank Stajano.

The idea relies on having a trusted box (which we call the T-Box as in the image below) between the physical interfaces of two communicating parties. The T-Box accepts 2 inputs (one from each party) and provides one output (seen by both parties). It ensures that none of the parties can determine the complete input of the other party.

T-Box

Therefore by connecting 2 instances of a T-Box together (as in the case of a relay attack) the message from one end to the other (Alice and Bob in the image above) gets distorted twice as much as it would in the case of a direct connection. That’s the basic idea.

One important question is how does the T-Box operate on the inputs such that we can detect a relay attack? In the paper we describe two example implementations based on a bi-directional channel (which is used for example between a smart card and a terminal). In order to help the reader understand these examples better and determine the usefulness of our idea Mike Bond and I have created a python simulation. This simulation allows you to choose the type of T-Box implementation, a direct or relay connection, as well as other parameters including the length of the anti-relay data stream and detection threshold.

In these two implementations we have restricted ourselves to make the T-Box part of the communication channel. The advantage is that we don’t rely on any party providing the T-Box since it is created automatically by communicating over the physical channel. The disadvantage is that a more powerful attacker can sample the line at twice the speed and overcome our T-Box solution.

The relay attack can be used against many applications, including all smart card based payments. There are already several ideas, including distance bounding, for detecting relay attacks. However our idea brings a new approach to the existing methods, and we hope that in the future we can find a practical implementation of our solutions, or a good scenario to use a physical T-Box which should not be affected by a powerful attacker.

The Smart Card Detective: a hand-held EMV interceptor

Banking security, Hardware & signals, Protocols, Security engineering

During my MPhil within the Computer Lab (supervised by Markus Kuhn) I developed a card-sized device (named Smart Card Detective – in short SCD) that can monitor Chip and PIN transactions. The main goal of the SCD was to offer a trusted display for anyone using credit cards, to avoid scams such as tampered terminals which show an amount on their screen but debit the card another (see this paper by Saar Drimer and Steven Murdoch). However, the final result is a more general device, which can be used to analyse and modify any part of an EMV (protocol used by Chip and PIN cards) transaction.

Using the SCD we have successfully shown how the relay attack can be mitigated by showing the real amount on the trusted display. Even more, we have tested the No PIN vulnerability (see the paper by Murdoch et al.) with the SCD. A reportage on this has been shown on Canal+ (video now available here).

After the “Chip and PIN is broken” paper was published some contra arguments referred to the difficulty of setting up the attack. The SCD can also show that such assumptions are many times incorrect.

More details on the SCD are on my MPhil thesis available here. Also important, the software is open source and along with the hardware schematics can be found in the project’s page. The aim of this is to make the SCD a useful tool for EMV research, so that other problems can be found and fixed.

Thanks to Saar Drimer, Mike Bond, Steven Murdoch and Sergei Skorobogatov for the help in this project. Also thanks to Frank Stajano and Ross Anderson for suggestions on the project.