Timing attack

About: Timing attack is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 726 publications have been published within this topic receiving 25462 citations.

PandA: Pairings and Arithmetic

Abstract: This paper introduces PandA, a software framework for Pairings and Arithmetic. It is designed to bring together advances in the efficient computation of cryptographic pairings and the development and implementation of pairing-based protocols. The intention behind the PandA framework is to give protocol designers and implementors easy access to a toolbox of all functions needed for implementing pairing-based cryptographic protocols, while making it possible to use state-of-the-art algorithms for pairing computation and group arithmetic. PandA offers an API in the C programming language and all arithmetic operations run in constant time to protect against timing attacks. The framework also makes it easy to consistently test and benchmark the lower level functions used in pairing-based protocols. As an example of how easy it is to implement pairing-based protocols with PandA, we use Boneh-Lynn-Shacham BLS signatures. Our PandA-based implementation of BLS needs only 434640 cycles for signature generation and 5832584 cycles for signature verification on one core of an Intel i5-3210M CPU. This includes full protection against timing attacks and compression of public keys and signatures.

A Probability-Based Approach to Attack Graphs Generation

Abstract: Attack graphs are important tools for analyzing network security vulnerabilities. Recently, the generation method of attack graphs is a hot topic to the security researchers. As previous works encounter the scalability problem and inaccurate input information problem, we propose a novel method to automatic construction of attack graphs based on probability. After introducing prior-probability, match-probability,and transition-probability into attack graphs generation process, we develop a new attack model and relevant generation algorithms. Our method uses threshold and key states to control the scale of result attack graphs with important attack paths reserved. The following experiments show our approach could get meaningful results with less time and space, especially when one wants to get a few shortest attack paths quickly.

BCoal: Bucketing-Based Memory Coalescing for Efficient and Secure GPUs

Abstract: Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are becoming a de facto choice for accelerating applications from a wide range of domains ranging from graphics to high-performance computing. As a result, it is getting increasingly desirable to improve the cooperation between traditional CPUs and accelerators such as GPUs. However, given the growing security concerns in the CPU space, closer integration of GPUs has further expanded the attack surface. For example, several side-channel attacks have shown that sensitive information can be leaked from the CPU end. In the same vein, several side-channel attacks are also now being developed in the GPU world. Overall, it is challenging to keep emerging CPU-GPU heterogeneous systems secure while maintaining their performance and energy efficiency. In this paper, we focus on developing an efficient defense mechanism for a type of correlation timing attack on GPUs. Such an attack has been shown to recover AES private keys by exploiting the relationship between the number of coalesced memory accesses and total execution time. Prior state-of-the-art defense mechanisms use inefficient randomized coalescing techniques to defend against such GPU attacks and require turning-off bandwidth conserving techniques such as caches and miss-status holding registers (MSHRs) to ensure security. To address these limitations, we propose BCoal – a new bucketing-based coalescing mechanism. BCoal significantly reduces the information leakage by always issuing pre-determined numbers of coalesced accesses (called buckets). With the help of a detailed application-level analysis, BCoal determines the bucket sizes and pads, if necessary, the number of real accesses with additional (padded) accesses to meet the bucket sizes ensuring the security against the correlation timing attack. Furthermore, BCoal generates the padded accesses such that the security is ensured even in the presence of MSHRs and caches. In effect, BCoal significantly improves GPU security at a modest performance loss.

A scalable representation towards attack graph generation

Abstract: In todaypsilas large complex organizational network, security administration is a challenging task. The typical means by which an attacker breaks into a network is through a series of exploits, where each exploit in the series satisfies the pre-condition for subsequent exploits and makes a causal relationship among them. Such a series of exploit is called attack path and the set of all possible attack paths form an attack graph. However, the generated attack graphs by various previous approaches become too complicated to visually interpret and comprehend. Hence the proposed approach addresses the scalability issue of the attack graph generation through a generic attack path detection algorithm. This will reduce the generation of redundancy in attack graph, thus facilitating security management of an enterprise network.

An Independent Evaluation of Web Timing Attack and its Countermeasure

Abstract: Web timing have attacks become a new threat on the Internet because they enable attackers to reveal users' private information. In this paper, we evaluate the threat of a web timing attack and its countermeasure. Our contribution is to investigate the occurrence conditions of a web timing attack. We also verify the effectiveness of our countermeasure, whose significant feature is fixing the authentication time whereas previous work fixes the response time. For our evaluation, we measure response times of several web applications, and analyze the result with statistical testing. We find that it is difficult to reveal the of username in some types of applications, and we confirm that our countermeasure can thwart web timing attacks.