Timing attack

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

Local Cyber-physical Attack with Leveraging Detection in Smart Grid

Abstract: A well-designed attack in the power system can cause an initial failure and then results in large-scale cascade failure. Several works have discussed power system attack through false data injection, line-maintaining attack, and line-removing attack. However, the existing methods need to continuously attack the system for a long time, and, unfortunately, the performance cannot be guaranteed if the system states vary. To overcome this issue, we consider a new type of attack strategy called combinational attack which masks a line-outage at one position but misleads the control center on line outage at another position. Therefore, the topology information in the control center is interfered by our attack. We also offer a procedure of selecting the vulnerable lines of its kind. The proposed method can effectively and continuously deceive the control center in identifying the actual position of line-outage. The system under attack will be exposed to increasing risks as the attack continuously. Simulation results validate the efficiency of the proposed attack strategy.

An Efficient and Optimized RC5 Image Encryption Algorithm for Secured Image Transmission

Abstract: Security has become the major concern in maintaining confidentiality of data. Communication within a network requires transfer of data in the form of text as well as images. During the transfer of a digital image security breaches are bound to occur. Hence, the use of cryptographic and encryption algorithm is emphasized and utilized. RC5 which is a block cipher algorithm is used to encrypt the images and to ensure secure wireless communication over the internet. It is seen that RC5 is prone to various attacks such as timing attack, correlation attack, differential and linear attacks when there are lesser number of attacks considered in the algorithm. In this paper, the number of rounds are increased to protect it from such attacks and histograms are plotted for the same. The mean and variance values for the encrypted and decrypted images are computed.

DAMARU: A Denial-of-Service Attack on Randomized Last-Level Caches

Abstract: Cross-core conflict-based timing attacks like Prime+Probe at the shared last-level cache (LLC) are practical and can cause information leakage. Cache address randomization is one of the techniques that claim to mitigate these attacks. CEASER, CEASER-S, and ScatterCache are the three recent randomized caches that use encryption engines to randomize the memory address mapping. CEASER and CEASER-S, along with encryption engines, remap the cache blocks periodically to break the static mapping of memory blocks into the LLC blocks. Encryption engine and remapping provide security to the randomized caches. However, access to encryption engines and the remapping of cache blocks are on the critical path of LLC accesses. We target encryption engine and remapping of randomized cache to mount a denial of service (DoS) attack named DAMARU. In DAMARU, the attacker frequently sends memory requests to the LLC that causes an increase in the victim's LLC access waiting time for the encryption engine. DAMARU is the first DoS attack on randomized caches where an attacker can cause a DoS even without thrashing the LLC. DAMARU provides a performance slowdown of up to 3.19X and 6X for 8-core and 16-core simulated systems, respectively. In terms of performance slowdown, the effectiveness of our DAMARU attack decreases with an increase in the number of encryption engines.

A New Direction in Utilization of Chaotic Fractal Functions for Cryptosystems

Abstract: Ever since Baptista in 1998 introduced his cryptographic scheme utilizing the only in online version. ergodic property of chaotic maps which is able to produce different cipher values for the same plaintext within the same message, intense scrutiny has been given upon the design. The capability to do the above mentioned output is akin to the Vigenere cipher and thus has the capacity to render an attacker with infinitely many choices (theoretically speaking) or in cryptographic terms would render an attacker to have a set off possible ciphertexts that could all have the possibility to just be mapped to a unique plaintext. This makes it computationally infeasible for the attacker to re-construct the correct plaintext. The Baptista design has been attacked and repaired many times. Alvarez noticed the characteristic of the cryptosystem that generates a sequence which can be exploited by an attacker. The attack which is dubbed the one-time pad attack is akin to an attack upon a One-Time-Pad (OTP) cryptosystem that reuses its key. Since then, attempts were made to redefine the cryptosystem such that it would be resistant towards the attack. Most of the attempts failed due to either the repaired cryptosystem still generates an exploitable sequence or it is not invertible. In this work we pair the Baptista design with a concept taken from the Iterated Function Systems (IFS). Although we did not encompass the whole concept of iterating the IFS, it could be seen that this could be easily done with the same desirable results. Four main outcomes are discussed. Beginning with the discussion on the infeasibility of Alvarez’s one-time pad attack on the design, we then discuss the quantitative properties of the design in discussing its cryptographic properties namely the Maximum Deviation Factor (MDF), Correlation Coefficient Factor (CCF) and the Strict Avalanche Criterion (SAC). Each experimental result shows promising results for this new design.