Tor is now using a centralized measurement system called Sbws to measure the bandwidth of relays to guide clients in selecting relays to balance traffic. Sbws has been proven to be vulnerable to multiple attacks because of the centralized structure and exposed measurements. We present SmartMeasurer, a secure and decentralized system for bandwidth measurement. Combining smart contract, Oracle Chainlink and ECC technology, we achieve decentralization while hiding the measurement circuits among the general circuits by exploiting the dual identity of randomly dynamic measurers and guards. We analyze the security of our system and demonstrate that it defends against three types of attacks. Our experiments on both private and public Tor networks show that our system is decentralized while keeping the error and the average of our measurements converges to a small interval of 0.30 Mbps. Compared to other existing methods, our system reduces trust assumptions and the costs of using smart contract, and enhances the practical feasibility of the solution.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Cryptography and Data Security
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Mustafa Ibrahim Alnajjar, Mehmet Sabır Kiraz, Ali H. Al‐Bayatti, Süleyman Kardaş
A distributed ledger is a shared and synchronized database across multiple designated nodes, often referred to as miners, validators, or peers. These nodes record, distribute, and access data to ensure security and transparency. However, these nodes can be compromised and manipulated by selectively choosing which user transactions to include, exclude, or reorder, thereby gaining an unfair advantage. This is known as a miner/maximal extractable value (MEV) attack. Existing solutions can be classified into various categories, such as MEV auction platforms and time-based ordering properties, which rely on private transaction Mempools. In this paper, we first identify some architectural weaknesses inherent in the latest proposals that divide the block creation and execution roles into separate functions: block builders and block executors. The existing schemes mainly suffer from the verifiability of the decryption process, where a corrupted builder or executor can simply deny the inclusion of specific targeted transactions by exploiting the fact that all transactions are in plain format. To address this, we propose an enhanced version that incorporates a verifiable decryption process. On a very high level, within our proposal, whenever an Executor or a Builder performs a decryption, the decrypted values must be broadcasted. This enables any entity in the network to publicly verify whether the decryption was executed correctly, thus preventing malicious behavior by either party from going undetected. We also define a new adversary model for MEV and conduct a comprehensive security analysis of our protocol against all kinds of potential adversaries related to MEV. Finally, we present the performance analysis of the proposed solution.
Open access
2 source records
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Akshay Kulkarni, Hrishav Bhattarai, Talha Hussain Syed, Mohammed Niamat
The globalization of integrated circuits (IC) faces threats from possible untrusted participants involved. One of the challenges faced is Intellectual Property (IP) piracy, which causes major revenue losses to third-party IP vendors (3PIP vendors) and design houses. The design reuse concept trending recently is further compounding this issue. In addition, a dubious actor can reverse-engineer a layout design file to obtain the gate-level netlist and claim ownership of the design. Substantial research has been done in this area to protect IP from being stolen and pirated, however, with the sophistication of attacks, a new dimension of research has been the need of the hour to combat the malicious activities on hardware IP. The presented work proposes a technique of hardware IP transfer by converting the layout file as a non-fungible token (NFT). NFT being a blockchain-powered concept, significant features such as decentralization, uniqueness, etc., are employed in this investigation. A case study with simulation results is presented to illustrate the technique. The smart contract for the proposed work is developed in Solidity language and tested locally on Remix IDE. With this technique, not only the IP can be protected but also the guilty party can be identified accountable for the untrustful act.
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Hossein Pourrahmani, Adel Yavarinasab, Amir Mahdi Hosseini Monazzah, Jan Van herle
The current advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the solutions being offered by this technology have accounted IoT among the top ten technologies that will transform the global economy by 2030. IoT is a state-of-the-art paradigm that has developed traditional living into a high-tech lifestyle. The current study aims to provide a comprehensive review and analysis of the existing cybersecurity attacks and vulnerabilities in IoT, offering suitable countermeasures with a focus on describing the impact of emerging technologies on IoT devices and protocol layers. The main vulnerabilities across different layers of the IoT reference model are discussed and categorized, and suitable countermeasures (such as separating IT and IoT network traffic, enhancing physical security, implementing encryption and secure messaging protocols, etc.) are suggested. In addition, the hardware, communication, application, web, and cloud vulnerabilities are introduced, then the corresponding safeguards and protections are presented. Furthermore, ia! (ia!) has been deliberately defined and the adoption of the NIST framework and IA model is recommended as a metric to ensure security for IoT solutions considering the five pillars of availability, integrity, authentication, confidentiality, and non-repudiation. Finally, Blockchain technology, known for its use in securing cryptocurrencies, is suggested to facilitate secure data exchange, identification, authentication, and communication for IoT devices by various avenues including ensuring the integrity of sensor data, eliminating the need for intermediaries, reducing costs, and enabling direct addressability of IoT devices.
Open access
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
The scale and scope of using IoT has had a rapid growth over the past few years. This growth has raised security and cost challenges of using IoT smart devices in large scale. In this research, we propose a comprehensive framework that addresses these challenges using cryptographic systems and blockchain NFTs. We analyze the credibility and scalability of our framework. In our proposed framework, we securely authenticate IoT devices and bind them to blockchain Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). To uniquely bind each IoT device to an NFT, we use the device's physical unclonable function (PUF). The link between the NFT and the device is difficult to break and can be traced anytime. Our framework also authenticates the device's acquired data using the device's PUF and securely stores the authenticated data on the blockchain. We use an approach that significantly reduces the blockchain costs and analyze it in large scale. Our analysis show that our framework is a secure and cost-effective solution for large-scale IoT authentication and data storage.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Due to the exponential growth of IoT devices across diverse applications, it has become essential to secure edge devices against various hardware attacks, such as tampering and cloning. A tampered device with a hardware Trojan can bypass the security measures implemented through the software layers. One of the primary ways to verify the authenticity of a device is by using physically unclonable functions (PUFs) as a unique device fingerprint. During authentication, the PUF response from the edge device is transferred securely and compared with the stored response. This requires a secure communication setup between the edge device and the central server. The fingerprint must also be stored on a server for response matching. However, the potential compromise of the central server will result in the leak of all secret information of the edge devices, and adversaries can exploit it to gain unauthorized access to the IoT network. In this paper, we propose an efficient, secure, and on-demand communication protocol using zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) that allow the prover to provide evidence of its secret without revealing that to the verifier. The edge device, acting as the prover, convinces the central server, the verifier, of the unique PUF response stored inside the device without needing the actual storage of PUF responses on the server. The non-interactive characteristic of zk-SNARK, a widely used ZKP protocol in many popular cryptocurrencies such as Zcash, offers better optimization to authentication frequency, communication bandwidth between device and server, and protection of device-specific secret, all of which contribute to constructing our proposed device authentication framework.
Open access
2 source records
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Venkata K. V. V. Bathalapalli, Saraju P. Mohanty, Elias Kougianos, Vasanth Iyer · 5 authors
This work presents a sustainable cybersecurity solution using Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF), Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and Tangle Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for sustainable device and data security. Security-by-Design (SbD) or Hardware- Assisted Security (HAS) solutions have gained much prominence due to the requirement of tamper-proof storage for hardwareassisted cryptography solutions. Designing complex security mechanisms can impact their efficiency as IoT applications are more decentralized. In the proposed architecture, we presented a novel TPM-enabled PUF-based security mechanism with effective integration of PUF with TPM. The proposed mechanism is based on the process of sealing the PUF key in the TPM, which cannot be accessed outside the TPM and can only be unsealed by the TPM itself. A specified NV-index is assigned to each IoT node for sealing the PUF key to TPM using the Media Access Control (MAC) address. Access to the TPM's Non-Volatile Random Access Memory (NVRAM) is defined by the TPM's Enhanced Authorization policies as specified by the Trust Computing Group (TCG). The proposed architecture uses Tangle for sustainable data security and storage in decentralized IoT systems through a Masked Authentication Messaging (MAM) scheme for efficient and secure access control to Tangle. We validated the proposed approach through experimental analysis and implementation, which substantiates the potential of the presented PUFchain 4.0 for decentralized IoT-driven security solutions.
Open access
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Advanced Memory and Neural Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Akshay Kulkarni, Noor Ahmad Hazari, Mohammed Niamat
Globalization of integrated circuits (ICs) may lead to the quality of ICs being compromised due to the possible untrusted entities involved in the supply chain. There have been well documented cases of chips secretly implanted with Trojans creeping into the supply chain. Studies have shown that tampering lithographic masks, also called as reticles, is one of the potential sources of hardware Trojan intrusion. This paper presents a novel blockchain-enabled mask writing technique to combat the alteration of the IC layout design at the mask making step. A blockchain-enabled file storage and transfer system for secure transfer of the layout GDSII file from the design house to the mask making machine is studied in this work. As part of this investigation, a smart contract is developed, which interacts with an external application programming interface (API) and fetches the design layout file from the file storage system. The smart contract developed as part of the research can be adopted in the existing EDA tools for mask making, curtailing the access sought by an adversary in the mask making process. The proposed smart contract is developed using Solidity language, on an online IDE called Remix. Finally, a case study is presented in this paper, validating the approach and simulating the proposed smart contract. The simulation of the smart contract is conducted on Goerli test network provided by Ethereum.
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Integrated Circuits and Semiconductor Failure Analysis
May 1, 2023·2023 IEEE 9th Intl Conference on Big Data Security on Cloud (BigDataSecurity), IEEE Intl Conference on High Performance and Smart Computing, (HPSC) and IEEE Intl Conference on Intelligent Data and Security (IDS)
With the development of smart contracts, the complexity of smart contracts continues to increase. Vulnerabilities may be hidden in complex contracts, which brings great hidden dangers to the development of contracts. Many fuzzing methods are used to detect contract vulnerabilities. Fuzzing requires expert knowledge as a rule for vulnerability detection. Expert knowledge depends on the induction of professionals, which lags behind the development of vulnerabilities. Although there are some methods using neural network classification models to solve the problem of expert knowledge generation, they do not consider the challenges brought by global variables. Global variables may carry dangerous data, which indirectly leads to vulnerabilities. The existing expert knowledge model does not analyze the semantics of global variables. To address this issue, we propose a model based on transaction bytecode and global variable semantics. We build a dynamic taint analysis model to capture the semantics of global variables. By capturing the global semantics, we solve the problem that global variables poses for expert knowledge generation models. We experimentally compare models with and without global variable semantics. Experiments show that our method is able to detect more vulnerabilities.
Big Data and Digital Economy
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Due to the rapid growth experienced by the market for non-fungible tokens in 2021, the topic has become much more present. Even people who have not previously dealt with the topic of cryptoassets are finding interest in it. What exactly is hidden behind the term NFT, which areas of application there are and in which direction crypto tokens are developing will be briefly presented in this article. Significant changes on the market and in the technological field will be highlighted, as well as opportunities and challenges.
Open access
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Junrui Liu, Ian Kretz, Hanzhi Liu, Bryan E‐Xin Tan · 10 authors
Zero-knowledge (ZK) proof systems have emerged as a promising solution for building security-sensitive applications. However, bugs in ZK applications are extremely difficult to detect and can allow a malicious party to silently exploit the system without leaving any observable trace. This paper presents Coda, a novel statically-typed language for building zero-knowledge applications. Critically, Coda makes it possible to formally specify and statically check properties of a ZK application through a rich refinement type system. One of the key challenges in formally verifying ZK applications is that they require reasoning about polynomial equations over large prime fields that go beyond the capabilities of automated theorem provers. Coda mitigates this challenge by generating a set of Coq lemmas that can be proven in an interactive manner with the help of a tactic library. We have used Coda to re-implement 77 arithmetic circuits from widely-used Circom libraries and applications. Our evaluation shows that Coda makes it possible to specify important and formally verify correctness properties of these circuits. Our evaluation also revealed 6 previously-unknown vulnerabilities in the original Circom projects.
Abstract Decomposition puzzles are pencil-and-paper logic puzzles that involve partitioning a rectangular grid into several regions to satisfy certain rules. In this paper, we construct a generic card-based protocol called printing protocol , which can be used to physically verify solutions of decompositon puzzles. We apply the printing protocol to develop card-based zero-knowledge proof protocols for two such puzzles: Five Cells and Meadows. These protocols allow a prover to physically show that he/she knows solutions of the puzzles without revealing them.
Globalization of the chip design and manufacturing industry has imposed significant threats to the hardware security of integrated circuits (ICs). It has made ICs more susceptible to various hardware attacks. Blockchain provides a trustworthy and distributed platform to store immutable records related to the evidence of intellectual property (IP) creation, authentication of provenance, and confidential data storage. However, blockchain encounters major security challenges due to its decentralized nature of ledgers that contain sensitive data. The research objective is to design a dedicated programmable hardware security modules scheme to safeguard and maintain sensitive information contained in the blockchain networks in the context of the IC supply chain. Thus, the blockchain framework could rely on the proposed hardware security modules and separate the entire cryptographic operations within the system as stand-alone hardware units. This work put forth a novel approach that could be considered and utilized to enhance blockchain security in real-time. The critical cryptographic components in blockchain secure hash algorithm-256 (SHA-256) and the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm are designed as separate entities to enhance the security of the blockchain framework. Physical unclonable functions are adopted to perform authentication of transactions in the blockchain. Relative comparison of designed modules with existing works clearly depicts the upper hand of the former in terms of performance parameters.
Open access
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Integrated Circuits and Semiconductor Failure Analysis
Abstract In areas of activity where the notion of accountability is strong, the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is limited by the opacity and lack of understanding of its behavior, all the more so in the embedded domain where neural networks are compressed and executed on microcontrollers. While the NIST introduced in 2021 several principles allowing the AI explainability, this paper introduces a novel scheme, HistoTrust, combining secure hardware and blockchain technology to bring trust in the traceability of AI behavior and allow its explainability. HistoTrust attests in an Ethereum ledger all the relevant data produced by a physical device, especially the heuristics inferred by AI. Thus, the audition of the ledger allows security verifications and AI behavior analysis.
Open access
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Mauro Isaja, Phu H. Nguyen, Arda Göknil, Sagar Sen · 14 authors
There is a current wave of a new generation of digital solutions based on intelligent systems, hybrid digital twins and AI-driven optimization tools to assure quality in smart factories. Such digital solutions heavily depend on quality-related information within the supply chain business ecosystem to drive zero-waste value chains. To empower zero-waste value chain strategies with meaningful, reliable, and trustful data, there must be a solution for end-to-end industrial data traceability, trust, and security across multiple process chains or even inter-organizational supply chains. In this paper, we first present Product, Process, and Data quality services to drive zero-waste value chain strategies. Following this, we present the Trusted Framework (TF), which is a key enabler for the secure and effective sharing of quality-related information within the supply chain business ecosystem, and thus for quality optimization actions towards zero-defect manufacturing. The TF specification includes the data model and format of the Process/Product/Data (PPD) Quality Hallmark, the OpenAPI exposed to factory system and a comprehensive Identity Management layer, for secure horizontal- and vertical quality data integration. The PPD hallmark and the TF already address some of the industrial needs to have a trusted approach to share quality data between the different stakeholders of the production chain to empower zero-waste value chain strategies.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Digital Transformation in Industry
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security