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The evolution of smart contracts in recent years inspired a crucial question: do smart contract evaluation protocols provide the required level of privacy when executing contracts on the blockchain? The Hawk (IEEE S&P '16) paper introduces a way to solve the problem of privacy in smart contracts by evaluating the contracts off-chain, albeit with the trust assumption of a manager. To avoid the partially trusted manager altogether, a novel approach named zkHawk (IEEE BRAINS '21) explains how we can evaluate the contracts privately off-chain using a multi-party computation (MPC) protocol instead of trusting said manager. This paper dives deeper into the detailed construction of a variant of the zkHawk protocol titled V-zkHawk using formal proofs to construct the said protocol and model its security in the universal composability (UC) framework (FOCS '01). The V-zkHawk protocol discussed here does not support immediate closure, i.e., all the parties (n) have to send a message to inform the blockchain that the contract has been executed with corruption allowed for up to t parties, where t < n . In the most quintessential sense, the V-zkHawk is a variant because the outcome of the protocol is similar (i.e., execution of smart contract via an MPC function evaluation) to zkHawk, but we modify key aspects of the protocol, essentially creating a small trade-off (removing immediate closure) to provide UC (stronger) security. The V-zkHawk protocol leverages joint Schnorr signature schemes, encryption schemes, Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Proofs (NIZKs), and commitment schemes with Common Reference String (CRS) assumptions, MPC function evaluations, and assumes the existence of asynchronous, authenticated broadcast channels. We achieve malicious security in a dishonest majority setting in the UC framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key-based circuit obfuscation or logic-locking is a technique that can be used to hide the full design of an integrated circuit from an untrusted foundry or end-user. The technique is based on creating ambiguity in the original circuit by inserting "key" input bits into the circuit such that the circuit is unintelligible absent a correct secret key. Clock signals have traditionally been avoided in locking in order to not corrupt the timing behavior of the locked circuit. In this paper, we explore the case where the clock signal itself may be obfuscated by ambiguating its frequency or pattern. Along with discussing formal notions of security in this context, we present practical ways to deobfuscate such designs using techniques from multi-rate model-checking. We present experimental data on deobfuscation runtime on a set of sequential benchmark circuits. Our results show that naive random clock obfuscation may not provide more security per overhead than traditional random keyed-gate insertion. We discuss how clock obfuscation may be a more attractive choice for special circuit designs that are inherently multi-clock/asynchronous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's world, the use of computer networks is everywhere, and to access the home network we use the Internet. IoT networks are the new range of these networks in which we try to connect different home appliances and try to give commands from a remote place. Access to any device over an insecure network invites various types of attacks. User authentication can be performed using some password or biometric technique. However, when it comes to authenticating a device, it becomes challenging to maintain data security over a secure network such as the Internet. Many encryptions and decryption algorithms assert confidentiality, and hash code or message authentication code MAC is used for authentication. Traditional cryptographic security methods are expensive in terms of computational resources such as memory, processing capacity, and power consumption. They are incompatible with the Internet of Things devices that have limited resources. Although automatic Device-to-Device communication enables new potential applications, the limited resources of the networks' machines and devices impose various constraints. This paper proposes a home device authentication scheme when these are accessed from a remote place. An authentication device is used for the home network and controller device to control home appliances. Our scheme can prevent various attacks such as replay attacks, server spoofing, and man-in-the-middle attack. The proposed scheme maintains the confidentiality and authenticity of the user and devices in the network. At the same time, we check the system in a simulated environment, and the results show that the network's performance does not degrade much in terms of delay, throughput, and energy consumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ever-increasing need for securing computing systems using cryptographic algorithms is spurring interest in the efficient implementation of common algorithms. While the algorithms can be implemented in software using base instruction sets, there is considerable potential to reduce memory cost and improve speed using specialized instructions and associated hardware. However, there is a need to assess the benefits and costs of software implementations and new instructions that implement key cryptographic algorithms in fewer cycles. The primary aim of this paper is to improve the understanding of the performance and cost of implementing cryptographic algorithms for the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) in two cases: software implementations of the algorithms using the rv32i instruction set and using cryptographic instructions supported by dedicated hardware in additional functional units. For both cases, we describe a RISC-V processor with cryptography hardware extensions and hand-optimized RISC-V assembly language implementations of eleven cryptographic algorithms. Compared to implementations with only the rv32i instruction set, implementations with the cryptography set extension provide a 1.5× to 8.6× faster execution speed and 1.2× to 5.8× less program memory for five of the eleven algorithms. Based on our performance analyses, a new instruction is proposed to increase the implementation efficiency of the algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Panopticon (which means "watcher of everything") is a well-known prison structure of continuous surveillance and discipline studied by Bentham in 1785. Today, where persistent, massive scale, surveillance is immensely facilitated by new technologies, the term Panopticon vaguely characterizes institutions with a power to acquire and process, undetectably, personal information. In this paper we propose a theoretical framework for studying Panopticons and their detectability status. We show, based on the Theory of Computation, that detecting Panopticons, modelled either as a simple Turing Machine or as an Oracle Turing Machine, is an undecidable problem. Furthermore, we show that for each sufficiently expressive formal system, we can effectively construct a Turing Machine for which it is impossible to prove, within the formal system, its Panopticon status. Finally, we discuss how Panopticons can be physically detected by the heat they dissipate each time they acquire, effortlessly, information in the form of an oracle and we investigate their detectability status with respect to a more powerful computational model than classical Turing Machines, the Infinite Time Turing Machines (ITTMs). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to the network security that relies on upper-layer encryption for the confidentiality and authenticity of communications, physical layer security (PLS) exploits the uniqueness and randomness of the physical channel to encrypt information and enhance the security of the system. In this paper, we study the PLS of a polar-coded wireless communication system. To be more specific, we leverage the unique properties in polar code construction and propose a channel quality indicator (CQI)-based frozen-bit pattern generation scheme. The transmitter employs the Gaussian approximation algorithm to generate the corresponding frozen bit pattern according to the instantaneous CQI of the legitimate link. At the receiver, by leveraging the full channel reciprocity in the time-division duplex (TDD) mode, we can map the CQI to the corresponding frozen bit pattern and correctly decode the received bits. By contrast, the eavesdropper was unable to have the knowledge of the legal channel, and hence cannot determine the frozen bit pattern of the polar-coded bit sequence. Our simulation results demonstrate that by adopting the proposed PLS key generation scheme, Eve was hardly able to correctly decode a complete frame, leading to a high block error rate (BLER), while Bob was able to attain a 10 − 5 BLER. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical data is frequently quite sensitive in terms of data privacy and security. Federated learning has been used to increase the privacy and security of medical data, which is a sort of machine learning technique. The training data is disseminated across numerous machines in federated learning, and the learning process is collaborative. There are numerous privacy attacks on deep learning (DL) models that attackers can use to obtain sensitive information. As a result, the DL model should be safeguarded from adversarial attacks, particularly in medical data applications. Homomorphic encryption-based model security from the adversarial collaborator is one of the answers to this challenge. Using homomorphic encryption, this research presents a privacy-preserving federated learning system for medical data. The proposed technique employs a secure multi-party computation protocol to safeguard the deep learning model from adversaries. The proposed approach is tested in terms of model performance using a real-world medical dataset in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of CPA and Template Attacks on masked implementations of bitsliced AES, targeting a 32-bit platform through the ChipWhisperer side-channel acquisition tool. Our results show that Template Attacks can recover the full AES key successfully within 300 attack traces even on the masked implementation when using a first-order attack (no pre-processing). Furthermore, we confirm that the SubBytes operation is overall a better target for Template Attacks due to its non-linearity, even in the case of bitsliced implementations, where we can only use two bits per key byte target. However, we also show that targeting the AddRoundKey can be used to attack bitsliced implementations and that, in some cases, it can be more efficient than the SubBytes attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]