We construct a stream-cipher SC whose implementation is secure even if a bounded amount of arbitrary (adaptively, adversarially chosen) information about the internal state of SC is leaked during computation of each output block. This captures all possible side-channel attacks on SC where (1) the amount of information leaked in a given period is bounded, but overall can be arbitrary large and (2) “only computation leaks information”. The construction is based on alternating extraction (used in the intrusion-resilient secret-sharing scheme from FOCS’07). We move this concept to the computational setting by proving a lemma that states that the output of any pseudorandom generator (PRG) has high HILL pseudoentropy (i.e. is indistinguishable from some distribution with high min-entropy) even if arbitrary information about the seed is leaked. The amount of leakage λ that we can tolerate in each step depends on the strength of the underlying PRG, it is at least logarithmic, but can be as large as a constant fraction of the internal state of SC if the PRG is exponentially hard. 1.

Abstract. This paper considers two questions in cryptography. Cryptography Secure Against Memory Attacks. A particularly devastating side-channel attack against cryptosystems, termed the “memory attack”, was proposed recently. In this attack, a significant fraction of the bits of a secret key of a cryptographic algorithm can be measured by an adversary if the secret key is ever stored in a part of memory which can be accessed even after power has been turned off for a short amount of time. Such an attack has been shown to completely compromise the security of various cryptosystems in use, including the RSA cryptosystem and AES. We show that the public-key encryption scheme of Regev (STOC 2005), and the identity-based encryption scheme of Gentry, Peikert and Vaikuntanathan (STOC 2008) are remarkably robust against memory attacks where the adversary can measure a large fraction of the bits of the secret-key, or more generally, can compute an arbitrary function of the secret-key of bounded output length. This is done without increasing the size of the secret-key, and without introducing any

Abstract. A weak pseudorandom function (wPRF) is a pseudorandom functions with a relaxed security requirement, where one only requires the output to be pseudorandom when queried on random (and not adversarially chosen) inputs. We show that unlike standard PRFs, wPRFs are secure against memory attacks, that is they remain secure even if a bounded amount of information about the secret key is leaked to the adversary. As an application of this result we propose a simple mode of operation which – when instantiated with any wPRF – gives a leakage-resilient stream-cipher. Such a cipher is secure against any side-channel attack, as long as the amount of information leaked per round is bounded, but overall can be arbitrary large. This construction is simpler than the only previous one (Dziembowski-Pietrzak FOCS’08) as it only uses a single primitive (a wPRF) in a straight forward manner. 1

Harvard architecture CPU design is common in the embedded world. Examples of Harvard-based architecture devices are the Mica family of wireless sensors. Mica motes have limited memory and can process only very small packets. Stack-based buffer overflow techniques that inject code into the stack and then execute it are therefore not applicable. It has been a common belief that code injection is impossible on Harvard architectures. This paper presents a remote code injection attack for Mica sensors. We show how to exploit program vulnerabilities to permanently inject any piece of code into the program memory of an Atmel AVR-based sensor. To our knowledge, this is the first result that presents a code injection technique for such devices. Previous work only succeeded in injecting data or performing transient attacks. Injecting permanent code is more powerful since the attacker can gain full control of the target sensor. We also show that this attack can be used to inject a worm that can propagate through the wireless sensor network and possibly create a sensor botnet. Our attack combines different techniques such as return oriented programming and fake stack injection. We present implementation details and suggest some counter-measures.

Today’s technical and legal landscape presents formidable challenges to personal data privacy. First, our increasing reliance on Web services causes personal data to be cached, copied, and archived by third parties, often without our knowledge or control. Second, the disclosure of private data has become commonplace due to carelessness, theft, or legal actions. Our research seeks to protect the privacy of past, archived data — such as copies of emails maintained by an email provider — against accidental, malicious, and legal attacks. Specifically, we wish to ensure that all copies of certain data become unreadable after a userspecified time, without any specific action on the part of a user, and even if an attacker obtains both a cached copy of that data and the user’s cryptographic keys and passwords. This paper presents Vanish, a system that meets this challenge through a novel integration of cryptographic techniques with global-scale, P2P, distributed hash tables (DHTs). We implemented a proof-of-concept Vanish prototype to use both the million-plus-node Vuze Bit-Torrent DHT and the restricted-membership OpenDHT. We evaluate experimentally and analytically the functionality, security, and performance properties of Vanish, demonstrating that it is practical to use and meets the privacy-preserving goals described above. We also describe two applications that we prototyped on Vanish: a Firefox plugin for Gmail and other Web sites and a Vanishing File application. 1

Most of the work in the analysis of cryptographic schemes is concentrated in abstract adversarial models that do not capture side-channel attacks. Such attacks exploit various forms of unintended information leakage, which is inherent to almost all physical implementations. Inspired by recent side-channel attacks, especially the “cold boot attacks ” of Halderman et al. (USENIX Security ’08), Akavia, Goldwasser and Vaikuntanathan (TCC ’09) formalized a realistic framework for modeling the security of encryption schemes against a wide class of sidechannel attacks in which adversarially chosen functions of the secret key are leaked. In the setting of public-key encryption, Akavia et al. showed that Regev’s lattice-based scheme (STOC ’05) is resilient to any leakage of

Abstract. The strongest standard security notion for digital signature schemes is unforgeability under chosen message attacks. In practice, however, this notion can be insufficient due to “side-channel attacks ” which exploit leakage of information about the secret internal state. In this work we put forward the notion of “leakage-resilient signatures, ” which strengthens the standard security notion by giving the adversary the additional power to learn a bounded amount of arbitrary information about the secret state that was accessed during every signature generation. This notion naturally implies security against all side-channel attacks as long as the amount of information leaked on each invocation is bounded and “only computation leaks information.” The main result of this paper is a construction which gives a (tree-based, stateful) leakage-resilient signature scheme based on any 3-time signature scheme. The amount of information that our scheme can safely leak per signature generation is 1/3 of the information the underlying 3-time signature scheme can leak in total. Signature schemes that remain secure even if a bounded total amount of information is leaked were recently constructed, hence instantiating our construction with these schemes gives the first constructions of provably secure leakage-resilient signature schemes. The above construction assumes that the signing algorithm can sample truly random bits, and thus an implementation would need some special hardware (randomness gates). Simply generating this randomness using a leakage-resilient stream-cipher will in general not work. Our second contribution is a sound general principle to replace uniform random bits in any leakage-resilient construction with pseudorandom ones: run two leakage-resilient stream-ciphers (with independent keys) in parallel and then apply a two-source extractor to their outputs. 1

A leakage-resilient cryptosystem remains secure even if arbitrary, but bounded, information about the secret key (or possibly other internal state information) is leaked to an adversary. Denote the length of the secret key by n. We show a signature scheme tolerating (optimal) leakage of up to n − nǫ bits of information about the secret key, and a more efficient one-time signature scheme that tolerates leakage of ( 1 4 −ǫ) ·n bits of information about the signer’s entire state. The latter construction extends to give a leakage-resilient t-time signature scheme. All these constructions are in the standard model under general assumptions. 1

Trusting a computer for a security-sensitive task (such as checking email or banking online) requires the user to know something about the computer’s state. We examine research on securely capturing a computer’s state, and consider the utility of this information both for improving security on the local computer (e.g., to convince the user that her computer is not infected with malware) and for communicating a remote computer’s state (e.g., to enable the user to check that a web server will adequately protect her data). Although the recent “Trusted Computing ” initiative has drawn both positive and negative attention to this area, we consider the older and broader topic of bootstrapping trust in a computer. We cover issues ranging from the wide collection of secure hardware that can serve as a foundation for trust, to the usability issues that arise when trying to convey computer state information to humans. This approach unifies disparate research efforts and highlights opportunities for additional work that can guide real-world improvements in computer security. 1

Online applications are vulnerable to theft of sensitive information because adversaries can exploit software bugs to gain access to private data, and because curious or malicious administrators may capture and leak data. CryptDB is a system that provides practical and provable confidentiality in the face of these attacks for applications backed by SQL databases. It works by executing SQL queries over encrypted data using a collection of efficient SQL-aware encryption schemes. CryptDB can also chain encryption keys to user passwords, so that a data item can be decrypted only by using the password of one of the users with access to that data. As a result, a database administrator never gets access to decrypted data, and even if all servers are compromised, an adversary cannot decrypt the data of any user who is not logged in. An analysis of a trace of 126 million SQL queries from a production MySQL server shows that CryptDB can support operations over encrypted data for 99.5% of the 128,840 columns seen in the trace. Our evaluation shows that CryptDB has low overhead, reducing throughput by 14.5 % for phpBB, a web forum application, and by 26 % for queries from TPC-C, compared to unmodified MySQL. Chaining encryption keys to user passwords requires 11–13 unique schema annotations to secure more than 20 sensitive fields and 2–7 lines of source code changes for three multi-user web applications.