{"title":"Natural Language Processing for Hardware Security: Case of Hardware Trojan Detection in FPGAs","authors":"Jaya Dofe, Wafi Danesh, Vaishnavi More, Aaditya Chaudhari","doi":"10.3390/cryptography8030036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography8030036","url":null,"abstract":"Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) offer the inherent ability to reconfigure at runtime, making them ideal for applications such as data centers, cloud computing, and edge computing. This reconfiguration, often achieved through remote access, enables efficient resource utilization but also introduces critical security vulnerabilities. An adversary could exploit this access to insert a dormant hardware trojan (HT) into the configuration bitstream, bypassing conventional security and verification measures. To address this security threat, we propose a supervised learning approach using deep recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for HT detection within FPGA configuration bitstreams. We explore two RNN architectures: basic RNN and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. Our proposed method analyzes bitstream patterns, to identify anomalies indicative of malicious modifications. We evaluated the effectiveness on ISCAS 85 benchmark circuits of varying sizes and topologies, implemented on a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA. The experimental results revealed that the basic RNN model showed lower accuracy in identifying HT-compromised bitstreams for most circuits. In contrast, the LSTM model achieved a significantly higher average accuracy of 93.5%. These results demonstrate that the LSTM model is more successful for HT detection in FPGA bitstreams. This research paves the way for using RNN architectures for HT detection in FPGAs, eliminating the need for time-consuming and resource-intensive reverse engineering or performance-degrading bitstream conversions.","PeriodicalId":36072,"journal":{"name":"Cryptography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141925654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CryptographyPub Date : 2024-07-15DOI: 10.3390/cryptography8030032
Jenilee Jao, Ian Wilcox, Jim Plusquellic, B. Paskaleva, Pavel Bochev
{"title":"Entropy Analysis of FPGA Interconnect and Switch Matrices for Physical Unclonable Functions","authors":"Jenilee Jao, Ian Wilcox, Jim Plusquellic, B. Paskaleva, Pavel Bochev","doi":"10.3390/cryptography8030032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography8030032","url":null,"abstract":"Random variations in microelectronic circuit structures represent the source of entropy for physical unclonable functions (PUFs). In this paper, we investigate delay variations that occur through the routing network and switch matrices of a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The delay variations are isolated from other components of the programmable logic, e.g., look-up tables (LUTs), flip-flops (FFs), etc., using a feature of Xilinx FPGAs called dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR). A set of partial designs is created to fix the placement of a time-to-digital converter (TDC) and supporting infrastructure to enable the path delays through the target interconnect and switch matrices to be extracted by subtracting out common-mode delay components. Delay variations are analyzed in the different levels of routing resources available within FPGAs, i.e., local routing and across-chip routing. Data are collected from a set of Xilinx Zynq 7010 devices, and a statistical analysis of within-die variations in delay through a set of the randomly-generated and hand-crafted interconnects is presented.","PeriodicalId":36072,"journal":{"name":"Cryptography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141648289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CryptographyPub Date : 2024-07-08DOI: 10.3390/cryptography8030031
Dana Sairangazhykyzy Amirkhanova, Maksim Iavich, O. Mamyrbayev
{"title":"Lattice-Based Post-Quantum Public Key Encryption Scheme Using ElGamal’s Principles","authors":"Dana Sairangazhykyzy Amirkhanova, Maksim Iavich, O. Mamyrbayev","doi":"10.3390/cryptography8030031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography8030031","url":null,"abstract":"Modern technologies like quantum and cloud computing have reshaped computing, offering immense power and scalability. While beneficial, they also challenge the security of traditional cryptographic systems. Quantum computing threatens RSA and ECC with algorithms like Shor’s algorithm, which can accelerate computations exponentially. This risks exposing these systems to attacks, necessitating quantum-resistant cryptography. Cloud computing poses data security concerns, requiring robust cryptographic mechanisms and access controls. Lattice-based cryptography, leveraging problems like the Short Integer Solution (SIS), emerges as a solution. This paper presents a novel quantum-resistant public key encryption scheme based on ElGamal and SIS, ensuring security against quantum and classical threats in modern cryptographic environments.","PeriodicalId":36072,"journal":{"name":"Cryptography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141667769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CryptographyPub Date : 2024-07-08DOI: 10.3390/cryptography8030030
Mario Alviano, Giada Gabriele
{"title":"Improve Parallel Resistance of Hashcash Tree","authors":"Mario Alviano, Giada Gabriele","doi":"10.3390/cryptography8030030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography8030030","url":null,"abstract":"Denial of Service (DoS) attacks remain a persistent threat to online systems, necessitating continual innovation in defense mechanisms. In this work, we present an improved algorithm for mitigating DoS attacks through the augmentation of client puzzle protocols. Building upon the foundation of hashcash trees, a recently proposed data structure combining hashcash and Merkle trees, we introduce a new version of the data structure that enhances resistance against parallel computation (a common tactic employed by attackers). By incorporating the labels of children and the next node in a breadth-first traversal into the hash function, we establish a sequential processing order that inhibits parallel node evaluation. The added dependency on the next node significantly elevates the complexity of constructing hashcash trees, introducing a linear number of synchronization points and fortifying resilience against potential attacks. Empirical evaluation demonstrates the efficacy of our approach, showcasing its ability to accurately control puzzle difficulty while bolstering system security against DoS threats.","PeriodicalId":36072,"journal":{"name":"Cryptography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141668427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CryptographyPub Date : 2024-07-05DOI: 10.3390/cryptography8030029
Javier de la Cruz, Edgar Martínez-Moro, Steven Muñoz-Ruiz, Ricardo Villanueva-Polanco
{"title":"Public Key Protocols from Twisted-Skew Group Rings","authors":"Javier de la Cruz, Edgar Martínez-Moro, Steven Muñoz-Ruiz, Ricardo Villanueva-Polanco","doi":"10.3390/cryptography8030029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography8030029","url":null,"abstract":"This article studies some algebraic structures known as twisted-skew group rings in the context of public key cryptography. We first present some background related to these structures to then specifically introduce particular twisted-skew group rings and show how to utilize them as the underlying algebraic structure to build cryptographic protocols. We closely follow an incremental-like methodology to construct these protocols by putting parts together. As as result, we first introduce a key-agreement protocol and then generalize it to a group key-agreement protocol. We then proceed to construct a probabilistic public key encryption from our two-party key agreement and, finally, introduce a key-encapsulation mechanism from a well-known generic construction applied to probabilistic public encryption. Furthermore, we provide an in-depth security analysis for each cryptographic construction under new related algebraic assumptions and supply a proof-of-concept implementation for various candidate chosen groups.","PeriodicalId":36072,"journal":{"name":"Cryptography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141674814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CryptographyPub Date : 2024-06-04DOI: 10.3390/cryptography8020024
Abdullah Aljuffri, Ruoyu Huang, Laura Muntenaar, Georgi Gaydadjiev, Kezheng Ma, Said Hamdioui, M. Taouil
{"title":"The Security Evaluation of an Efficient Lightweight AES Accelerator","authors":"Abdullah Aljuffri, Ruoyu Huang, Laura Muntenaar, Georgi Gaydadjiev, Kezheng Ma, Said Hamdioui, M. Taouil","doi":"10.3390/cryptography8020024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography8020024","url":null,"abstract":"The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is widely recognized as a robust cryptographic algorithm utilized to protect data integrity and confidentiality. When it comes to lightweight implementations of the algorithm, the literature mainly emphasizes area and power optimization, often overlooking considerations related to performance and security. This paper evaluates two of our previously proposed lightweight AES implementations using both profiled and non-profiled attacks. One is an unprotected implementation, and the other one is a protected version using Domain-Oriented Masking (DOM). The findings of this study indicate that the inclusion of DOM in the design enhances its resistance to attacks at the cost of doubling the area.","PeriodicalId":36072,"journal":{"name":"Cryptography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141267567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CryptographyPub Date : 2024-06-02DOI: 10.3390/cryptography8020023
Younes Lahraoui, S. Lazaar, Youssef Amal, Abderrahmane Nitaj
{"title":"Securing Data Exchange with Elliptic Curve Cryptography: A Novel Hash-Based Method for Message Mapping and Integrity Assurance","authors":"Younes Lahraoui, S. Lazaar, Youssef Amal, Abderrahmane Nitaj","doi":"10.3390/cryptography8020023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography8020023","url":null,"abstract":"To ensure the security of sensitive data, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is adopted as an asymmetric method that balances security and efficiency. Nevertheless, embedding messages into elliptic curve (EC) points poses a significant challenge. The intricacies of this process can greatly affect the overall security and efficiency of the cryptosystem, reflecting security vulnerabilities observed in many existing schemes that utilize ElGamal ECC-based encryption. In this paper, we introduce an innovative hash-based technique for securely embedding messages into EC points before encryption. A random parameter and a shared secret point generated through the EC Diffie–Hellman protocol are used to bolster the scheme’s security. The security of the proposed method is evaluated against various attack models; moreover, the complexity, and sensitivity of the encryption scheme, as well as its inputs, are analyzed. The randomness assessment of the ciphertext was performed using the NIST statistical test suite. Additionally, we propose a mechanism to ensure the integrity of the message by securely appending a tag to the ciphertext. As a consequence, a comprehensive analysis of our scheme demonstrates its effectiveness in maintaining data security and integrity against various attack models. The algorithm also meets more criteria such as the strict avalanche criterion, linear complexity, and operability.","PeriodicalId":36072,"journal":{"name":"Cryptography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141272825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CryptographyPub Date : 2024-05-23DOI: 10.3390/cryptography8020021
Gregory Fitzgibbon, Carlo Ottaviani
{"title":"Constrained Device Performance Benchmarking with the Implementation of Post-Quantum Cryptography","authors":"Gregory Fitzgibbon, Carlo Ottaviani","doi":"10.3390/cryptography8020021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography8020021","url":null,"abstract":"Advances in quantum computers may pose a significant threat to existing public-key encryption methods, which are crucial to the current infrastructure of cyber security. Both RSA and ECDSA, the two most widely used security algorithms today, may be (in principle) solved by the Shor algorithm in polynomial time due to its ability to efficiently solve the discrete logarithm problem, potentially making present infrastructures insecure against a quantum attack. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reacted with the post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standardization process to develop and optimize a series of post-quantum algorithms (PQAs) based on difficult mathematical problems that are not susceptible to being solved by Shor’s algorithm. Whilst high-powered computers can run these PQAs efficiently, further work is needed to investigate and benchmark the performance of these algorithms on lower-powered (constrained) devices and the ease with which they may be integrated into existing protocols such as TLS. This paper provides quantitative benchmark and handshake performance data for the most recently selected PQAs from NIST, tested on a Raspberry Pi 4 device to simulate today’s IoT (Internet of Things) devices, and provides quantitative comparisons with previous benchmarking data on a range of constrained systems. CRYSTALS-Kyber and CRYSTALS-Dilithium are shown to be the most efficient PQAs in the key encapsulation and signature algorithms, respectively, with Falcon providing the optimal TLS handshake size.","PeriodicalId":36072,"journal":{"name":"Cryptography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141106077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CryptographyPub Date : 2024-05-09DOI: 10.3390/cryptography8020020
Zahraa Abdullah Ali, Z. Abduljabbar, H. Al-Asadi, V. O. Nyangaresi, I. Q. Abduljaleel, Abdulla J. Y. Aldarwish
{"title":"A Provably Secure Anonymous Authentication Protocol for Consumer and Service Provider Information Transmissions in Smart Grids","authors":"Zahraa Abdullah Ali, Z. Abduljabbar, H. Al-Asadi, V. O. Nyangaresi, I. Q. Abduljaleel, Abdulla J. Y. Aldarwish","doi":"10.3390/cryptography8020020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography8020020","url":null,"abstract":"Smart grids integrate information technology, decision support systems, communication networks, and sensing technologies. All these components cooperate to facilitate dynamic power adjustments based on received client consumption reports. Although this brings forth energy efficiency, the transmission of sensitive data over the public internet exposes these networks to numerous attacks. To this end, numerous security solutions have been presented recently. Most of these techniques deploy conventional cryptographic systems such as public key infrastructure, blockchains, and physically unclonable functions that have either performance or security issues. In this paper, a fairly efficient authentication scheme is developed and analyzed. Its formal security analysis is carried out using the Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, which shows that the session key negotiated is provably secure. We also execute a semantic security analysis of this protocol to demonstrate that it can resist typical smart grid attacks such as privileged insider, guessing, eavesdropping, and ephemeral secret leakages. Moreover, it has the lowest amount of computation costs and relatively lower communication overheads as well as storage costs.","PeriodicalId":36072,"journal":{"name":"Cryptography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140996481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CryptographyPub Date : 2024-05-01DOI: 10.3390/cryptography8020018
Peng Zhang, Ao Duan, Hengrui Lu
{"title":"An Efficient Homomorphic Argmax Approximation for Privacy-Preserving Neural Networks","authors":"Peng Zhang, Ao Duan, Hengrui Lu","doi":"10.3390/cryptography8020018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography8020018","url":null,"abstract":"Privacy-preserving neural networks offer a promising solution to train and predict without user privacy leakage, and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) stands out as one of the key technologies, as it enables homomorphic operations over encrypted data. However, only addition and multiplication homomorphisms are supported by FHE, and thus, it faces huge challenges when implementing non-linear functions with ciphertext inputs. Among the non-linear functions in neural networks, one may refer to the activation function, the argmax function, and maximum pooling. Inspired by using a composition of low-degree minimax polynomials to approximate sign and argmax functions, this study focused on optimizing the homomorphic argmax approximation, where argmax is a mathematical operation that identifies the index of the maximum value within a given set of values. For the method that uses compositions of low-degree minimax polynomials to approximate argmax, in order to further reduce approximation errors and improve computational efficiency, we propose an improved homomorphic argmax approximation algorithm that includes rotation accumulation, tree-structured comparison, normalization, and finalization phases. And then, the proposed homomorphic argmax algorithm was integrated into a neural network structure. Comparative experiments indicate that the network with our proposed argmax algorithm achieved a slight increase in accuracy while significantly reducing the inference latency by 58%, as the homomorphic sign and rotation operations were rapidly reduced.","PeriodicalId":36072,"journal":{"name":"Cryptography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141046584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}