{"title":"Hardness of Module-LWE with Semiuniform Seeds from Module-NTRU","authors":"Wenjuan Jia, Jiang Zhang, Baocang Wang","doi":"10.1049/2023/2969432","DOIUrl":"10.1049/2023/2969432","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>The module learning with errors (MLWE) problem has attracted significant attention and has been widely used in building a multitude of lattice-based cryptographic primitives. The hardness of the MLWE problem has been established for several variants, but most of the known results require the seed distribution (i.e., the distribution of matrix <b>A</b>) to be the uniform distribution. In this paper, we show that under the Module-N-th degree Truncated polynomial Ring Units (NTRU) (MNTRU) assumption, the search MLWE problem can still be hard for some distributions that are not (even computationally indistinguishable from) the uniform distribution. Specifically, we show that if the seed distribution is a semiuniform distribution (namely, the seed distribution can be publicly derived from and has a “small difference” to the uniform distribution), then for appropriate settings of parameters, the search MLWE problem is hard under the MNTRU assumption. Moreover, we also show that under the appropriate settings of parameters, the search learning with errors over rings problem with semiuniform seeds can still be hard under the NTRU assumption due to our results for the search MLWE problem with semiuniform seeds being rank-preserving.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50380,"journal":{"name":"IET Information Security","volume":"2023 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1049/2023/2969432","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135412746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hardness of (Semiuniform) MLWE with Short Distributions Using the Rényi Divergence","authors":"Wenjuan Jia, Baocang Wang","doi":"10.1049/2023/2104380","DOIUrl":"10.1049/2023/2104380","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>The module learning with errors (MLWE) problem has attracted considerable attention for its tradeoff between security and efficiency. The quantum/classical worst-case to average-case hardness for the MLWE problem (or more exactly, a family of problems) has been established, but most of the known results require the seed distribution to be the uniform distribution. In the present paper, we show that, using the noise flooding technique based on the Rényi divergence, the search MLWE problem with uniform <i>B</i>-bounded secret distribution for 1 ≤ <i>B</i> ≪ <i>q</i> can still be hard for some seed distributions that are not (even computationally indistinguishable from) the uniform distribution under the standard MLWE assumption. Specifically, we show that if the seed distribution is a semiuniform distribution (namely, the seed distribution can be publicly derived from and has a “small difference” to the uniform distribution), then for suitable parameter choices, the search MLWE problem with uniform bounded secret distribution is hard under the standard MLWE assumption. Moreover, we also show that under the appropriate setting of parameters, the search MLWE problem with uniform bounded noise distribution is at least as hard as the standard MLWE assumption using a different approach than the one used by Boudgoust et al. in [JoC 2023].</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50380,"journal":{"name":"IET Information Security","volume":"2023 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1049/2023/2104380","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135412888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Defending against social engineering attacks: A security pattern-based analysis framework","authors":"Tong Li, Chuanyong Song, Qinyu Pang","doi":"10.1049/ise2.12125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1049/ise2.12125","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Social engineering attacks are a growing threat to modern complex systems. Increasingly, attackers are exploiting people's \"vulnerabilities\" to carry out social engineering attacks for malicious purposes. Although such a severe threat has attracted the attention of academia and industry, it is challenging to propose a comprehensive and practical set of countermeasures to protect systems from social engineering attacks due to its interdisciplinary nature. Moreover, the existing social engineering defence research is highly dependent on manual analysis, which is time-consuming and labour-intensive and cannot solve practical problems efficiently and pragmatically. This paper proposes a systematic approach to generate countermeasures based on a typical social engineering attack process. Specifically, we systematically ‘attack’ each step of social engineering attacks to prevent, mitigate, or eliminate them, resulting in 62 countermeasures. We have designed a set of social engineering security patterns that encapsulate relevant security knowledge to provide practical assistance in the defence analysis of social engineering attacks. Finally, we present an automatic analysis framework for applying social engineering security patterns. We applied the case study method and performed semi-structured interviews with nine participants to evaluate our proposal, showing that our approach effectively defended against social engineering attacks.</p>","PeriodicalId":50380,"journal":{"name":"IET Information Security","volume":"17 4","pages":"703-726"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1049/ise2.12125","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50136879","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Solving blockchain trilemma using off-chain storage protocol","authors":"Saha Reno, Md. Mokammel Haque","doi":"10.1049/ise2.12124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1049/ise2.12124","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Trilemma in blockchain refers to the infamous problem of simultaneously not delivering the three critical aspects of a ledger: security, scalability, and decentralisation. While security and scalability hinder decentralisation, security is jeopardised if the scalability is escalated. This deficiency of not maintaining a balance among these three crucial factors restricts the broader adoption of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies in the industries. This paper proposes a solution to the blockchain trilemma by implementing a public ledger using The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and a newly introduced strategy called the double-chain technique. The scalability and decentralisation features are guaranteed by the distributed file system of IPFS and the public nature of the blockchain suggested in this study. Although any consensus can be plugged into our system, the proof-of-work consensus is utilised to ensure that the security is not compromised while stabilising scalability and decentralisation.</p>","PeriodicalId":50380,"journal":{"name":"IET Information Security","volume":"17 4","pages":"681-702"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1049/ise2.12124","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50137203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An optimisation for a two-round good-case latency protocol","authors":"Kexin Hu, Zhenfeng Zhang, Kaiwen Guo, Weiyu Jiang, Xiaoman Li, Jiang Han","doi":"10.1049/ise2.12123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1049/ise2.12123","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Byzantine broadcast is a fundamental primitive in distributed computing. A highly efficient Byzantine broadcast protocol, motivated by the real-world performance of practical state machine replication protocols, is increasingly needed. This article focuses on the state-of-the-art partially synchronous Byzantine broadcast protocol proposed by Abraham et al. (PODC’21), which achieves optimal good-case latency of two rounds and optimal resilience of <i>n</i> ≥ 5<i>f</i> − 1 in this setting. Each step of the protocol is analysed, and then improved by cutting down the number of messages required to be collected and transmitted <i>in the heaviest step</i> of the protocol <i>by about half</i>, without adding any extra cost. This benefits from a new property, named “spread”, that we identify and extract from the original protocol. It helps us to eliminate non-essential work in its view-change procedure. The authors also show that no further reduction is possible without violating security. A prototype is implemented and the performances of improved and original protocols are evaluated in the same environment. The results show that our improvement can achieve about 50% lower communication cost and 40% shorter latency at a scale of 100 replicas. The latency gap becomes wider as the scale further increases.</p>","PeriodicalId":50380,"journal":{"name":"IET Information Security","volume":"17 4","pages":"664-680"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1049/ise2.12123","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50131632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Search framework for neutral bits and boomerangs in SHA-1 collision attacks","authors":"Degang Li, Yang Yang, Guang Zeng","doi":"10.1049/ise2.12122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1049/ise2.12122","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Neutral bits and boomerangs are key techniques for accelerating collision search in SHA-1 attacks. The current acceleration techniques for SHA-1 near-collision attacks are reviewed and a generic search framework for neutral bits and boomerangs is presented. The framework can efficiently construct auxiliary paths for a given differential path and message bit relations and find and store ideal boomerangs. The framework was applied to free-start attacks for 76-step SHA-1, and the complexity was reduced from <math>\u0000 <semantics>\u0000 <mrow>\u0000 <msup>\u0000 <mn>2</mn>\u0000 <mn>50.25</mn>\u0000 </msup>\u0000 </mrow>\u0000 <annotation> ${2}^{50.25}$</annotation>\u0000 </semantics></math> to <math>\u0000 <semantics>\u0000 <mrow>\u0000 <msup>\u0000 <mn>2</mn>\u0000 <mn>47.9</mn>\u0000 </msup>\u0000 </mrow>\u0000 <annotation> ${2}^{47.9}$</annotation>\u0000 </semantics></math>. Relaxing the boomerang's restrictions on message words, the authors propose an accelerating technique termed semi-boomerangs, combined with the search framework of boomerangs, which increases the speed of collision search by 3.48 times in a free-start attack for 80-step SHA-1 and the complexity for 80-step attack was reduced from <math>\u0000 <semantics>\u0000 <mrow>\u0000 <msup>\u0000 <mn>2</mn>\u0000 <mn>57.5</mn>\u0000 </msup>\u0000 </mrow>\u0000 <annotation> ${2}^{57.5}$</annotation>\u0000 </semantics></math> to <math>\u0000 <semantics>\u0000 <mrow>\u0000 <msup>\u0000 <mn>2</mn>\u0000 <mn>55.7</mn>\u0000 </msup>\u0000 </mrow>\u0000 <annotation> ${2}^{55.7}$</annotation>\u0000 </semantics></math>.</p>","PeriodicalId":50380,"journal":{"name":"IET Information Security","volume":"17 4","pages":"647-663"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1049/ise2.12122","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50124897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exploiting statistical effective fault attack in a blind setting","authors":"Navid Vafaei, Hadi Soleimany, Nasour Bagheri","doi":"10.1049/ise2.12121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1049/ise2.12121","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In order to obtain the secret key, the majority of physical attacks require knowledge of the plaintext or ciphertext, which may be unavailable or cannot be exploited. Blind attacks are introduced to do key recovery in circumstances where the adversary has no direct access to plaintext and ciphertext. A combination of fault and power attacks can circumvent typical countermeasures in this setting, for example, Fault Template Attack (FTA). However, FTA relies on bit fault injection, which is difficult to implement in practice. The SIFA-blind, a framework for executing the Statistical Ineffective Fault Attack, is more flexible, but sensitivity to setup noise and missed faults is its main drawback. To address this deficiency, we suggest two ways to use Statistical Effective Fault Attack in a blind setting that are much less affected by missed faults and noise when measuring power traces, even though they do not use fault injection at the bit level. In order to demonstrate the viability and adaptability of our proposed attacks, we injected a fault via glitch frequency onto the ChipWhisperer board. While SEFA-blind does not need a bit-level fault, our results demonstrate that it is better than SIFA-blind when the number of missed faults increases.</p>","PeriodicalId":50380,"journal":{"name":"IET Information Security","volume":"17 4","pages":"639-646"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1049/ise2.12121","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50141900","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revisit two memoryless state-recovery cryptanalysis methods on A5/1","authors":"Yanbin Xu, Yonglin Hao, Mingxing Wang","doi":"10.1049/ise2.12120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1049/ise2.12120","url":null,"abstract":"<p>At ASIACRYPT 2019, Zhang proposed a near collision attack on A5/1 claiming to recover the 64-bit A5/1 state with a time complexity around 2<sup>32</sup> cipher ticks with negligible memory requirements. Soon after its proposal, Zhang's near collision attack was severely challenged by Derbez et al. who claimed that Zhang's attack cannot have a time complexity lower than Golic's memoryless guess-and-determine attack dating back to EUROCRYPT 1997. In this article, both the guess-and-determine and the near collision attacks for recovering A5/1 states with negligible memory complexities are studied. Firstly, a new guessing technique called the <i>move guessing technique</i> that can construct linear equation filters in a more efficient manner is proposed. Such a technique can be applied to both guess-and-determine and collision attacks for efficiency improvements. Secondly, the filtering strength of the linear equation systems is taken into account for complexity analysis. Such filtering strength are evaluated with practical experiments making the complexities more convincing. Based on such new techniques, the authors are able to give 2 new guess-and-determine attacks on A5/1: the 1st attack recovers the internal state <math>\u0000 <semantics>\u0000 <mrow>\u0000 <msup>\u0000 <mi>s</mi>\u0000 <mn>0</mn>\u0000 </msup>\u0000 </mrow>\u0000 <annotation> ${boldsymbol{s}}^{0}$</annotation>\u0000 </semantics></math> with time complexity 2<sup>43.92</sup>; the 2nd one recovers a different state <math>\u0000 <semantics>\u0000 <mrow>\u0000 <msup>\u0000 <mi>s</mi>\u0000 <mn>1</mn>\u0000 </msup>\u0000 </mrow>\u0000 <annotation> ${boldsymbol{s}}^{1}$</annotation>\u0000 </semantics></math> with complexity 2<sup>43.25</sup>. Golic's guess-and-determine attack and Zhang's near collision attacks are revisited. According to our detailed analysis, the complexity of Golic's <math>\u0000 <semantics>\u0000 <mrow>\u0000 <msup>\u0000 <mi>s</mi>\u0000 <mn>1</mn>\u0000 </msup>\u0000 </mrow>\u0000 <annotation> ${boldsymbol{s}}^{1}$</annotation>\u0000 </semantics></math> recovery attack is no lower than 2<sup>46.04</sup>, higher than the previously believed 2<sup>43</sup>. On the other hand, Zhang's near collision attack recovers <math>\u0000 <semantics>\u0000 <mrow>\u0000 <msup>\u0000 <mi>s</mi>\u0000 <mn>0</mn>\u0000 </msup>\u0000 </mrow>\u0000 <annotation> ${boldsymbol{s}}^{0}$</annotation>\u0000 </semantics></math> with the time complexity 2<sup>53.19</sup>: such a complexity can be further lowered to ","PeriodicalId":50380,"journal":{"name":"IET Information Security","volume":"17 4","pages":"626-638"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1049/ise2.12120","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50152087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bit-level evaluation of piccolo block cipher by satisfiability problem solver","authors":"Shion Utsumi, Kosei Sakamoto, Takanori Isobe","doi":"10.1049/ise2.12119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1049/ise2.12119","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the field of symmetric key cryptography, the security against distinguishing attacks is one of the crucial security requirements. With advancements in computing capabilities and cryptanalysis techniques in recent years, more efficient methods have been proposed for exploring distinguishers using Mixed-Integer Linear Programing (MILP) or satisfiability problem (SAT), thereby updating the security bounds of various ciphers. Piccolo is a lightweight block cipher proposed at CHES in 2011, with support 80-bit and 128-bit keys. Designers have undergone a rough security evaluation against differential, impossible differential, and related-key differential attacks, based on nibble-wise estimations due to the limitation of computational resource. Here, the authors perform bit-level evaluations on Piccolo block cipher against differential, integral and impossible differential attacks by leveraging SAT-based approaches. For the first time, the authors succeed in identifying optimal differential distinguisher on 6 rounds in the single key setting, and on 10/12 rounds in the related-key setting for 80-bit and 128-bit keys, respectively. For integral attacks, the authors find integral distinguisher up to 7 rounds. Although the number of attacked rounds is the same as that of the previous attack, the authors find the 56th ordered integral distinguisher, which enable reducing the data complexity for attacks from 2<sup>63</sup> to 2<sup>56</sup>. As a result, the authors find the 7-round impossible differentials which is the same number of rounds as the previous nibble-wise evaluation.</p>","PeriodicalId":50380,"journal":{"name":"IET Information Security","volume":"17 4","pages":"616-625"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1049/ise2.12119","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50147304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"FlowMFD: Characterisation and classification of tor traffic using MFD chromatographic features and spatial–temporal modelling","authors":"Liukun He, Liangmin Wang, Keyang Cheng, Yifan Xu","doi":"10.1049/ise2.12118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1049/ise2.12118","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Tor traffic tracking is valuable for combating cybercrime as it provides insights into the traffic active on the Tor network. Tor-based application traffic classification is one of the tracking methods, which can effectively classify Tor application services. However, it is not effective in classifying specific applications due to more complicated traffic patterns in the spatial and temporal dimensions. As a solution, the authors propose FlowMFD, a novel Tor-based application traffic classification approach using amount-frequency-direction (MFD) chromatographic features and spatial-temporal modelling. Expressly, FlowMFD mines the interaction pattern between Tor applications and servers by analysing the time series features (TSFs) of different size packets. Then MFD chromatographic features (MFDCF) are designed to represent the pattern. Those features integrate multiple low-dimensional TSFs into a single plane and retain most pattern information. In addition, FlowMFD utilises a cascaded model with a two-dimensional convolutional neural network (2D-CNN) and a bidirectional gated recurrent unit to capture spatial-temporal dependencies between MFDCF. The authors evaluate FlowMFD under the public ISCXTor2016 dataset and the self-collected dataset, where we achieve an accuracy of 92.1% (4.2%↑) and 88.3% (4.5%↑), respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art comparison methods.</p>","PeriodicalId":50380,"journal":{"name":"IET Information Security","volume":"17 4","pages":"598-615"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1049/ise2.12118","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50143678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}