HeeSeok Kim

A fast and provably secure higher-order masking of AES S-box

This paper proposes an efficient and secure higher-order masking algorithm for AES S-box that consumes the most computation time of the higher-order masked AES. During the past few years, much of the research has focused on finding higher-order masking schemes for this AES S-box, but these are still slow for embedded processors use. Our proposed higher-order masking of AES S-box is constructed based on the inversion operation over the composite field. We replace the subfield operations over the composite field into the table lookup operation, but these precomputation tables do not require much ROM space because these are the operations over GF(24). In the implementation results, we show that the higher-order masking scheme using our masked S-box is about 2.54 (second-order masking) and 3.03 (third-order masking) times faster than the fastest method among the existing higher-order masking schemes of AES.

Aberrant ribosome biogenesis activates c-Myc and ASK1 pathways resulting in p53-dependent G1 arrest

The largest energy consumer in the cell is the ribosome biogenesis whose aberrancy elicits various diseases in humans. It has been recently revealed that p53 induction, along with cell cycle arrest, is related with abnormal ribosome biogenesis, but the exact mechanism still remains unknown. In this study, we have found that aberrant ribosome biogenesis activates two parallel cellular pathways, c-Myc and ASK1/p38, which result in p53 induction and G1 arrest. The c-Myc stabilizes p53 by rpL11-mediated HDM2 inhibition, and ASK1/p38 activates p53 by phosphorylation on serine 15 and 33. Our studies demonstrate the relationship between these two pathways and p53 induction. The changes caused by impaired ribosomal stress, such as p53 induction and G1 arrest, were completely disappeared by inhibition of either pathway. These findings suggest a monitoring mechanism of c-Myc and ASK1/p38 against abnormal ribosome biogenesis through controlling the stability and activity of p53 protein.

First-order side channel attacks on Zhang’s countermeasures

Abstract Zhang’s three countermeasures are known to be secure against certain first-order side channel attacks such as differential power analysis and correlation power analysis. This security comes from the countermeasures’ use of random points to blind the message and random integers to blind the secret scalar. In this paper, we propose first-order side channel attack methods that can perfectly break these three countermeasures. Even though Zhang’s countermeasures use random points and random integers our attacks are made possible by the fact that intermediate values computed by these countermeasures are dependent on specific values that we can guess. The experimental results verify that the proposed attack methods can successfully break existing countermeasures.

An Algorithm for Switching from Arithmetic to Boolean Masking with Low Memory

Power analysis attacks are techniques to analyze power signals to find out the secrets when cryptographic algorithm is performed. One of the most famous countermeasure against power analysis attacks is masking methods. Masking types are largely classified into two types which are boolean masking and arithmetic masking. For the cryptographic algorithm to be used with boolean and arithmetic masking at the same time, the converting algorithm can switch between boolean and arithmetic masking. In this paper we propose an algorithm for switching from boolean to arithmetic masking using storage size at less cost than ones. The proposed algorithm is configured to convert using the look-up table without the least significant bit(LSB), because of equal the bit of boolean and arithmetic masking. This makes it possible to design a converting algorithm compared to the previous algorithm at a lower cost without sacrificing performance. In addition, by applying the technique at the LEA it showed up to 26 percent performance improvement over existing techniques.

A study on extraction of optimized API sequence length and combination for efficient malware classification

With the development of the Internet, the number of cyber threats is continuously increasing and their techniques are also evolving for the purpose of attacking our crucial systems. Since attackers are able to easily make exploit codes, i.e., malware, using dedicated generation tools, the number of malware is rapidly increasing. However, it is not easy to analyze all of malware due to an extremely large number of malware. Because of this, many researchers have proposed the malware classification methods that aim to identify unforeseen malware from the well-known malware. The existing malware classification methods used malicious information obtained from the static and the dynamic malware analysis as the criterion of calculating the similarity between malwares. Also, most of them used API functions and their sequences that are divided into a certain length. Thus, the accuracy of the malware classification heavily depends on the length of divided API sequences. In this paper, we propose an extraction method of optimized API sequence length and combination that can be used for improving the performance of the malware classification.

Development of a Performance Evaluation Model on Similarity Measurement Method of Malware

날로 급증하는 대량의 악성코드들을 분류하여 악성코드에 대한 분석시간을 단축하고 신종의 악성코드를 발견하기 위한 악성코드 분류의 필요성이 대두됨에 따라 대량의 악성코드들을 분류하기 위한 다양한 악성 코드 유사도 측정 기법이 제안되고 있다. 하지만 제안된 기존 연구들은 대부분 유사도 측정 기법을 소개하 고 해당 기법에 의한 악성코드 분류 결과만을 제시하고 있으며, 다른 유사도 측정 기법과의 성능 비교 결과 는 제시하지 않는다. 이는 유사도 측정 기법의 성능을 비교할 수 있는 평가 모델이 존재하지 않기 때문이 다. 본 논문에서는 다양한 악성코드 유사도 측정 기법들의 성능을 비교 및 평가할 수 있는 악성코드 유사도 측정기법의 성능평가 모델로 성공확률과 신뢰도의 두 지표를 제안한다. 또한 본 논문에서는 두 지표를 이 용해 기존 유사도 측정 기법들의 성능을 비교 및 평가한다.

New Type of Collision Attack on Power-Analysis Resistant AES

This paper introduces a new collision attack on first-order masked AES. This attack is a known plaintext attack, while the existing collision attacks are a chosen plaintext attack. In addition, our method is more efficient than the second-order power analysis and requires about 1/27.5 power measurements by comparison with the last collision attack. Some experiment results of this paper support this fact. In this paper, we also introduce a simple countermeasure, which can protect against our attack.

Efficient Masking Method to Protect SEED Against Power Analysis Attack

In the recent years, power attacks were widely investigated, and so various countermeasures have been proposed. In the case of block ciphers, masking methods that blind the intermediate results in the algorithm computations(encryption, decryption) are well-known. In case of SEED block cipher, it uses 32 bit arithmetic addition and S-box operations as non-linear operations. Therefore the masking type conversion operations, which require some operating time and memory, are required to satisfy the masking method of all non-linear operations. In this paper, we propose a new masked S-boxes that can minimize the number of the masking type conversion operation. Moreover we construct just one masked S-box table and propose a new formula that can compute the other masked S-boxs output by using this S-box table. Therefore the memory requirements for masked S-boxes are reduced to half of the existing masking methods one.

Enhanced doubling attacks on signed-all-bits set recoding

In cryptographic devices like a smart card whose computing ability and memory are limited, cryptographic algorithms should be performed efficiently. However, the issue of efficiency sometimes raises vulnerabilities against side channel attacks (SCAs). In elliptic curve cryptosystems, one of main operations is the scalar multiplication. Thus it must be constructed in safety against SCAs. Recently, Hedabou et al. proposed a signed-all-bits set (sABS) recoding as simple power analysis countermeasure, which is also secure against doubling attack (DA). In this paper we propose enhanced doubling attacks which break Hedabous countermeasure based on sABS recoding, and then show the statistical approach of noise reduction to experiment on the proposed attacks in actuality. We also introduce a countermeasure based on a projective coordinate.