No abstract

We show that the amount of information about the key that an unknown-message attacker can extract from a deterministic side-channel is bounded from above by |O| log 2 (n + 1) bits, where n is the number of side-channel measurements and O is the set of possible observations. We use this bound to derive a novel countermeasure against timing attacks, where the strength of the security guarantee can be freely traded for the resulting performance penalty. We give algorithms that efficiently and optimally adjust this trade-off for given constraints on the side-channel leakage or on the efficiency of the cryptosystem. Finally, we perform a case-study that shows that applying our countermeasure leads to implementations with minor performance overhead and formal security guarantees.

No abstract

Risk-based authentication (RBA) aims to strengthen password-based authentication rather than replacing it. RBA does this by monitoring and recording additional features during the login process. If feature values at login time differ significantly from those observed before, RBA requests an additional proof of identification. Although RBA is recommended in the NIST digital identity guidelines, it has so far been used almost exclusively by major online services. This is partly due to a lack of open knowledge and implementations that would allow any service provider to roll out RBA protection to its users. To close this gap, we provide a first in-depth analysis of RBA characteristics in a practical deployment. We observed N=780 users with 247 unique features on a real-world online service for over 1.8 years. Based on our collected data set, we provide (i) a behavior analysis of two RBA implementations that were apparently used by major online services in the wild, (ii) a benchmark of the features to extract a subset that is most suitable for RBA use, (iii) a new feature that has not been used in RBA before, and (iv) factors which have a significant effect on RBA performance. Our results show that RBA needs to be carefully tailored to each online service, as even small configuration adjustments can greatly impact RBA's security and usability properties. We provide insights on the selection of features, their weightings, and the risk classification in order to benefit from RBA after a minimum number of login attempts.

No abstract

Passwords are widely used for user authentication, and will likely remain in use in the foreseeable future, despite several weaknesses. One important weakness is that human-generated passwords are far from being random, which makes them susceptible to guessing attacks. Understanding the adversaries capabilities for guessing attacks is a fundamental necessity for estimating their impact and advising countermeasures. This paper presents OMEN, a new Markov model-based password cracker that extends ideas proposed by Narayanan and Shmatikov (CCS 2005). The main novelty of our tool is that it generates password candidates according to their occurrence probabilities, i.e., it outputs most likely passwords first. As shown by our extensive experiments, OMEN significantly improves guessing speed over existing proposals. In particular, we compare the performance of OMEN with the Markov mode of John the Ripper, which implements the password indexing function by Narayanan and Shmatikov. OMEN guesses more than 40% of passwords correctly with the first 90 million guesses, while JtR-Markov (for T = 1 billion) needs at least eight times as many guesses to reach the same goal, and OMEN guesses more than 80% of passwords correctly at 10 billion guesses, more than all probabilistic password crackers we compared against.

No abstract

Abstract. Key-dependent message security, short KDM security, was introduced by Black, Rogaway and Shrimpton to address the case where key cycles occur among encryptions, e.g., a key is encrypted with itself. We extend this definition to include the cases of adaptive corruptions and arbitrary active attacks, called adKDM security incorporating several novel design choices and substantially differing from prior definitions for public-key security. We also show that the OAEP encryption scheme (using a partial-domain one-way function) satisfies the strong notion of adKDM security in the random oracle model. The OAEP construction thus constitutes a suitable candidate for implementating symbolic abstractions of encryption schemes in a computationally sound manner under active adversaries.