Research – Secgroup Ca' Foscari

New attacks on crypto tokens

We performed some experiments on the low-level APDU protocols of several smartcards and authentication tokens. Results include sensitive cryptographic keys in the clear, PINs in the clear or easily reversible, stateless protocols that allow easy injection of commands and restrictions on key use enforced at the PKCS#11 (driver) level that are trivially bypassed at the APDU level.

Our findings will be presented in September at the 19th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses – RAID 2016 (a preprint of the paper is available here).

We have published a summary of the paper.

PhD positions in Computer Science

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice announces 10 PhD positions (6 with scholarship) in Computer Science. The programme is three years long in a context where all the graduate programmes (Master and PhD) are taught in English.

PhD students will have the opportunity to do their work inside the well-established research centres:

ACADIA (AdvanCes in Autonomous, DIstributed and pervAsive systems)
KIIS (Knowledge, Interaction and Intelligent Systems)

In particular, secgroup@unive proposes PhD research projects on the following topics:

1) Analysis of Security APIs
2) Models and tools for highly secure systems

Research will be done under my guidance in the very stimulating context of secgroup@unive also known as c00kies@venice in hacking competitions. For topic 1 it will be possible a collaboration with the spin-off Cryptosense.

Application deadline is 27th May 2013 – at 12:00 pm (CEST). More information and on-line application available here.

RSA padding oracle hands-on

I’ve published a hands-on guide to Padding Oracle Attacks on RSA that appears in Hakin9 – Defend Yourself! Hands-on Cryptography. It is a practical experience on how to break RSA using a side-channel and contains references to our recent results on real devices.

The “Million Message Attack” in 15,000 Messages

An article on our paper “Efficient Padding Oracle Attacks on Cryptographic Hardware“, to appear at CRYPTO 2012 this August, has been published today on the New-York Times. The news seems to be bouncing back and forth on many blogs, sometimes imprecise and exaggerated. Our FAQ page should clarify any doubt you might have. If you are curious and you don’t want to go through the full paper, Matthew Green’s blog provides a very nice write-up.

Gran: grsecurity analyser

Our paper about automated analysis of grsecurity has been accepted for presentation at IEEE CSF 2012 at the end of June. In the paper we formalize grsecurity semantics and, based on that, we develop a tool that checks for security flaws inside real grsecurity policies. The paper is based on Marco Squarcina’s undergraduate thesis (tesi triennale).

The gran tool (grsecurity analyser) is available for download here.