Transparency order versus confusion coefficient:a case study of NIST lightweight cryptography S-Boxes

Side-channel resistance is nowadays widely accepted as a crucial factor in deciding the security assurance level of cryptographic implementations.In most cases,non-linear components(e.g.S-Boxes)of cryptographic algorithms will be chosen as primary targets of side-channel attacks(SCAs).In order to measure side-channel resistance of S-Boxes,three theoretical metrics are proposed and they are revisited transparency order(VTO),confusion coefficients variance(CCV),and minimum confusion coefficient(MCC),respectively.However,the practical effectiveness of these metrics remains still unclear.Taking the 4-bit and 8-bit S-Boxes used in NIST Lightweight Cryptography candidates as concrete examples,this paper takes a comprehensive study of the applicability of these metrics.First of all,we empirically investigate the relations among three metrics for targeted S-boxes,and find that CCV is almost linearly correlated with VTO,while MCC is inconsistent with the other two.Furthermore,in order to verify which metric is more effective in which scenarios,we perform simulated and practical experiments on nine 4-bit S-Boxes under the non-profiled attacks and profiled attacks,respectively.The experiments show that for quantifying side-channel resistance of S-Boxes under non-profiled attacks,VTO and CCV are more reliable while MCC fails.We also obtain an interesting observation that none of these three metrics is suitable for measuring the resistance of S-Boxes against profiled SCAs.Finally,we try to verify whether these metrics can be applied to compare the resistance of S-Boxes with different sizes.Unfortunately,all of them are invalid in this scenario.

Transparency order versus confusion coefficient:a case study of NIST lightweight cryptography S‑Boxes

Side-channel resistance is nowadays widely accepted as a crucial factor in deciding the security assurance level of cryptographic implementations.In most cases,non-linear components(e.g.S-Boxes)of cryptographic algorithms will be chosen as primary targets of side-channel attacks(SCAs).In order to measure side-channel resistance of S-Boxes,three theoretical metrics are proposed and they are reVisited transparency order(VTO),confusion coefficients variance(CCV),and minimum confusion coefficient(MCC),respectively.However,the practical effectiveness of these metrics remains still unclear.Taking the 4-bit and 8-bit S-Boxes used in NIST Lightweight Cryptography candidates as concrete examples,this paper takes a comprehensive study of the applicability of these metrics.First of all,we empirically investigate the relations among three metrics for targeted S-boxes,and find that CCV is almost linearly correlated with VTO,while MCC is inconsistent with the other two.Furthermore,in order to verify which metric is more effective in which scenarios,we perform simulated and practical experiments on nine 4-bit S-Boxes under the nonprofiled attacks and profiled attacks,respectively.The experiments show that for quantifying side-channel resistance of S-Boxes under non-profiled attacks,VTO and CCV are more reliable while MCC fails.We also obtain an interesting observation that none of these three metrics is suitable for measuring the resistance of S-Boxes against profiled SCAs.Finally,we try to verify whether these metrics can be applied to compare the resistance of S-Boxes with different sizes.Unfortunately,all of them are invalid in this scenario.

Improving Smart Home Security via MQTT: Maximizing Data Privacy and Device Authentication Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography

The rapid adoption of Internet of Things(IoT)technologies has introduced significant security challenges across the physical,network,and application layers,particularly with the widespread use of the Message Queue Telemetry Transport(MQTT)protocol,which,while efficient in bandwidth consumption,lacks inherent security features,making it vulnerable to various cyber threats.This research addresses these challenges by presenting a secure,lightweight communication proxy that enhances the scalability and security of MQTT-based Internet of Things(IoT)networks.The proposed solution builds upon the Dang-Scheme,a mutual authentication protocol designed explicitly for resource-constrained environments and enhances it using Elliptic Curve Cryptography(ECC).This integration significantly improves device authentication,data confidentiality,and energy efficiency,achieving an 87.68%increase in data confidentiality and up to 77.04%energy savings during publish/subscribe communications in smart homes.The Middleware Broker System dynamically manages transaction keys and session IDs,offering robust defences against common cyber threats like impersonation and brute-force attacks.Penetration testing with tools such as Hydra and Nmap further validated the system’s security,demonstrating its potential to significantly improve the security and efficiency of IoT networks while underscoring the need for ongoing research to combat emerging threats.

Low Area PRESENT Cryptography in FPGA Using TRNG-PRNG Key Generation

Lightweight Cryptography(LWC)is widely used to provide integrity,secrecy and authentication for the sensitive applications.However,the LWC is vulnerable to various constraints such as high-power consumption,time consumption,and hardware utilization and susceptible to the malicious attackers.In order to overcome this,a lightweight block cipher namely PRESENT architecture is proposed to provide the security against malicious attacks.The True Random Number Generator-Pseudo Random Number Generator(TRNG-PRNG)based key generation is proposed to generate the unpredictable keys,being highly difficult to predict by the hackers.Moreover,the hardware utilization of PRESENT architecture is optimized using the Dual port Read Only Memory(DROM).The proposed PRESENT-TRNGPRNG architecture supports the 64-bit input with 80-bit of key value.The performance of the PRESENT-TRNG-PRNG architecture is evaluated by means of number of slice registers,flip flops,number of slices Look Up Table(LUT),number of logical elements,slices,bonded input/output block(IOB),frequency,power and delay.The input retrieval performances analyzed in this PRESENT-TRNG-PRNG architecture are Peak Signal to Noise Ratio(PSNR),Structural Similarity Index(SSIM)and Mean-Square Error(MSE).The PRESENT-TRNG-PRNG architecture is compared with three different existing PRESENT architectures such as PRESENT On-TheFly(PERSENT-OTF),PRESENT Self-Test Structure(PRESENT-STS)and PRESENT-Round Keys(PRESENT-RK).The operating frequency of the PRESENT-TRNG-PRNG is 612.208 MHz for Virtex 5,which is high as compared to the PRESENT-RK.

TLERAD: Transfer Learning for Enhanced Ransomware Attack Detection

Ransomware has emerged as a critical cybersecurity threat,characterized by its ability to encrypt user data or lock devices,demanding ransom for their release.Traditional ransomware detection methods face limitations due to their assumption of similar data distributions between training and testing phases,rendering them less effective against evolving ransomware families.This paper introduces TLERAD(Transfer Learning for Enhanced Ransomware Attack Detection),a novel approach that leverages unsupervised transfer learning and co-clustering techniques to bridge the gap between source and target domains,enabling robust detection of both known and unknown ransomware variants.The proposed method achieves high detection accuracy,with an AUC of 0.98 for known ransomware and 0.93 for unknown ransomware,significantly outperforming baseline methods.Comprehensive experiments demonstrate TLERAD’s effectiveness in real-world scenarios,highlighting its adapt-ability to the rapidly evolving ransomware landscape.The paper also discusses future directions for enhancing TLERAD,including real-time adaptation,integration with lightweight and post-quantum cryptography,and the incorporation of explainable AI techniques.

RECTANGLE: a bit-slice lightweight block cipher suitable for multiple platforms

In this paper, we propose a new lightweight block cipher named RECTANGLE. The main idea of the design of RECTANGLE is to allow lightweight and fast implementations using bit-slice techniques. RECTANGLE uses an SP-network. The substitution layer consists of 16 4 × 4 S-boxes in parallel. The permutation layer is composed of 3 rotations. As shown in this paper, RECTANGLE offers great performance in both hardware and software environment, which provides enough flexibility for different application scenario. The following are3 main advantages of RECTANGLE. First, RECTANGLE is extremely hardware-friendly. For the 80-bit key version, a one-cycle-per-round parallel implementation only needs 1600 gates for a throughput of 246 Kbits/s at100 k Hz clock and an energy efficiency of 3.0 p J/bit. Second, RECTANGLE achieves a very competitive software speed among the existing lightweight block ciphers due to its bit-slice style. Using 128-bit SSE instructions,a bit-slice implementation of RECTANGLE reaches an average encryption speed of about 3.9 cycles/byte for messages around 3000 bytes. Last but not least, we propose new design criteria for the RECTANGLE S-box.Due to our careful selection of the S-box and the asymmetric design of the permutation layer, RECTANGLE achieves a very good security-performance tradeoff. Our extensive and deep security analysis shows that the highest number of rounds that we can attack, is 18(out of 25).

BORON:an ultra-lightweight and low power encryption design for pervasive computing

We propose an ultra-lightweight, compact, and low power block cipher BORON. BORON is a substitution and permutation based network, which operates on a 64-bit plain text and supports a key length of 128/80 bits. BORON has a compact structure which requires 1939 gate equivalents(GEs) for a 128-bit key and 1626 GEs for an 80-bit key. The BORON cipher includes shift operators, round permutation layers, and XOR operations. Its unique design helps generate a large number of active S-boxes in fewer rounds, which thwarts the linear and differential attacks on the cipher. BORON shows good performance on both hardware and software platforms. BORON consumes less power as compared to the lightweight cipher LED and it has a higher throughput as compared to other existing SP network ciphers. We also present the security analysis of BORON and its performance as an ultra-lightweight compact cipher. BORON is a well-suited cipher design for applications where both a small footprint area and low power dissipation play a crucial role.

An efficient permutation approach for SbPN-based symmetric block ciphers

It is challenging to devise lightweight cryptographic primitives efficient in both hardware and software that can provide an optimum level of security to diverse Internet of Things applications running on low-end constrained devices.Therefore,an effcient hardware design approach that requires some specific hardware resource may not be effcient if implemented in software.Substitution bit Permutation Network based ciphers such as PRESENT and GIFT are effcient,lightweight cryptographic hardware design approaches.These ciphers introduce confusion and diffu-sion by employing a 4×4 static substitution box and bit permutations.The bit-wise permutation is realised by sim-ple rerouting,which is most cost-effective to implement in hardware,resulting in negligible power consumption.However,this method is highly resource-consuming in software,particularly for large block-sized ciphers,with each single-bit permutation requiring multiple sub-operations.This paper proposes a novel software-based design approach for permutation operation in Substitution bit Permutation Network based ciphers using a bit-banding fea-ture.The conventional permutation using bit rotation and the proposed approach have been implemented,analysed and compared for GIFT and PRESENT ciphers on ARM Cortex-M3-based LPC1768 development platform with KEIL MDK used as an Integrated Development Environment.The real-time performance comparison between conven-tional and the proposed approaches in terms of memory(RAM/ROM)footprint,power,energy and execution time has been carried out using ULINKpro and ULINKplus debug adapters for various code and speed optimisation sce-narios.The proposed approach substantially reduces execution time,energy and power consumption for both PRE-SENT and GIFT ciphers,thus demonstrating the effciency of the proposed method for Substitution bit Permutation Network based symmetric block ciphers.