IET Information Security最新文献

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.

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.

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 n ≥ 5f − 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 in the heaviest step of the protocol by about half, 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.

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 $��2^{50.25}�$ to $��2^{47.9}�$. 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 $��2^{57.5}�$ to $��2^{55.7}�$.

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.