The DRAM Latency PUF: Quickly Evaluating Physical Unclonable Functions by Exploiting the Latency-Reliability Tradeoff in Modern Commodity DRAM Devices

Abstract: Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are commonly used in cryptography to identify devices based on the uniqueness of their physical microstructures. DRAM-based PUFs have numerous advantages over PUF designs that exploit alternative substrates: DRAM is a major component of many modern systems, and a DRAM-based PUF can generate many unique identifiers. However, none of the

Topology-Hiding MPC

Abstract: Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows n distrusting parties to jointly compute a function of their inputs while revealing nothing but the output of the function. At TCC 15, Moran et al. [1] introduced “Topology-Hiding MPC”. Here, one considers MPC over an incomplete network, where the network topology, in itself, is considered sensitive information. The

Ratio Buckets: A Numeric Method for r-Fold Tight Differential Privacy

Abstract: Privacy guarantees of a privacy-enhancing system have to be robust against thousands of observations for many realistic application scenarios, such as anonymous communication systems, privacy-enhancing database queries, or privacy-enhancing machine-learning methods. The notion of r-fold Approximate Differential Privacy (ADP) offers a well-established framework with clear privacy bounds and with composition theorems that capture how

PISKES: Pervasive Internet-Scale Key Establishment System

Abstract: IP address spoofing allows large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) reflection attacks. In these attacks, an adversary sends the initial packet of a communication protocol to a reflector, without performing a full handshake. An efficient first-packet authentication system can mitigate such attacks. This work presents the design, implementation, analysis, and experimental evaluation of PISKES,

Anonymous Communication for Messengers via “Forced” Participation

Abstract: Anonymous communication networks (ACNs) are basic building blocks for obtaining or exchanging data in a privacy-preserving manner. ACNs suffer from a bootstrapping problem: having few users leads to a small anonymity set, which renders the ACN unattractive.  We propose a system, CoverUp, that tackles the bootstrapping problem for ACNs. The key idea is to draw

[ZISC Lunch Seminar] Analyses, measurements, and solutions — a few example cases in data security and authentication

Abstract: This talk is primarily to introduce some of our recent projects, and some project ideas for possible collaboration. The talk will touch several topics. I will go into details based on the group’s interests. Feel free to check the papers at: https://users.encs.concordia.ca/~mmannan/pubs-year.html *Anti-coercion* we have been exploring solutions for data security in coercive situations

[ZISC Lunch Seminar] Towards Trojan-tolerant Cryptographic Hardware

Abstract: The current consensus within the security industry is that high-assurance systems cannot tolerate the presence of compromised hardware components. In this talk, we challenge this perception and demonstrate how trusted, high-assurance hardware can be built from untrusted and potentially malicious components.   The majority of IC vendors outsource the fabrication of their designs to