Analyzing packet loss, whether resulting from communication challenges or malicious attacks, is vital for broadcast authentication protocols. It ensures legitimate and continuous authentication across networks. While previous studies have mainly focused on countering Denial of Service (DoS) attacks' impact on packet loss, our research introduces an innovative investigation into packet loss and develops data recovery within variant TESLA protocols. We highlight the efficacy of our proposed hybrid TLI-µTESLA protocol in maintaining continuous and robust connections among network members, while maximizing data recovery in adverse communication conditions. The study examines the unique packet structures associated with each TESLA protocol variant, emphasizing the implications of losing each type on the network performance. We also introduce modifications to variant TESLA protocols to improve data recovery and alleviate the effects of packet loss. Using Java programming language, we conducted simulation analyses that illustrate the adaptability of variant TESLA protocols in recovering lost packet keys and authenticating previously buffered packets, all while maintaining continuous and robust authentication between network members. Our findings also underscore the superiority of the hybrid TLI-µTESLA protocol in terms of packet loss performance and data recovery, alongside its robust cybersecurity features, including confidentiality, integrity, availability, and accessibility. Additionally, we demonstrated the efficiency of our proposed protocol in terms of low computational and communication requirements compared to earlier TESLA protocol variants, as outlined in previous publications.

The rapid integration of IoT devices into everyday decision-making processes underscores the need for continuous user authentication and data integrity checking during network communication, all while minimizing energy consumption to extend device lifespan. This paper introduces the Bio-Integrated Hybrid TESLA protocol, which is a fully symmetric and energy-efficient authentication protocol designed for resource-constrained IoT devices. Based on the Hybrid TLI-lTESLA protocol, this innovative solution prioritizes high cybersecurity levels and minimal computational requirements for continuous authentication. An innovative advancement involves eliminating the public cryptography process during the synchronization stage of TESLA protocols. Instead, biometric authentication through distorted fingerprint and EEG templates is employed, to establish a non-shared symmetric session key, utilized only once. Furthermore, neither the key nor the original biometric templates are transmitted over the network, ensuring user identity preservation and effectively resolving the key distribution challenge inherent in symmetric cryptography. By offloading intensive tasks to servers and avoiding the storage or transmission of biometric data, the proposed approach conserves IoT device energy and enhances cybersecurity. Simulation analyses and cybersecurity assessments demonstrate successful synchronization, privacy preservation, and low computational demands compared to existing protocols, making the Bio-Integrated Hybrid TESLA protocol a significant advancement in IoT authentication.

Although cryptographic algorithms may be mathematically secure, it is often possible to leak secret information from the implementation of the algorithms. Timing and power side-channel vulnerabilities are some of the most widely considered threats to cryptographic algorithm implementations. Timing vulnerabilities may be easier to detect and exploit, and all high-quality cryptographic code today should be written in constant-time style. However, this does not prevent power side-channels from existing. With constant time code, potential attackers can resort to power side-channel attacks to try leaking secrets. Detecting potential power side-channel vulnerabilities is a tedious task, as it requires analyzing code at the assembly level and needs reasoning about which instructions could be leaking information based on their operands and their values. To help make the process of detecting potential power side-channel vulnerabilities easier for cryptographers, this work presents Pascal: Power Analysis Side Channel Attack Locator, a tool that introduces novel symbolic register analysis techniques for binary analysis of constant-time cryptographic algorithms, and verifies locations of potential power side-channel vulnerabilities with high precision. Pascal is evaluated on a number of implementations of post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, and it is able to find dozens of previously reported single-trace power side-channel vulnerabilities in these algorithms, all in an automated manner.

Modular inversion, the multiplicative inverse of an integer in the ring of integers modulo a prime number, is widely used in public-key cryptography. However, it is one of the most computationally intensive operations, thus, it remains the main performance bottleneck for many cryptographic algorithms.This paper presents to the best of the author’s knowledge, the first FPGA-based hardware design for computing the multiplicative inverse using the recently proposed fast constant-time Greatest Common Divisor (GCD) algorithm. This paper introduces two distinct design architectures targeting different applications: (a) a full-width design and (b) a sequential design. The presented designs are compact, parameterizable, and scalable in terms of area and speed. The evaluation shows the proposed designs, which are constant-time and protect against timing-based attacks, outperform existing software and hardware implementations that use other modular inversion techniques. As a specific example, this work presents an evaluation focusing on the use of the multiplicative inverse hardware module to accelerate the ElGamal cryptosystem. The proposed design achieves a speed-up of 90% in the modular inverse calculation and a speed-up of 45% in the overall ElGamal decryption algorithm using our sequential hardware design of fast constant-time GCD algorithm.In addition to developing the fast hardware implementation, this work potentially opens up a new direction for designing cryptosystems: the inverse operation is often avoided when designing algorithms, due to its complexity. With the new hardware module, using the inverse becomes more tractable, making it more appealing to use in the design of new cryptosystems.

Recent works on reducing the size of Error Correcting Codes have investigated the usage of rank metric instead of Hamming metric. Numerous proposals for the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography competition, including four second round candidates, rely on these codes. In this paper, we discuss several non-trivial issues when porting these schemes into real-world systems on different platforms, such as Intel x86, Armv6 and Armv8. We provide insights on how to implement the underlying finite field and polynomial arithmetic, or the generation of errors of a given rank in constant-time, and report execution time of several rank-based cryptosystems, showing that the achieved performance is similar to those of some of the most popular lattice-based cryptosystems.

It is notably challenging to design an efficient and secure signature scheme based on error-correcting codes. An approach to build such signature schemes is to derive it from an identification protocol through the Fiat-Shamir transform. All such protocols based on codes must be run several rounds, since each run of the protocol allows a cheating probability of either 2/3 or 1/2. The resulting signature size is proportional to the number of rounds, thus making the 1/2 cheating probability version more attractive. We present a signature scheme based on double circulant codes in the rank metric, derived from an identification protocol with cheating probability of 2/3. We reduced this probability to almost 1/2 to obtain the smallest signature among code-based signature schemes based on the Fiat-Shamir paradigm, around 22 KBytes for 128 bit security level. Furthermore, among all code-based signature schemes, our proposal has the lowest value of signature plus public key size, and the smallest secret and public key sizes. We provide a security proof in the Random Oracle Model, implementation performances, and a comparison with the parameters of similar signature schemes.