Authentication Comp Security

Security assignment 1

SECURITY ASSIGNMENT

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Security assignment 2

Question I: “Nothing to hide” argument

The “Nothing to hide” is an ideology that supports governmental surveillance over the

lives of its citizens. This perception is founded on the assumption that people will not hide their

activities in the mask of privacy if they are not doing something illegal. Further, this idea

assumes that if the government surveillance identifies criminal activities in the conduct of an

individual through monitoring, such individuals should not have kept those activities private

(Stuart and Levine, 2017). This notion is both good and bad for the management of the society.

On the positive side, if people are being stalked or there are criminal activities which are a threat

to the national security, surveillance over such individuals is reasonable to enhance security

within the society (Stuart and Levine, 2017). However, when this monitoring is used by

malicious law enforcement agencies to blackmail suspects, such surveillance is will evil motive

and inappropriate. Although people may strive to live by the law, there are instances where they

might have committed offenses or omissions which might lead the blackmail (Stuart and Levine,

2017). In such a situation, surveillance becomes inappropriate and unreasonable.

Question II: Insecurity of Weak Random Number Generators

A frail random number generator compromises the security of otherwise secure systems.

This perception is founded on the situation that the weak random number generators used in

RSA encryption are not as reliable as they should. It is easy to identify pairs of unique keys that

have common divisors. This vulnerability can be exploited even with a basic attack which

compromises the security of such systems (Bernstein et al., 2013).Revoking certificates sharing

common factors and issuing new ones to those users do not resolve the problem. This weakness

lies in the scenario that these randomness failures may also be visible with primes appearing only

Security assignment 3

once. For such certificates, it becomes difficult to identify the anomalies using this approach.

Testing the RSAmoduli is the most efficient approach to handling such vulnerabilities within the

weak random number generators. When repeated primes are identified in the model, it is

essential to revoke all keys as this is an indication of malfunctioning in the generator (Bernstein

et al., 2013). Through this comprehensive approach, weak random number generators are

mitigated to enhance the security of systems.

Question III:RSA Factorization

The factorization attacks on the RSA encryption involve integer factorization on the

primes’ p and q that are private. These primes are computed from Modulus N which is available

publicly. This attack enables the attacker to masquerade as the owner of the key and decrypt the

private messages shared between the sender and the recipient (Nemec et al., 2017). Various

measures can be implemented to mitigate this type of attack. One of the steps is changing the

algorithm for generating the random prime numbers. The second mitigation measure that can be

used is importing secure keypairs made from another library. This importation of the keypairs

enables the affected devices to access protected keypairs enhancing their security against future

attacks (Nemec et al., 2017). The last mechanism of mitigating devices affected by these attacks

is using more secure key lengths. Keys with the bit length of 3072 are more confident when

compared to those of that are 4096, 512, 2048 and 1024 bits long (Nemec et al., 2017). If the

affected devised adopt this key length, there is increased protection against future attacks that

might be targeted on them. The exponential time complexity of attacks on the RSA limits the

research of its vulnerability on the small keys. The ROCA example in the article notes that this is

a significant setback in the study of generic attacks against the algorithm (Nemec et al., 2017).

Security assignment 4

This situation affects researchers who might want to gather information regarding zero-day

assaults on this encryption algorithm.

Question IV: “Gummy” Fingers

The biometric systems that are authenticated through fingerprints are not as secure as

they are thought. These systems are prone to attacks through molds that are designed to look like

the real fingers. Such molds present an artificial finger pattern which resembles the pattern of a

normal finger. When the biometric system scans this finger pattern, it identifies it as an authentic

pattern, providing access to the attacker (Matsumoto et al., 2002). The cheap materials used to

make such molds pose a great challenge to the security of the biometric systems. Despite this

weakness in the fingerprint recognition systems, there are possible mechanisms for resolving the

issue. The most effective countermeasure to adopt is the "live and well" finger recognition

approach. Through this approach, the biometric system can identify whether the finger pattern

scanned is a live human being (Matsumoto et al., 2002). This recognition reduces the chances of

finger molds being used in the system. Thus, the countermeasure enhances the security of the

biometric systems against “gummy” fingers.

Question V: Attacks on Diffie-Hellman Protocol

There are two major Diffie-Hellman attacks which are mainly man-in-the-middle attacks.

These attacks are the standard domain parameters and the logjam attacks. The standard domain

parameters attacks exploit the protocol by computing the discrete log of the corresponding public

value to compromise one of the private keys used (Adrian et al., 2015). An excellent approach to

carrying out this attack is performing pre-computations of the discrete logs to break the particular

connection that used the primes from the computed primes. The logjam attacks enable the

Security assignment 5

attacker to break encrypted communications through the forceful negotiation of keys that are 512

bits long (Adrian et al., 2015). The new version of the attack is mainly conducted on services that

have DHE_EXPORT ciphers’ support. One of the measures of preventing these attacks is to

avoid the use of conventional domain parameters in the encryption. Alternatively, the situation

can be mitigated by using keys with sizeable key length. Considerable key measures increase the

complexity of pre-computation thus enhancing the security of the system (Adrian et al., 2015).

The other mechanism is incorporating the Elliptic Curve into the Diffie-Hellman protocol. This

incorporation enhances the security against any known possible attacks on the encryption.

Security assignment 6

References

Adrian, D., Bhargavan, K., Durumeric, Z., Gaudry, P., Green, M., Halderman, J.A., Heninger,

N., Springall, D., Thomé, E., Valenta, L. and VanderSloot, B., 2015, October. Imperfect

forward secrecy: How Diffie-Hellman fails in practice. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM

SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (pp. 5-17).ACM.

Bernstein, D.J., Chang, Y.A., Cheng, C.M., Chou, L.P., Heninger, N., Lange, T., and Van

Someren, N., 2013, December. Factoring RSA keys from certified smart cards:

Coppersmith in the wild. In International Conference on the Theory and Application of

Cryptology and Information Security (pp. 341-360).Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Matsumoto, T., Matsumoto, H., Yamada, K. and Hoshino, S., 2002, January. Impact of artificial

gummy fingers on fingerprint systems.In Proceedings of SPIE (Vol. 4677, No. 1, pp.

275-289).

Nemec, M., Sys, M., Svenda, P., Klinec, D. and Matyas, V., 2017, October. The Return of

Coppersmith's Attack: Practical Factorization of Widely Used RSA Moduli. In

Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications

Security (pp. 1631-1648).ACM.

Stuart, A. and Levine, M. (2017). Beyond ‘nothing to hide’: When identity is key to privacy

threat under surveillance. European Journal of Social Psychology, 47(6), pp.694-707.

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