Recently, we have seen an evolution of programmable network devices, where it is possible to customize packet processing inside the data plane at an unprecedented level. This is in contrast to traditional approaches, where networking device functionality is fixed and defined by the ASIC and customers need to wait possibly years before the vendors release new versions that add features required by customers. The vendors in the industry have adapted and the focus has shifted to offering new types of network devices, such as the SmartNIC, IPU, and DPU. Another major paradigm shift in the networking area is the shift towards protocols that encrypt parts of headers and contents of packets such as QUIC. Also, many devices such as smart phones have support for multiple access networks, which requires efficient multipath protocols to leverage the capabilities of multiple networks at the same time. However, when using protocols inside the network that requires encryption such as QUIC or multipath QUIC, packet processing operations for the en/decryption process are very resource intensive. Consequently, network vendors and operators are in need to accelerate and offload crypto operations to dedicated hardware in order to free CPU cycles for business critical operations. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate how multipath QUIC can be offloaded or hardware accelerated in order to reduce the CPU utilization on the server. Our contributions are an evaluation of frameworks, programming languages and hardware devices in terms of crypto offloading functionality. Two packet processing offloading prototypes were designed using the DPDK framework and the programming language P4. The design using DPDK was implemented and evaluated on a BlueField 2 DPU. The offloading prototype handles a major part of the packet processing and the crypto operations in order to reduce the load of the user application running on the host. A evaluation show that the throughput when using larger keys are only slightly decreased. The evaluation gives important insights in the need of crypto engines and/or CPUs with high performance when offloading.

Yes / Year in and year out the increasing adaptivity of offenders has maintained ransomware's position as a major cybersecurity threat. The cybersecurity industry has responded with a similar degree of adaptiveness, but has focussed more upon technical (science) than ‘non-technical’ (social science) factors. This article explores empirically how organisations and investigators have reacted to the shift in the ransomware landscape from scareware and locker attacks to the almost exclusive use of crypto-ransomware. We outline how, for various reasons, victims and investigators struggle to respond effectively to this form of threat. By drawing upon in-depth interviews with victims and law enforcement officers involved in twenty-six crypto-ransomware attacks between 2014 and 2018 and using an inductive content analysis method, we develop a data-driven taxonomy of crypto-ransomware countermeasures. The findings of the research indicate that responses to crypto-ransomware are made more complex by the nuanced relationship between the technical (malware which encrypts) and the human (social engineering which still instigates most infections) aspects of an attack. As a consequence, there is no simple technological ‘silver bullet’ that will wipe out the crypto-ransomware threat. Rather, a multi-layered approach is needed which consists of socio-technical measures, zealous front-line managers and active support from senior management. / This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and is part of the EMPHASIS (EconoMical, PsycHologicAl and Societal Impact of RanSomware) project [EP/P011721/1].

Yes / This paper estimates liquidity dynamics between virtual and real assets from multiple dimensions, namely market capacity, transaction cost and market efficiency. The data covers transaction information of crypto markets and four equity exchanges (US, UK, EU and Japan) between January 2019 and December 2022. The first result shows a two-way liquidity risk feedback loop between virtual and real markets, and the second result confirms dynamic liquidity interactions between them. The US market is identified as a transmitter rather than a receiver of liquidity risk but may not escape cumulative liquidity shocks.

No description available.

The monetary policies of states and systems built upon them do not naturally allow transactions of a very small value, as the transaction costs exceeds the actual value of the transaction. These types of transactions are called micropayments. This is problematic as it removes the possibility to monetize content that has a valuation that is so low that the costs of the transaction exceeds the value of the content. In this thesis we aim to create a system that allows micropayments to monetize low value content. We do so by developing a design theory based on Gregor and Jones conceptual model for design theories within Information Systems research. The system that we develop will use the end users computational power to generate a value, by running a cryptocurrency miner. We present the background knowledge required to fully understand the presented design theory. Within the design theory, we present a theoretical framework to base systems on that enables micropayments through cryptocurrency mining. We also present a developed proof of work prototype that proves the validity of the theoretical framework. Lastly we discuss our design theory. We conclude that the design theory enables transactions of a very low value, such as 0,0001 \$ cents. Transactions of such small value is not possible with systems built upon states monetary policies. We also conclude that the proposed design theory can be further developed to function independently of cryptocurrency mining. Instead the value for the transaction could be generated through solving complicated problems if institutions are willing to pay for computational power to solve them.

I studien undersöks huruvida en grupp narkotikasäljare på den svenska hemsidan Flugsvamp drivs av andra motivationer än ett grundläggande vinstintresse. Sidan bygger på de teknologiska verktyg som utvecklades av den libertarianskt inspirerade Cypherpunkrörelsens arbete med stark kryptografi i slutet av 1990-talet. Dessa verktyg skyddar både brottslingar och frihetskämpar, men har främst associerats med de som använder anonymiteten i kriminella syften och således har verktygen fått ett dåligt rykte som riskerar äventyra kryptografins framtid. Genom semistrukturerade onlineintervjuer med fem säljare av skiftande karaktär samlade jag information gällande deras upplevelse av sidan, relationerna till kunder och administratörer, hur de rent moraliskt rationaliserade sin verksamhet och vilken påverkan de såg sig ha på samhället och kryptografin. En bild framträdde där majoriteten av säljarna uppvisade ansvarskänsla och eftertänksamhet genom att agera med transparens och professionalitet. Genom att utkonkurrera oärliga aktörer och med ett nära kollegialt samarbete med varandra använde dessa säljare sin roll för att utmana den traditionella majoritetsinställningen till narkotika och visa hur den ansvarsfulla digitala försäljningen i längden kan vara samhällsförändrande. En minoritet uppgav att de endast använde sidan för att tjäna extrapengar och egentligen tyckte att det var en rimlig idé för staten att förbjuda de kryptoanarkistiska verktygen då de främst anses användas i kriminella syften. Studien når fram till slutsatserna att samhället som helhet tjänar på att det narkotikarelaterade våldet försvinner från gatorna, visar på hur en inkonsekvent och konservativ lagstiftning gör sig mottaglig för starka motargument samt understryker att den framtida digitala mänskligheten kommer ha en betydande användning för de kryptoanarkistiska verktygen.

Actuellement, nous vivons dans une société numérique. L'avènement de l'Internet et l'arrivée du multimédia et des supports de stockage numériques, ont transformé profondément la façon dont nous communiquons. L'image en particulier occupe une place très importante dans la communication interpersonnelle moderne. Toutefois, elle présente l'inconvénient d'être représentée par une quantité d'information très importante. De ce fait, la transmission et le stockage des images soulèvent certains problèmes qui sont liés essentiellement à la sécurité et à la compression d'images. Ce sont ces considérations qui ont guidé cette thèse. En effet, la problématique que nous posons dans cette thèse est de proposer une solution conduisant à la crypto-compression d'images afin d'assurer un archivage et un transfert sécurisés tout en conservant les performances de la méthode de compression utilisée. En effet, nos travaux de recherche ont porté essentiellement sur la compression et le cryptage des images numériques. Concernant la compression, nous avons porté un intérêt particulier au codage arithmétique vu sont efficacité en terme de ta ux de compression et son utilisation par les nouvelles normes et standards de compression tel que JPEG2000, JBIG, JBIG2 et H.264/AVC. Quant au cryptage, nous avons opté pour l'utilisation du chaos combiné avec les fractions continues afin de générer des flux de clés ayant à la fois de bonnes propriétés cryptographiques et statistiques. Ainsi, nous avons proposé deux nouvelles méthodes de compression sans perte basées sur le codage arithmétique tout en introduisant de nouveaux paramètres de codage afin de réduire davantage la taille en bits des images compressées. Deux autres méthodes s'appuient sur l'utilisation du chaos et des fractions continues pour le développement d'un générateur de nombres pseudo-aléatoires et le cryptage par flot d'images. Enfin, nous proposons une nouvelle méthode qui emploie conjointement le cryptage avec la compression. Cette dernière méthode se base sur l'échange des sous-intervalles associés aux symboles d'un codeur arit hmétique binaire de façon aléatoire tout en exploitant notre générateur de nombres pseudo-aléatoire. Elle est efficace, sécurisée et conserve le taux de compression obtenu par le codage arithmétique et ceci quelque soit le modèle statistique employé : statique ou adaptatif. / Actually, we live in a digital society. The proliferation of the Internet and the rapid progress in information technology on multimedia, have profoundly transformed the way we communicate. An enormous amount of media can be easily exchanged through the Internet and other communication networks. Digital image in particular occupies an important place in modern interpersonal communication. However, image data have special features such as bulk capacity. Thus, image security and compression issues have became exceptionally acute. It is these considerations that have guided this thesis. Thus, we propose throw this thesis to incorporating security requirements in the data compression system to ensure reasonable security without downgrading the compression performance.For lossless image compression, we have paid most attention to the arithmetic coding (AC) which has been widely used as an efficient compression algorithm in the new standards including JBIG, JBIG2, JPEG2000 and H.264/AVC. For image encryption, we are based on the combination of a chaotic system and the Engel continued fraction map to generate key-stream with both good chaotic and statistical properties. First, we have proposed two new schemes for lossless image compression based on adding new pre-treatment steps and on proposing new modeling methods to estimate probabilities for AC. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed schemes give mean compression ratios that are significantly higher than those by the conventional AC. In addition, we have proposed a new pseudo-random bit generator (PRBG). The detailed analysis done by NIST statistical test Suite demonstrates that the proposed PRGB is suitable for cryptography. The proposed PRBG is used to develop a new symmetr ic stream cipher for image encryption. Theoretic and numerical simulation analyses indicate that our image encryption algorithm is efficient and satisfies high security. Finally, we have proposed a new scheme which performs both lossless compression and encryption of image. The lossless compression is based on the binary AC (BAC) and the encryption is based on the proposed PRBG. The numerical simulation analysis indicates that the proposed compression and encryption scheme satisfies highly security with no loss of the BAC compression efficiency.

Data privacy has been growing in importance in recent years, especially with the continuous increase of online activity. Researchers study, design, and develop solutions aimed at enhancing users’ data privacy. The wicked problem of data privacy is a continuous challenge that defies straightforward solutions. Since there are many factors involved in data privacy, such as technological, legal, and human aspects, we can only aim at mitigating rather than solving this wicked problem. Our aim was to focus on human aspects for designing usable crypto-based privacy-enhancing solutions.  In this thesis, we followed a user centered design method by using empirical qualitative means for investigating user’s perceptions and opinions of our solutions. Most of our work has focused on redactable signatures in the cloud context within the eHealth use-case. Redactable signatures are  a privacy enhancing scheme allowing to remove parts of a signed document by a specified party for achieving data minimization without invalidating the respective signature. We mainly used semi-structures interviews and focus groups in our investigations. Our results yielded key HCI considerations as well as guidelines of different means for supporting the design of future solutions. / Data privacy has been growing in importance in recent years, especially with the continuous increase of online activity. Researchers continuously study, design, and develop solutions aimed at enhancing users’ data privacy. The wicked problem of data privacy is the continuous challenge that defies straightforward solutions. Since there are many factors involved in data privacy, such as technological, legal, and human aspects, we can only aim at mitigating rather than solving this wicked problem. Our aim was to focus on human aspects for designing usable crypto-based privacy-enhancing solutions.  In this thesis, we followed a user centered design method by using empirical qualitative means for investigating user’s perceptions and opinions of our solutions. Most of our work has focused on redactable signatures in the cloud context within an eHealth use-case. Redactable signatures are a privacy-enhancing scheme, which allow the removal of parts of a signed document by a specified party without invalidating the respective signature. Our results yielded key HCI considerations as well as guidelines of different means for supporting the design of future solutions. / <p>Paper 3 was included as manuscript in the thesis.</p>

Cette thèse est consacrée à la problématique de l'évaluation des produits antivirus. L'utilisateur final d'un produit antivirus ne sait pas toujours quelle confiance il peut placer dans son produit antivirus pour parer convenablement la menace virale. Pour répondre à cette question, il est nécessaire de formuler la problématique de sécurité à laquelle doit répondre un tel produit et de disposer d'outils et de critères méthodologiques, techniques et théoriques permettant d'évaluer la robustesse des fonctions de sécurité et la pertinence des choix de conception au regard d'une menace virale identifiée. Je concentre mon analyse de la menace virale sur quelques mécanismes (mécanismes cryptographiques, transformations de programme) adaptés au contexte boîte blanche, i.e. permettant à un virus de protéger ses données critiques en confidentialité et de masquer son fonctionnement dans un environnement complètement maîtrisé par l'attaquant. Une première étape incontournable avant toute organisation d'une ligne de défense consiste à analyser les virus, afin d'en comprendre le fonctionnement et les effets sur le système. Les méthodes et techniques de la rétro-ingénierie logicielle occupent ici - au côté des techniques de cryptanalyse - une place centrale. J'ai pris le parti de focaliser sur les méthodes dynamiques d'extraction d'information fondées sur une émulation du matériel supportant le système d'exploitation. L'évaluation d'un moteur de détection selon des critères objectifs requiert un effort de modélisation. J'étudie quelques modèles utilisés actuellement (grammaires formelles, interprétation abstraite, statistique). Chacun de ces modèles permet de formaliser certains aspects du problème de la détection virale. Je m'attache à l'étude des critères qu'il est possible de définir dans chacun de ces cadres formels et à leur utilisation pour partie des travaux d'évaluation d'un moteur de détection. Mes travaux m'ont conduit à la mise en oeuvre d'une approche méthodologique et d'une plate-forme de tests pour l'analyse de robustesse des fonctions et mécanismes d'un produit anti-virus. J'ai développé un outil d'analyse de code viral, appelé VxStripper, dont les fonctionnalités sont utiles à la réalisation de plusieurs des tests. Les outils formels sont utilisés pour qualifier en boîte blanche - ou sur la base des documents de conception détaillée - la conformité et l'efficacité d'un moteur de détection.

Πολλά πρότυπα ασφαλούς επικοινωνίας, όπως το secure shell (SSH), IP security (IPsec), καθώς και διάφορες μορφές κρυπτογράφησης e-mail δημιουργήθηκαν για να προστατεύουν τις πληροφορίες κατά τη μεταφορά, διασφαλίζοντας το κανάλι επικοινωνίας. Ωστόσο, γίνεται αντιληπτό ότι τα δεδομένα σε αποθήκευση (data at rest) είναι επίσης ευάλωτα σε επιθέσεις και πρέπει να προστατευτούν. Το πρότυπο IEEE P1619, το οποίο έχει προταθεί από το IEEE, προσδιορίζει τα βασικά στοιχεία μιας αρχιτεκτονικής, η οποία παρέχει ασφάλεια σε sector-level-random-access διαμοιραζόμενα μέσα αποθήκευσης, επιλέγοντας ως το καταλληλότερο mode λειτουργίας το Electronic codebook (ECB). Βασικό μειονέκτημα αυτού του τρόπου κρυπτογράφησης είναι ότι κατά το ECB mode το ίδιο plaintext παράγει πάντα (κρυπτογραφείται) το ίδιο ciphertext, δημιουργώντας την ανάγκη για συχνή αλλαγή στο συμμετρικό κλειδί. Μια τέτοια πρακτική όμως δεν θα αποδίδει λόγω του απαιτούμενου χρόνου για την επέκταση των νέων κλειδιών. Το πρόβλημα αυτό αντιμετωπίζει το IEEE P1619, κάνοντας χρήση της θέσης (location) των δεδομένων ως την επιθυμητή μεταβαλλόμενη τιμή κλειδιού, εφαρμόζοντας block-cipher αλγόριθμους κρυπτογράφησης. Το νέο αυτό πρότυπο έχει προσελκύσει την προσοχή εταιριών, ως μια καλή λύση για τις απαιτήσεις των καταναλωτών για υψηλό επίπεδο ασφάλειας των δεδομένων σε συσκευές αποθήκευσης. Πρόσφατες ερευνητικές εργασίες ερευνούν ή/και παρουσιάζουν διάφορες αρχιτεκτονικές για την υλοποίηση του προτύπου σε υλικό (hardware), με στόχο την υιοθέτησή τους σε μελλοντικά προϊόντα. Οι προτεινόμενες προσεγγίσεις στοχεύουν στην αξιοποίηση είτε πόρων του υπολογιστή (προσεγγίσεις λογισμικού) είτε ειδικού σκοπού υλικού, στοχεύοντας σε διαφορετικές απαιτήσεις, ανάλογων της εφαρμογής. Η εργασία αυτή επικεντρώνεται σε ένα Narrow-block Tweak-able σχήμα κρυπτογράφησης (XTS-AES) και διερευνά διάφορες αρχιτεκτονικές που προσφέρουν μια ποικιλία χαρακτηριστικών. Αυτή είναι η πρώτη προσπάθεια διερεύνησης αρχιτεκτονικών προσεγγίσεων (υφιστάμενων και προτεινόμενων), με σκοπό να αναδειχθεί η καταλληλότερη αρχιτεκτονική για μια ποικιλία εφαρμογών. Το βασικό χαρακτηριστικό των προτεινόμενων αρχιτεκτονικών είναι η μεγιστοποίηση της αξιοποίησης των πόρων που υλοποιούν το IEEE P1619, ώστε να επιτευχθεί η υψηλότερη απόδοση, λαμβάνοντας υπόψη διάφορα κριτήρια σχεδιασμού, όπως είναι η υψηλή ταχύτητα, η μικρή επιφάνεια, το χαμηλό κόστος και η σχεδιαστική πολυπλοκότητα. / A standard for the protection of data in shared storage media has been proposed by IEEE, the IEEE P1619. It specifies the fundamental elements of an architecture that provides security in block-based shared storage media applying block-cipher encryption algorithms to blocks of data. The newly presented standard has attracted the attention of the market vendors, as a good solution to the demands of the consumers for higher security levels in storage devices. The manufacturers have already developed future platforms based on IEEE P1619. Recent research works introduced various approaches targeting their adoption in future products. The proposed approaches are aiming to exploit either computer resources (software approaches) or special purpose hardware. This work focuses on the Narrow-block Tweakable encryption scheme (XTS-AES transform) and explores various architectures offering a variety of characteristics to the final implementation. This is the first, to the authors knowledge, attempt to explore the various architecture approaches that have been proposed until now and additionally introduce new ones, with an aim to highlight the appropriate architecture for a variety of applications. The key feature of the proposed architectures is parallelism, with respect to data block processing. The target is to exploit in full the resources of the core(s) implementing the IEEE P1619 and achieve the highest performance, respecting various design criteria as low cost, and/or design complexity. Basic details regarding IEEE P1619 and its dominant unit (the XTS-AES transform) are offered, a summary of previous works is presented and several issues are considered for potential optimization of the system architecture. Novel architectures are introduced, exploring time-scheduling of the processes to be performed and the characteristics of the various architectures are analyzed and compared.