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Published in: International Journal of Information Security 4/2019

02-01-2019 | Regular Contribution

Breaking MPC implementations through compression

Authors: João S. Resende, Patrícia R. Sousa, Rolando Martins, Luís Antunes

Published in: International Journal of Information Security | Issue 4/2019

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Abstract

There are many cryptographic protocols in the literature that are scientifically and mathematically sound. By extension, cryptography today seeks to respond to numerous properties of the communication process beyond confidentiality (secrecy), such as integrity, authenticity, and anonymity. In addition to the theoretical evidence, implementations must be equally secure. Due to the ever-increasing intrusion from governments and other groups, citizens are now seeking alternatives ways of communication that do not leak information. In this paper, we analyze multiparty computation (MPC), which is a sub-field of cryptography with the goal of creating methods for parties to jointly compute a function over their inputs while keeping those inputs private. This is a very useful method that can be used, for example, to carry out computations on anonymous data without having to leak that data. Thus, due to the importance of confidentiality in this type of technique, we analyze active and passive attacks using complexity measures (compression and entropy). We start by obtaining network traces and syscalls, then we analyze them using compression and entropy techniques. Finally, we cluster the traces and syscalls using standard clustering techniques. This approach does not need any deep specific knowledge of the implementations being analyzed. This paper presents a security analysis for four MPC frameworks, where three were identified as insecure. These insecure libraries leak information about the inputs provided by each party of the communication. Additionally, we have detected, through a careful analysis of its source code, that SPDZ-2’s secret sharing schema always produces the same results.

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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
Entropy is a measure of unpredictability of information content [31].
 
2
tcpdump is a tool that allows to inspect the traffic passing through the data network. Like all sniffers, tcpdump can be used for good (e.g., detecting communication errors), but also for evil (e.g., capturing personal data).
 
3
STrace allows the attacker to observe the system calls used by an application. STrace is useful because it can help the user to better understand what the system does during program execution, which can be a great help in tuning performance and resource management.
 
4
Approximate Entropy is a technique used to quantify the amount of regularity and the unpredictability of fluctuations over time-series data [32].
 
5
A network socket is an endpoint to the communication flow between two programs running over a network.
 
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Metadata
Title
Breaking MPC implementations through compression
Authors
João S. Resende
Patrícia R. Sousa
Rolando Martins
Luís Antunes
Publication date
02-01-2019
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in
International Journal of Information Security / Issue 4/2019
Print ISSN: 1615-5262
Electronic ISSN: 1615-5270
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-018-0424-2

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