International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 16 October 2012

Kevin D. Bowers, Marten van Dijk, Robert Griffin, Ari Juels, Alina Oprea, Ronald L. Rivest, Nikos Triandop
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Most cryptographic systems carry the basic assumption that entities

are able to preserve the secrecy of their keys. With attacks today showing ever increasing sophistication, however, this tenet is eroding. \"Advanced Persistent Threats\" (APTs), for instance, leverage zero-day exploits and extensive system knowledge to achieve full compromise of cryptographic keys and other secrets.Such compromise is often silent, with defenders failing to detect the loss of private

keys critical to protection of their systems. The growing virulence of today\'s threats clearly calls for new models of defenders\' goals and abilities.

In this paper, we explore applications of FlipIt, a novel game-theoretic model of system defense introduced recently. In FlipIt, an attacker periodically gains complete control of a system, with the unique feature that system compromises are stealthy, i.e., not immediately detected by the system owner, called the defender. We distill out several lessons from our study of FlipIt and demonstrate

their application to several real-world problems, including password reset policies, key rotation, VM refresh and cloud auditing.

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