When SideChannelMarvels meet LIEF

On how we used LIEF to lift an Android x86_64 library to Linux to perform our usual white-box attacks on it.

more ...

Security Assessment of OpenVPN

Quarkslab was hired by OSTIF to perform a security assessment of OpenVPN 2.4.0. We focused on code and cryptography assessment. Results are briefly described in this blog post, and full report is available at its end.

more ...

Make Confide great again? No, we cannot

In recent weeks, Confide, a secure instant messaging application, has gained popularity in some circles. This article presents a quick assessment of the security of this application. The official website boasts the confidentiality provided by the product through three qualifiers: encrypted, ephemeral and screenshot protected. Each of these aspects will be studied.

The encryption protocol will be particularly detailed because it is tagged as battle tested, military grade cryptography. We already knew about military grade cryptography, which seems to be a synonym of put AES-256 somewhere, no matter how you use it in many applications, but we had never heard of battle tested cryptography. This article is an opportunity to present this technology.

Developing properly end-to-end communication systems is complex. As we have seen in the past with iMessage, even if cryptographic primitives are correctly implemented and encryption keys are correctly generated and protected, the design is critical to forbid the service operator from being able to eavesdrop messages.

more ...

Differential Fault Analysis on White-box AES Implementations

With the Differential Computation Analysis (DCA) presented at CHES 2016, we have shown that side-channel techniques developed to break hardware cryptographic implementations can be adapted successfully to break white-box implementations. In this post, we will explore another class of hardware attacks: fault injections and how to apply them on white-box implementations.

more ...

Security Assessment of VeraCrypt: fixes and evolutions from TrueCrypt

Quarkslab made a security assessment of VeraCrypt 1.18. The audit was funded by OSTIF and was performed by two Quarkslab engineers between Aug. 16 and Sep. 14, 2016 for a total of 32 man-days of study. A critical vulnerability, related to cryptography, has been identified. It has been introduced in version 1.18, and will be fixed in version 1.19.

more ...

A brief survey of Fully Homomorphic Encryption, computing on encrypted data

When appointing computation of private data to a third party, privacy is an issue. How can one delegate computation without giving up one's secrets? This gets trickier when multiple parties are involved. Several works on Multi-Party Computation (MPC) addressed this issue, but a new approach has started to emerge: Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).

more ...

Reversing a Finite Field Multiplication Optimization

An optimization for the finite field multiplication on 128-bit elements for AES-GCM exists whose explanation was not published, preventing any further application with different parameters. We reverse engineered the result to 1) get the explanation and 2) be able to apply it with other parameters.

more ...

A glimpse of ext4 filesystem-level encryption

Linux 4.1 has arrived with a new feature for its popular ext4 filesystem: filesystem-level encryption!

more ...

Have you ever played with Domino?

IBM Lotus Domino is an email client rather common in companies like Microsoft Outlook. This article proposes to observe a small part of the application engine, namely one method used to store the user's password. In a second step, we will conduct a brief analysis of all used algorithms then we will see how to implement a plugin for John The Ripper to bruteforce discovered digests.

more ...

iMessage Privacy

iMessage is probably one of the most trendy instant messaging systems. Apple presents it as very secure, with high cryptographic standards, including end-to-end encryption preventing even Apple from reading the messages. Is this true?

more ...