Marco Cesati

Marco Cesati

This article proposes a new method to inject backdoors in RSA and other cryptographic primitives based on the Integer Factorization problem for balanced semi-primes. The method relies on mathematical congruences among the factors of the semi-primes modulo a large prime number, which acts as a "designer key" or "escrow key". In particular, two different backdoors are proposed, one targeting a single semi-prime and the other one a pair of semi-primes. The article also describes the results of tests performed on a SageMath implementation of the backdoors.

Pierpaolo Santucci, Emiliano Ingrassia, Giulio Picierro et al.

Cryptographic algorithm implementations are vulnerable to Cold Boot attacks, which consist in exploiting the persistence of RAM cells across reboots or power down cycles to read the memory contents and recover precious sensitive data. The principal defensive weapon against Cold Boot attacks is memory encryption. In this work we propose MemShield, a memory encryption framework for user space applications that exploits a GPU to safely store the master key and perform the encryption/decryption operations. We developed a prototype that is completely transparent to existing applications and does not require changes to the OS kernel. We discuss the design, the related works, the implementation, the security analysis, and the performances of MemShield.