The Crypto-Agility Properties
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Proceedings of The 12th International Multi-Conference on Society, Cybernetics and Informatics (IMSCI 2018) The Crypto-Agility Properties Hassane Aissaoui Mehrez Network and Computer Science Department INSTITUT MINES TELECOM-Télécom ParisTech 75 013 Paris, France [email protected] Othmane EL OMRI IRT SystemX Department SystemX Institute of Research & Technology Paris Saclay, 91120 Palaiseau France ABSTRACT levels. This is far from easy due to the high complexity in the domain of C-ITS. Due to the continuous population growth and the size of urban In this paper, we will discuss our motivations (§2). In (§3) we areas, transportation systems are facing significant challenges: relate some works and the best practices to achieve crypto- traffic congestion, innovative real time travel information agility. In (§4) we define crypto-agility and we detail our services, etc. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) makes a contribution. We finish this paper with a conclusion and positive contribution in addressing those challenges, by working perspectives. towards alleviating congestion, maintaining a high level of operational efficiency in the transportation system, and 2. THREATS OVERVIEW AND MOTIVATIONS predicting and preventing traffic incidents, as to its social, economic and environmental impact. Motivations Along these lines, ITS aim at providing sophisticated management models and tools across all transport modes. The main motivation for our project is to maintain the security Therefore designing models that resist future attacks is an system and on the long-term. Having a fixed security system is important area of research and standardization, in particular in a bad approach since what is secure today can be insecure our project Secure Cooperative Autonomous systems in relation tomorrow, therefore the need to quickly and efficiently update to the domain of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems. So the security system will always be present. There are several it is far from easy due to the high complexity of these systems. motivations to update security systems and encryption To preserve the security properties of today’s communications algorithms in particular: against future attacks, protocols must begin to explore the new challenges to design and implement crypto-agility, which has The discovery of new attacks and cryptanalysis techniques, the ability to switch easily from an obsolete cryptographic algorithm to another. To achieve these challenges, we introduce properties for the The constant evolution of computing performance crypto-agility in order to allow designers to develop generic according to Moore’s law which lowers the security of the models, while providing more agility and significantly reducing existing cryptographic algorithms. For example, attacks like the development cycle. brute force will take less time to find the secret key, Keywords: Post-Quantum Cryptography, Public-Key The development of quantum computers which is Encryption, C-ITS, HSM, crypto-agility. threatening the security of several cryptosystems. This topic is discussed in more detail in the following sections, 1. INTRODUCTION If the lifecycle of cryptographic systems (microchips, Today's vehicles are already connected devices. Tomorrow, secure elements, embedded HSMs) exceed ten years, then they they will also communicate directly with each other and with will likely be decrypted, compromised or cloned in the next the road infrastructure. This communication will allow road decade. users and traffic managers to share information and use it to coordinate their actions. In general, without crypto-agility, updating or changing the This coordination - between vehicles and between vehicles and security system can be a very slow and inefficient process. In transport infrastructure - is expected to significantly improve fact, for an implementer, this would mean changing the code, road safety, driving comfort, helping the driver to take the right rebuilding it, testing it, deploying patches to all the users, etc. decisions, etc. Not only does this process lack efficiency but it can also be a However, to increase the safety of future cooperative vehicles, many security requirements should be guaranteed at different 99 Proceedings of The 12th International Multi-Conference on Society, Cybernetics and Informatics (IMSCI 2018) big window of attack if one of these steps is not followed However, not all is lost and the general recommendation is to properly. double the size of keys, for example AES-512 should be used to have the same level of security as AES-256. Threats Overview “Table 1,” shows the effective security level of different crypto algorithms with conventional computers and quantum Recent advances on the development of quantum computers are computers. A security level of n bits means that breaking the n more than ever threatening the majority of cryptographic algorithm will require performing on average 2 operations. algorithms used nowadays. Therefore, they constitute a major If the cryptographic systems are based on any of the above, and motivation for having crypto-agile systems that can change their lifecycles exceed ten years, then microchips, secure efficiently their crypto algorithms in case they are broken due to elements, embedded HSMs, generated with the affected the computing capacity of these computers. algorithms, will likely be decrypted, compromised or cloned The quantum computers are not “better” than classic computers within the next decade “Figure 1,”. in an absolute way, they just specialize in different tasks Figure 1 Quantum computer expected timeline [2] because they are built following a completely different architecture than classic computers. In fact, they use quantum phenomena such as superposition of states and entanglement of particles to perform computations. Therefore, there can perform some tasks in a much more efficient way than classic computers. In fact, in quantum computers the information is represented by "quantum bits" (qubits), which is the quantum equivalent of the binary bits used in conventional computing. A bit can take two logical values (0 or 1). The qubit however, is a probabilistic unit of information that can be in a superposition of both states (0 and 1). Quantum computers are very good at factorizing numbers into Due to this concern, many researchers have begun to investigate prime factors using Shor’s algorithm, which is an algorithm the crypto-agility design and implementation. The goal of this specially designed for quantum computers. Shor’s algorithm research is to develop cryptographic algorithms that would be can factorize a number in a polynomial time, while the best secure against both classical and quantum computers, and could factorization algorithms for classic computers run in serve as counter measures for the eventuality that large-scale exponential time. Therefore, quantum computers can easily quantum computers become a reality. NIST (National Institute break any cryptosystem that relies on the difficulty of of Standards and Technology) has decided that it is wise to factorization such as RSA. begin developing standards for post-quantum cryptography, Moreover, a modification of Shor’s algorithm can be used to because it appears that a transition to post-quantum solve the discrete logarithm problem, which is a difficult cryptography will not be simple. Therefore, it is desirable to problem for classic computers, and a lot of asymmetric plan for this transition early. cryptosystems rely on the difficulty of this problem such as NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) has ElGamal, ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography), Diffie-Hellman decided that it is wise to begin developing standards for post- key exchange protocol, DSA, etc. Hence, the security of these quantum cryptography, because it appears that a transition to widely used cryptosystems will be broken when quantum post-quantum cryptography will not be simple. Therefore, it is computers are available on a large scale. desirable to plan for this transition early. Currently, there are several post-quantum cryptosystems that Table 1 Key strength for conventional computing [1] have been proposed, including lattice-based cryptosystems, code-based cryptosystems, multivariate cryptosystems, hash- Effective Key Strength / Security Level based signatures, and others. However, for most of these proposals, further research is Algorithm Conventional Quantum Key Length Computing Computing needed in order to gain more confidence in their security and to improve their performance. RSA-1024 1024 80 0 RSA-2048 2048 112 0 3. RELATED WORKS AND BEST PRACTICES ECC-256 256 128 0 There are a few documentations that address the topic of crypto- ECC-384 384 256 0 agility such as the RFC 7696 [3][4] and the C-ITS Platform Final Report [5]. Moreover, a few existing security protocols AES-128 128 128 64 have some crypto-agility built in. For instance, the popular web AES-256 256 256 128 security protocol TLS/SSL allows for cipher suites to be changed, and X.509 digital certificates can support new cryptographic algorithms. Another thing that quantum computers are good at is searching The RFCs (7696/6421) described the processes and over a set of data. Given a black-box function f, Grover’s perspectives of recent guidelines from the Internet Engineering Algorithm is an effective way to invert the function f, which Task Force (IETF) and described the requirements for a crypto- means search for x such as f(x) = y when