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Shujun Li

Publications and source records attributed to Shujun Li.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
arXiv2018

When Human cognitive modeling meets PINs: User-independent inter-keystroke timing attacks

This paper proposes the first user-independent inter-keystroke timing attacks on PINs. Our attack method is based on an inter-keystroke timing dictionary built from a human cognitive model whose parameters can be determined by a small amount of training data on any users (not necessarily the target victims). Our attacks can thus be potentially launched on a large scale in real-world settings. We investigate inter-keystroke timing attacks in different online attack settings and evaluate their performance on PINs at different strength levels. Our experimental results show that the proposed attack performs significantly better than random guessing attacks. We further demonstrate that our attacks pose a serious threat to real-world applications and propose various ways to mitigate the threat.

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arXiv2018

Lost in the Digital Wild: Hiding Information in Digital Activities

This paper presents a new general framework of information hiding, in which the hidden information is embedded into a collection of activities conducted by selected human and computer entities (e.g., a number of online accounts of one or more online social networks) in a selected digital world. Different from other traditional schemes, where the hidden information is embedded into one or more selected or generated cover objects, in the new framework the hidden information is embedded in the fact that some particular digital activities with some particular attributes took place in some particular ways in the receiver-observable digital world. In the new framework the concept of "cover" almost disappears, or one can say that now the whole digital world selected becomes the cover. The new framework can find applications in both security (e.g., steganography) and non-security domains (e.g., gaming). For security applications we expect that the new framework calls for completely new steganalysis techniques, which are likely more complicated, less effective and less efficient than existing ones due to the need to monitor and analyze the whole digital world constantly and in real time. A proof-of-concept system was developed as a mobile app based on Twitter activities to demonstrate the information hiding framework works. We are developing a more hybrid system involving several online social networks.

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arXiv2017

An oracle-based attack on CAPTCHAs protected against oracle attacks

CAPTCHAs/HIPs are security mechanisms that try to prevent automatic abuse of services. They are susceptible to learning attacks in which attackers can use them as oracles. Kwon and Cha presented recently a novel algorithm that intends to avoid such learning attacks and "detect all bots". They add uncertainties to the grading of challenges, and also use trap images designed to detect bots. The authors suggest that a major IT corporation is studying their proposal for mainstream implementation. We present here two fundamental design flaws regarding their trap images and uncertainty grading. These leak information regarding the correct grading of images. Exploiting them, an attacker can use an UTS-CAPTCHA as an oracle, and perform a learning attack. Our testing has shown that we can increase any reasonable initial success rate up to 100%.

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arXiv2017

"Flow Size Difference" Can Make a Difference: Detecting Malicious TCP Network Flows Based on Benford's Law

Statistical characteristics of network traffic have attracted a significant amount of research for automated network intrusion detection, some of which looked at applications of natural statistical laws such as Zipf's law, Benford's law and the Pareto distribution. In this paper, we present the application of Benford's law to a new network flow metric "flow size difference", which have not been studied before by other researchers, to build an unsupervised flow-based intrusion detection system (IDS). The method was inspired by our observation on a large number of TCP flow datasets where normal flows tend to follow Benford's law closely but malicious flows tend to deviate significantly from it. The proposed IDS is unsupervised, so it can be easily deployed without any training. It has two simple operational parameters with a clear semantic meaning, allowing the IDS operator to set and adapt their values intuitively to adjust the overall performance of the IDS. We tested the proposed IDS on two (one closed and one public) datasets, and proved its efficiency in terms of AUC (area under the ROC curve). Our work showed the "flow size difference" has a great potential to improve the performance of any flow-based network IDSs.

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arXiv2016

On the security defects of an image encryption scheme

This paper studies the security of a recently-proposed chaos-based image encryption scheme, and points out the following problems: 1) there exist a number of invalid keys and weak keys, and some keys are partially equivalent for encryption/decryption; 2) given one chosen plain-image, a subkey $K_{10}$ can be guessed with a smaller computational complexity than that of the simple brute-force attack; 3) given at most 128 chosen plain-images, a chosen-plaintext attack can possibly break the following part of the secret key: $\{K_i\bmod 128\}_{i=4}^{10}$, which works very well when $K_{10}$ is not too large; 4) when $K_{10}$ is relatively small, a known-plaintext attack can be carried out with only one known plain-image to recover some visual information of any other plain-images encrypted by the same key.

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arXiv2015

OR-Benchmark: An Open and Reconfigurable Digital Watermarking Benchmarking Framework

Benchmarking digital watermarking algorithms is not an easy task because different applications of digital watermarking often have very different sets of requirements and trade-offs between conflicting requirements. While there have been some general-purpose digital watermarking benchmarking systems available, they normally do not support complicated benchmarking tasks and cannot be easily reconfigured to work with different watermarking algorithms and testing conditions. In this paper, we propose OR-Benchmark, an open and highly reconfigurable general-purpose digital watermarking benchmarking framework, which has the following two key features: 1) all the interfaces are public and general enough to support all watermarking applications and benchmarking tasks we can think of; 2) end users can easily extend the functionalities and freely configure what watermarking algorithms are tested, what system components are used, how the benchmarking process runs, and what results should be produced. We implemented a prototype of this framework as a MATLAB software package and used it to benchmark a number of digital watermarking algorithms involving two types of watermarks for content authentication and self-restoration purposes. The benchmarking results demonstrated the advantages of the proposed benchmarking framework, and also gave us some useful insights about existing image authentication and self-restoration watermarking algorithms which are an important but less studied topic in digital watermarking.

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arXiv2012

Recovering Missing Coefficients in DCT-Transformed Images

A general method for recovering missing DCT coefficients in DCT-transformed images is presented in this work. We model the DCT coefficients recovery problem as an optimization problem and recover all missing DCT coefficients via linear programming. The visual quality of the recovered image gradually decreases as the number of missing DCT coefficients increases. For some images, the quality is surprisingly good even when more than 10 most significant DCT coefficients are missing. When only the DC coefficient is missing, the proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods according to experimental results conducted on 200 test images. The proposed recovery method can be used for cryptanalysis of DCT based selective encryption schemes and other applications.

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arXiv2010

An Improved DC Recovery Method from AC Coefficients of DCT-Transformed Images

Motivated by the work of Uehara et al. [1], an improved method to recover DC coefficients from AC coefficients of DCT-transformed images is investigated in this work, which finds applications in cryptanalysis of selective multimedia encryption. The proposed under/over-flow rate minimization (FRM) method employs an optimization process to get a statistically more accurate estimation of unknown DC coefficients, thus achieving a better recovery performance. It was shown by experimental results based on 200 test images that the proposed DC recovery method significantly improves the quality of most recovered images in terms of the PSNR values and several state-of-the-art objective image quality assessment (IQA) metrics such as SSIM and MS-SSIM.

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arXiv2009

Breaking a modified substitution-diffusion image cipher based on chaotic standard and logistic maps

Recently, an image encryption scheme based on chaotic standard and logistic maps was proposed by Patidar et al. It was later reported by Rhouma et al. that an equivalent secret key can be reconstructed with only one known/chosen-plaintext and the corresponding ciphertext. Patidar et al. soon modified the original scheme and claimed that the modified scheme is secure against Rhouma et al.'s attack. In this paper, we point out that the modified scheme is still insecure against the same known/chosen-plaintext attack. In addition, some other security defects existing in both the original and the modified schemes are also reported.

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arXiv2009

A Differential Cryptanalysis of Yen-Chen-Wu Multimedia Cryptography System (MCS)

At ISCAS'2005, Yen et al. presented a new chaos-based cryptosystem for multimedia transmission named "Multimedia Cryptography System" (MCS). No cryptanalytic results have been reported so far. This paper presents a differential attack to break MCS, which requires only seven chosen plaintexts. The complexity of the attack is O(N), where $N$ is the size of plaintext. Experimental results are also given to show the real performance of the proposed attack.

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arXiv2009

Cryptanalysis of a family of self-synchronizing chaotic stream ciphers

Unimodal maps have been broadly used as a base of new encryption strategies. Recently, a stream cipher has been proposed in the literature, whose keystream is basically a symbolic sequence of the (one-parameter) logistic map or of the tent map. In the present work a thorough analysis of the keystream is made which reveals the existence of some serious security problems

nlin.CD↗
arXiv2008

On the security of a new image encryption scheme based on chaotic map lattices

This paper reports a detailed cryptanalysis of a recently proposed encryption scheme based on the logistic map. Some problems are emphasized concerning the key space definition and the implementation of the cryptosystem using floating-point operations. It is also shown how it is possible to reduce considerably the key space through a ciphertext-only attack. Moreover, a timing attack allows the estimation of part of the key due to the existent relationship between this part of the key and the encryption/decryption time. As a result, the main features of the cryptosystem do not satisfy the demands of secure communications. Some hints are offered to improve the cryptosystem under study according to those requirements.

nlin.CD↗
arXiv2007

Cryptanalysis of an Image Encryption Scheme Based on a Compound Chaotic Sequence

Recently, an image encryption scheme based on a compound chaotic sequence was proposed. In this paper, the security of the scheme is studied and the following problems are found: (1) a differential chosen-plaintext attack can break the scheme with only three chosen plain-images; (2) there is a number of weak keys and some equivalent keys for encryption; (3) the scheme is not sensitive to the changes of plain-images; and (4) the compound chaotic sequence does not work as a good random number resource.

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arXiv2007

Chosen-Plaintext Cryptanalysis of a Clipped-Neural-Network-Based Chaotic Cipher

In ISNN'04, a novel symmetric cipher was proposed, by combining a chaotic signal and a clipped neural network (CNN) for encryption. The present paper analyzes the security of this chaotic cipher against chosen-plaintext attacks, and points out that this cipher can be broken by a chosen-plaintext attack. Experimental analyses are given to support the feasibility of the proposed attack.

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arXiv2007

Breaking an encryption scheme based on chaotic Baker map

In recent years, a growing number of cryptosystems based on chaos have been proposed, many of them fundamentally flawed by a lack of robustness and security. This paper describes the security weaknesses of a recently proposed cryptographic algorithm with chaos at the physical level. It is shown that the security is trivially compromised for practical implementations of the cryptosystem with finite computing precision and for the use of the iteration number n as the secret key. Some possible countermeasures to enhance the security of the chaos-based cryptographic algorithm are also discussed.

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