Emerging threats and Countermeasures responses

Discussion 1 :

Cryptography is about the use of codes in the protection of information. It is one of the most effective ways for data protection. Even as cryptography can lead to protection of data, it is still important to come up with the best mechanisms for its implementation. That is because attackers can always devise mechanisms for accessing protected information if proper implementations of the available countermeasures. In addition, most of the countermeasures are never adequate to offer a watertight protection against all types of attacks. That calls for the need to know about the different types of cybercrimes and their preventive mechanisms. One of the cryptography attacks that security experts need to be aware of is brute-force attack. In this kind of attack, cybercriminals make an effort of decrypting a message by using various sets of the possible secret keys. The concept behind this attack is that the true or the real secret key always lie within the possible set of secret keys (Moe, 2017). As such, attackers believe that if they have adequate time and computational resources, they are able to have the right key. They take their time to make the guesses and if proper care is not taken, they end up accessing protected information. In order to prevent brute-force attack, the best approach is to have a long secret key. In normal circumstances, the longest hey is always 256 bits (Lee, 2020). Having a long key implies that it may not be possible to guess or come up with the right key in case the attackers make an attempt of decrypting the information under protection. Despite the time and computational resources that attackers may have, it can be impossible to access the information under protection of the long key is used. That is due to the fact that making guesses more than 200 times to arrive at the

right key is close to an impossibility. Reference

Lee, C. (2020). Deep Learning Enabled Intrusion Detection and Prevention System over SDN Networks. 2020 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC Workshops), 1–6. https://doi.org/ 10.1109/ICCWorkshops49005.2020.9145085

Moe, W. (2017). Improved hashing and honey-based stronger password prevention against brute force attack. 2017 International Symposium on Electronics and Smart Devices (ISESD), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1109/ ISESD.2017.825329

Discussion :2

There are various types of cryptographic attach. Man-in-the-middle , Brute-force, Replay, Side channel, Power analysis and timing attack. Each of them have their own ways to break the secure communication between sender and receiver (Poston & Dhandhania, n,d,.). We will talk about power analysis attack. Every machine runs on power. We can build the correlation between the power consumption and the processing that machine is doing. So based on the underlying process machine is doing we can extract the information about the operation that is being performed.   Power analysis attack works that way. Any cryptographic operation will take sometime. Based on the algorithm and the type of operation, it’s possible to build the power analysis of the machine. For example we can build the power analysis of the RSA algorithm. Machine might be using the

private key to encrypt the information that its sending or receiving. There is way to get the binary bits of the private key from the RSA algorithms power analysis. Method is called at square-and-multiply(Poston & Dhandhania, n,d,.).  In power analysis if RSA, using this method , rise in power shows operation for bit zero and fall in power shows the processing for bit one. This way from the graphic plot of the processing we can get the binary bits of the private key. Though the attack looks easy to extract the information , the protection should be done more on the machine side. Server machines should be protected to not give away the underlying access. Periodically the review of the access should be monitored and maintained to make sure to identify the security vulnerabilities.     These days all the public cloud providers and private cloud machines are powerful enough to protect against any of the issues.      Reference:   Poston, H & Dhandhania, K .(n.,d.). Cryptographic Attacks: Types of Attacks with Examples, and How to Defend Against Them. https:// www.commonlounge.com/discussion/ 4c8ace459d1840408e487a673cca255d