Crypto for Developers

March 14, 2016 (at 9 a.m.)

ABSTRACT:

This is a practice-oriented crypto course. It's intended for anyone implementing crypto, using crypto libraries or APIs, reviewing crypto implementations, selecting crypto schemes, or designing new ones. You'll learn the core notions and concepts and you'll see examples of failures and attacks and how to avoid them. The agenda is flexible and will be adapted to the audience. I'd like to have an interactive course, where you can share your experience and learn from others'

DETAILED OUTLINE:

The tentative roadmap is as follows:

Definitions (~1h)
- The building blocks: ciphers, hash functions, MACs, PRFs, RNGs, public-key encryption, signatures, key agreement, etc.
- Attack models and goals: semantic security, perfect forward secrecy, side-channel models, informational vs. computational security
Randomness (~1h30)
- What is randomness and entropy in crypto
- Examples of bugs and (epic) failures
- How to use strong randomness, depending on your needs/constraints
- Which RNG to use? Which API? Which entropy source(s)? etc.
- How (not) to test your RNG, what tests it can detect
Attacks and defenses (~1h30)
- Timing attacks: principle, examples of attacks, defenses
- Padding oracles: principle, examples of attacks, defenses
- Case study: AES cache-timing attacks
- Case study: RC4 failures (from WEP to TLS)
- Case study: RSA PKCS#1 v1.5 and side channels
Using crypto (~1h30)
- Review of libs and APIs: OpenSSL, CryptoAPI, NaCl, etc.
- Basic vulnerability searching (reviewing, static analyzing, fuzzing)
- AES-128 or AES-256? RSA or ECC? which TLS ciphersuites? etc.
- What is the right key size? for which application?
- Testing crypto (it's more than test vectors)
Selected topics (~1h)
- Elliptic curve crypto demystified
- Password hashing do's and don'ts
- TextSecure/Axolotl protocol

Useful references to check before the training:

https://cryptocoding.net/

http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/

https://131002.net/data/talks/cryptanalysis_bhad11.pdf

http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/hac/

http://www.cryptofails.com/

Jean-Philippe Aumasson

Jean-Philippe (JP) Aumasson is Principal Research Engineer at Kudelski Security, in Switzerland. He designed the popular cryptographic functions BLAKE2 and SipHash, and the new authenticated cipher NORX. He has spoken at Black Hat, DEFCON, RSA, CCC, SyScan, Troopers. He initiated the Crypto Coding Standard and the Password Hashing Competition projects, co-wrote the 2015 book "The Hash Function BLAKE", and will release a new cryptography book in 2017 for a wider audience. JP tweets as @veorq.