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8 stories in the last 7d

Fluid Notarization: Verifiable Evolution of Concurrently Edited Structured Documents

Fluid Notarization anchors delta-CRDT change graphs on blockchain, providing verifiable provenance for concurrently edited documents, demonstrated on collaborative electronic health records.

The paper introduces Fluid Notarization, a paradigm that notarizes the evolution of collaboratively edited structured documents rather than isolated snapshots. It builds on Melda, a JSON-native delta-CRDT representing changes as compact content-addressed deltas linked by causal dependencies, with blockchain notarization reduced to recording identifiers of evolution artifacts while synchronization, reconstruction, and conflict resolution remain off-chain. The architecture combines deterministic CRDT convergence with independently auditable proof-of-existence, provenance, and publication evidence, validated through a prototype based on collaboratively edited electronic health records.

arXiv cs.CR · 20h agoResearch

Differential Trust: Dynamic Multi-Authority Anonymous Credentials with Epoch-Weighted Updates

Researchers propose MA-ACEW, the first multi-authority anonymous credential model with epoch-weighted issuance and efficient cross-epoch credential updates.

The paper introduces MA-ACEW, a multi-authority anonymous credential scheme that weights authorities differently during credential issuance, targeting decentralized systems such as Proof-of-Stake networks. Its core primitive, Epoch-Bound Pointcheval-Sanders Signatures (EB-PS), binds signatures to time epochs, enabling non-interactive credential updates when authority weight distributions change. The authors formalize EUF-eCMA unforgeability and prove unforgeability, anonymity, and blindness under a novel STB-GPS assumption. Aggregating a credential from 128 partial credentials takes about 10.68 ms on average.

arXiv cs.CR · 21h agoResearch

Securing the unpatchable in an age of AI-driven vulnerabilities

Cisco Talos argues AI-driven vulnerability discovery leaves unpatchable OT systems exposed, recommending virtual patching via NGFW/IPS and micro-segmentation.

AI-assisted code analysis is uncovering vulnerabilities faster than organizations can patch, leaving certified or end-of-life OT systems with unmitigated known flaws. Talos recommends virtual patching with next-generation firewalls and IPS, micro-segmentation using VLANs and ACLs, and building visibility-based inventories of legacy systems. The article cites WannaCry's impact on the NHS and 2023 exploitation of end-of-life software in government systems, and warns that air gaps and data diodes are routinely circumvented by operational shortcuts.

Cisco Talos · 1d agoResearch

DDRop Attack Forces Intel TDX Confidential VMs Into Debug Mode and Exposes Memory

KU Leuven and ETH Zurich researchers released DDRop PoC hardware that forces Intel TDX confidential VMs into debug mode and exposes plaintext memory.

Researchers from KU Leuven, ETH Zurich, Google, and Durham University published proof-of-concept code, hardware designs, and firmware for DDRop, a DDR5 interposer that injects parity errors to drop selected cache-line writebacks. Because Intel TDX, Intel Scalable SGX, and AMD SEV-SNP lack per-line cryptographic freshness, processors decrypt and accept stale DRAM contents as current state. The PoC flips a victim's ATTRIBUTES.DEBUG flag to enable TDX debug mode, then copies victim memory in plaintext and can forge attestation reports. Affected environments include Intel 5th- and 6th-generation Xeon Scalable with TDX; Intel says the attack falls outside its cloud-computing threat model.

GBHackers · 2d agoResearch

gr-PHYSEC: Real-time Channel-based Key Generation for Physical Layer Secure Wireless Communications

gr-PHYSEC GNU Radio module derives symmetric encryption keys from wireless channel randomness using a neural network, validated on robotic platforms with ADALM-Pluto SDRs.

The paper introduces gr-PHYSEC, a GNU Radio out-of-tree module for real-time physical-layer key generation that derives symmetric keys from the wireless channel's inherent randomness instead of pre-shared secrets. A trained neural network extracts channel features between trusted parties during probe exchanges; features are quantized into binary keys, reconciled via Reed-Solomon encoding, and secured with SHA-512 hashing before direct use for encryption. Real-world experiments at the FAU CAAI connected robotics testbed using ADALM Pluto software-defined radios and NVIDIA Jetson Orin demonstrated low key disagreement rates and NIST-verified randomness. Source code is publicly available on GitHub.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

How Attackers Abuse VSS, and How Huntress Detects It

Huntress details how attackers abuse Windows Volume Shadow Copies for ransomware recovery sabotage and NTDS.dit credential theft, plus detection logic.

Huntress explains that attackers abuse VSS in three ways: deleting shadow copies to inhibit recovery before ransomware detonation, creating shadow copies to extract the NTDS.dit Active Directory database for offline credential theft, and manipulating shadow copy configuration. Because backup agents and RMM tools routinely create and delete shadow copies, raw events are too noisy to alert on alone. Huntress detections instead correlate VSS activity with lateral movement and credential harvesting over a time window, such as an observed sequence of PsExec spawning SYSTEM shells on a domain controller, vssadmin create shadow, a blocked deletion attempt, and DNS reconnaissance against another host.

Huntress · 2d agoResearch

Differential Privacy Meets Fixed Parameter Tractability: Algorithms and Lower Bounds

Theory paper combines differential privacy with fixed-parameter tractable encoders, improving approximation guarantees for combinatorial optimization and proving new lower bounds.

The paper studies combinatorial optimization under epsilon-differential privacy within the implicit encoder-decoder framework of Gupta et al. (SODA 2010), generalizing it to allow fixed-parameter tractable encoders. This circumvents approximation barriers inherent to polynomial-time algorithms and yields improved guarantees for fundamental combinatorial optimization problems. The authors establish the first representation-independent lower bounds: assuming a non-uniform variant of the Gap Exponential Time Hypothesis, no epsilon-DP encoder-decoder pair can achieve certain approximation guarantees with a subexponential-time decoder for sufficiently small epsilon. Representation-dependent lower bounds are also provided for larger epsilon.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

On Identifying Sound Conditions for Frontrunning Resistance

Researchers formally define smart-contract frontrunning resistance, showing 55% of 393 audited vulnerabilities escape state-of-the-art detection, and find two undisclosed Ethereum flaws.

The paper gives the first formal definition of frontrunning vulnerability for smart contracts, grounded in how honest users interact with contracts rather than contract code alone. In a large-scale study of 287 smart contract audits, 55% of the 393 vulnerabilities reported by leading auditors fall outside the scope of state-of-the-art dynamic detection criteria. The authors present a sound algorithm for synthesizing secure interaction conditions and apply it to real-world contracts, uncovering previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in two Ethereum contracts.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch