INFORMATION HIDING -- AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY (9/10)

032027 `Breaking an Efficient Anonymous Channel'

  • B Pfitzmann, Eurocrypt 94 pp 339 -- 348
  • At Eurocrypt'93, Park, Itoh, and Kurosawa presented two efficient designs for an anonymous channel based on Chaum's mix-nets. The idea was to simulate a trusted host for applications like electronic voting with secret inputs and public outputs. Here, the author first identifies a passive attack against both designs that may allow correlation of inputs and outputs, and shows how to avoid this by careful choice of parameters. She then demonstrates an active attack that completely breaks one of the designs; there may be ways to avoid this attack on the other design by adding counters and redundancy.

    'Receipt-Free Mix- Type Voting Schemes'

  • K Sako, J Kilian, Eurocrypt 95 pp 393 -- 403
  • The authors use Chaum's anonymous channel to construct an anonymous voting scheme under which voters cannot prove how they voted and so cannot so easily be bribed or coerced. However each voter can still check that every vote was properly counted.

    'Covert Distributed processing with Computer Viruses'

  • SR White, Advances in Cryptology -- Crypto 89, Springer LNCS v 435 pp 616 -- 619
  • Viruses can be used to perform distributed processing without the knowledge or consent of the machine owners. The class of problems for which such processing might be useful is discussed, and includes keysearch; a virus which infected ten million machines might break a DES key in about three months.

    'A SHORT COURSE IN COMPUTER VIRUSES - SECOND EDITION'

  • Frederick B Cohen, Wiley 1994 ISBN 0-471-00769-2
  • Fred Cohen is uniquely qualified to write about computer viruses, having invented them twelve years ago as his PhD project. In addition to a brief history of the subject, including covert channel attacks on military secure Unix systems, he ranges from the oretical results on undecidability through to practical accounts of the latest virus and anti-virus techniques.

    034404 'Recursive mappings for computer virus'

  • XA Li, JH Fu, YG Song, HY Yang, Chinacrypt 94 pp 279 -- 286 (in Chinese)
  • This paper builds on Adleman's suggested definition of computer viruses in terms of Godel numberings, and suggests a recursive mapping definition. They show that programs exist which are viruses under their definition but not Adleman's and vice versa; and that for any virus, there exists a program which it cannot infect or injure.

    'Reflections on Trusting Trust'

  • K Thomson, Communications of the ACM v 27 no 8 (Aug 84)
  • In his Turing award lecture, Ken Thomson shows that a Trojan horse can be hidden in a compiler; it inserts copies of itself every time either the compiler or the login program is compiled.