Applied Cryptography Security Architecture
When developing software, developers and companies usually rely on numerous external libraries. According to GitHub State of the Octoverse Report 2019 [1], open-source projects have an average of 180 package dependencies. The same goes for commercial and closed-source software, although no official numbers are available.
For an attacker, it is enough to compromise one of these dependencies to break into the network or data of the final user of the software [3]. This technique has proven extremely effective, and hence is increasingly used by attackers [2].
This supply chain attack technique can be applied to any programming language and dependency management tool: PHP/composer, Python/PIP, DotNET/NuGet, Java/Maven. All these dependency management systems rely on a central system storing the details of available libraries.
In this project, we plan to study how these central systems can be replaced by a distributed system relying on blockchain. A blockchain system is often compared to a distributed ledger. It allows to guarantee the integrity of stored data: no record can be inserted or modified in the database of libraries without being detected by the users of the database. This property would allow to create a software supply chain that would be protected against supply chain attacks.
A few weeks ago, we had the opportunity to present a short webinar on two topics currently under research in our department:
ReadIf you already research about web3 and decentralization, you probably stumbled on the Inter Planetary File System (IPFS). However if you wanted to use the API provided by the IPFS in one of your go program, you probably went crazy trying to understand how to use the API to finaly realize the documentation is not even up to date and refer to deprecated library. The IPFS-API module try to fill this gap and provide a basic yet simple to use package to interact with an IPFS RPC API endpoint.
ReadIf you ever connected to a discord server related to ethereum (geth, ethereum.org) you probably noticed that despite very useful information given about the technology, those server are also unfortunately full of scammer... Let's have a look at one of them and analyse the scam it propose.
ReadBlockchain Ethereum Smart Contract
If you have already been curious about how Ethereum smart contract works under the hood or even participated to a CTF where you had to exploit some weakness in smart contract, you probably stumble upon the solidity abi encoding page. Even if this is the reference paper, it can look a bit difficult to understand and it's not easily readable even though it's not really difficult. Let's review how the encoding is working with the help of few example.
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