Page 96 - Cyber Defense Magazine RSA Edition for 2021
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part, often undermined by man-in-the-middle attacks, or by elevations of law on information systems.
These attacks, when identification or decryption relies only on one-factor authentication, allow the theft
of encryption keys, and directly compromise the security of your data. To mitigate these threats, two-
factor authentication (or 2FA) adds a layer of protection by either obtaining a unique code sent by SMS
to your phone number, or by validating a request for it authentication (Google / Facebook), or through
the use of authenticators which is increasingly recommended by security specialists.
Why use the EviToken Technology?
The purpose of EviToken technology is to secure secrets of different kinds, such as asymmetric keys
(RSA), symmetric keys (AES) but also login information, PIN codes, account or bank card identifiers,
cryptocurrency private keys, cryptocurrency wallet passphrases, cryptocurrency recovery phrases
(SEED), etc. The EviToken secure safe is contained in a simple NFC card, not connected to a computer
system. It communicates with the latter, on demand, via a near-field transmission protocol (NFC) which
transmits data over an encrypted channel, built by EviToken. Secrets stored in the card are segmented
and encrypted to make them physically inaccessible to cybercriminals. The EviToken secure safe is a
real natural Air Gap component. Thus, apart from the case of data transmission, the architecture used
has: no power supply; no security breach due to an increase in temperature (which makes it immune to
malware such as "BitWhisper and Fansmitter"); no emission of sound signals, even those inaudible to
the human ear and no emission of light or waves. Finally, to avoid a conflation with smart card-based
systems, the support of EviToken technology does not require dedicated physical connection hardware
with the digital system, nor does it have an operating system, which makes it insensitive to the
introduction of malicious code as on a Java architecture. Like any electronic component, the EviToken
secure safe can undergo invasive attacks which consist in using acids to expose the electronic circuit
that will then have to be analyzed to try to understand the implementation of the secure secrets in multiple
scrambled segments.
If EviToken technology provides security in a secure vault, what about the use of encryption keys
to transport secrets over a secure channel?
In the context of two-factor authentication, we consider that you are the only one who can hold the second
criterion of trust. This security measure traditionally allows, in case of failure, not to trigger the secure
transport of your data. However, this function is not intended to secure the transport, it is the role of the
encryption protocol to perform this operation. Thus, if the encryption keys are compromised, the data
could be compromised during a listen. Faced with this problem, EviToken directly integrates metadata
trust criteria into its encryption keys, in order to secure the encrypted messages during their transport.
Thus, even in the event of a compromise of the keys, decryption remains blocked by the trust criteria.
With this in mind, why stop at two criteria of trust? In its basic version, EviToken offers nine trust criteria
based on the possession of a third-party object, technical components (phone ID, barcode, password,
geolocation or BSSID) but also environmental and specific components to the sender, or recipient, to
make data compromise even more difficult.
A simple example, you want to send a confidential message containing your latest invention to a
colleague in a hostile environment, with a high probability of compromise. You will therefore add non-
digital trust criteria to your encryption key, to ensure its protection in the event of a compromise. The
decryption of the message by the AES 256 symmetric key will only be accessible, by the digital tool, once
the conditions related to the trust criteria have been met. If we base one of the trust criteria on a
geolocation for example, the recipient must not only be in possession of an EviToken card, but also be
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