Biblio

While the Internet of Things (IoT) is embraced as important tools for efficiency and productivity, it is becoming an increasingly attractive target for cybercriminals. This work represents the first endeavor to develop practical Puncturable Attribute Based Encryption schemes that are light-weight and applicable in IoTs. In the proposed scheme, the attribute-based encryption is adopted for fine grained access control. The secret keys are puncturable to revoke the decryption capability for selected messages, recipients, or time periods, thus protecting selected important messages even if the current key is compromised. In contrast to conventional forward encryption, a distinguishing merit of the proposed approach is that the recipients can update their keys by themselves without key re-issuing from the key distributor. It does not require frequent communications between IoT devices and the key distribution center, neither does it need deleting components to expunge existing keys to produce a new key. Moreover, we devise a novel approach which efficiently integrates attribute-based key and punctured keys such that the key size is roughly the same as that of the original attribute-based encryption. We prove the correctness of the proposed scheme and its security under the Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) assumption. We also implement the proposed scheme on Raspberry Pi and observe that the computation efficiency of the proposed approach is comparable to the original attribute-based encryption. Both encryption and decryption can be completed within tens of milliseconds.

Device-to-device communication is widely used for mobile devices and Internet of Things. Authentication and key agreement are critical to build a secure channel between two devices. However, existing approaches often rely on a pre-built fingerprint database and suffer from low key generation rate. We present GeneWave, a fast device authentication and key agreement protocol for commodity mobile devices. GeneWave first achieves bidirectional initial authentication based on the physical response interval between two devices. To keep the accuracy of interval estimation, we eliminate time uncertainty on commodity devices through fast signal detection and redundancy time cancellation. Then, we derive the initial acoustic channel response for device authentication. We design a novel coding scheme for efficient key agreement while ensuring security. Therefore, two devices can authenticate each other and securely agree on a symmetric key. GeneWave requires neither special hardware nor pre-built fingerprint database, and thus it is easyto-use on commercial mobile devices. We implement GeneWave on mobile devices (i.e., Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P) and evaluate its performance through extensive experiments. Experimental results show that GeneWave efficiently accomplish secure key agreement on commodity smartphones with a key generation rate 10× faster than the state-of-the-art approach.

Hardware implementations of cryptographic algorithms may leak information through numerous side channels, which can be used to reveal the secret cryptographic keys, and therefore compromise the security of the algorithm. Power Analysis Attacks (PAAs) [1] exploit the information leakage from the device's power consumption (typically measured on the supply and/or ground pins). Digital circuits consume dynamic switching energy when data propagate through the logic in each new calculation (e.g. new clock cycle). The average power dissipation of a design can be expressed by: Ptot(t) = α · (Pd(t) + Ppvt(t)) (1) where α is the activity factor (the probability that the gate will switch) and depends on the probability distribution of the inputs to the combinatorial logic. This induces a linear relationship between the power and the processed data [2]. Pd is the deterministic power dissipated by the switching of the gate, including any parasitic and intrinsic capacitances, and hence can be evaluated prior to manufacturing. Ppvt is the change in expected power consumption due to nondeterministic parameters such as process variations, mismatch, temperature, etc. In this manuscript, we describe the design of logic gates that induce data-independent (constant) α and Pd.

Realization of an application using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) using Sensor Nodes (SNs) brings in profound advantages of ad-hoc and flexible network deployments. Implementation of these networks face immense challenges due to short wireless range; along with limited power, storage & computational capabilities of SNs. Also, due to the tiny physical attributes of the SNs in WSNs, they are prone to physical attacks. In the context of WSNs, the physical attacks may range from destroying, lifting, replacing and adding new SNs. The work in this paper addresses the threats induced due to physical attacks and, further proposes a methodology to mitigate it. The methodology incorporates the use of newly proposed secured and efficient symmetric and asymmetric key distribution technique based on the additional commodity hardware Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Further, the paper demonstrates the merits of the proposed methodology. With some additional economical cost for the hardware, the proposed technique can fulfill the security requirement of WSNs, like confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, resilience to attack, key connectivity and data freshness.

Since the Information Networks are added to the current electricity networks, the security and privacy of individuals is challenged. This combination of technologies creates vulnerabilities in the context of smart grid power which disrupt the consumer energy supply. Methods based on encryption are against the countermeasures attacks that have targeted the integrity and confidentiality factors. Although the cryptography strategies are used in Smart Grid, key management which is different in size from tens to millions of keys (for meters), is considered as the critical processes. The Key mismanagement causes to reveal the secret keys for attacker, a symmetric key distribution method is recently suggested by [7] which is based on a symmetric key distribution, this strategy is very suitable for smart electric meters. The problem with this method is its vulnerability to impersonating respondents attack. The proposed approach to solve this problem is to send the both side identifiers in encrypted form based on hash functions and a random value, the proposed solution is appropriate for devices such as meters that have very little computing power.

Code signing which at present is the only methodology of trusting a code that is distributed to others. It heavily relies on the security of the software providers private key. Attackers employ targeted attacks on the code signing infrastructure for stealing the signing keys which are used later for distributing malware in disguise of genuine software. Differentiating a malware from a benign software becomes extremely difficult once it gets signed by a trusted software providers private key as the operating systems implicitly trusts this signed code. In this paper, we analyze the growing menace of signed malware by examining several real world incidents and present a threat model for the current code signing infrastructure. We also propose a novel solution that prevents this issue of malicious code signing by requiring additional verification of the executable. We also present the serious threat it poses and it consequences. To our knowledge this is the first time this specific issue of Malicious code signing has been thoroughly studied and an implementable solution is proposed.

In this paper, we propose a lightweight multi-receiver encryption scheme for the device to device communications on Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In order for the individual user to control the disclosure range of his/her own data directly and to prevent sensitive personal data disclosure to the trusted third party, the proposed scheme uses device-generated public keys. For mutual authentication, third party generates Schnorr-like lightweight identity-based partial private keys for users. The proposed scheme provides source authentication, message integrity, replay-attack prevention and implicit user authentication. In addition to more security properties, computation expensive pairing operations are eliminated to achieve less time usage for both sender and receiver, which is favourable property for IoT applications. In this paper, we showed a proof of security of our scheme, computational cost comparison and experimental performance evaluations. We implemented our proposed scheme on real embedded Android devices and confirmed that it achieves less time cost for both encryption and decryption comparing with the existing most efficient certificate-based multi-receiver encryption scheme and certificateless multi-receiver encryption scheme.

The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is an international standard for a security chip that can be used for the management of cryptographic keys and for remote attestation. The specification of the most recent TPM 2.0 interfaces for direct anonymous attestation unfortunately has a number of severe shortcomings. First of all, they do not allow for security proofs (indeed, the published proofs are incorrect). Second, they provide a Diffie-Hellman oracle w.r.t. the secret key of the TPM, weakening the security and preventing forward anonymity of attestations. Fixes to these problems have been proposed, but they create new issues: they enable a fraudulent TPM to encode information into an attestation signature, which could be used to break anonymity or to leak the secret key. Furthermore, all proposed ways to remove the Diffie-Hellman oracle either strongly limit the functionality of the TPM or would require significant changes to the TPM 2.0 interfaces. In this paper we provide a better specification of the TPM 2.0 interfaces that addresses these problems and requires only minimal changes to the current TPM 2.0 commands. We then show how to use the revised interfaces to build q-SDH-and LRSW-based anonymous attestation schemes, and prove their security. We finally discuss how to obtain other schemes addressing different use cases such as key-binding for U-Prove and e-cash.

Cloud computing has become a part of people's lives. However, there are many unresolved problems with security of this technology. According to the assessment of international experts in the field of security, there are risks in the appearance of cloud collusion in uncertain conditions. To mitigate this type of uncertainty, and minimize data redundancy of encryption together with harms caused by cloud collusion, modified threshold Asmuth-Bloom and weighted Mignotte secret sharing schemes are used. We show that if the villains do know the secret parts, and/or do not know the secret key, they cannot recuperate the secret. If the attackers do not know the required number of secret parts but know the secret key, the probability that they obtain the secret depends the size of the machine word in bits that is less than 1/2(1-1). We demonstrate that the proposed scheme ensures security under several types of attacks. We propose four approaches to select weights for secret sharing schemes to optimize the system behavior based on data access speed: pessimistic, balanced, and optimistic, and on speed per price ratio. We use the approximate method to improve the detection, localization and error correction accuracy under cloud parameters uncertainty.

In smart grid, large quantities of data is collected from various applications, such as smart metering substation state monitoring, electric energy data acquisition, and smart home. Big data acquired in smart grid applications is usually sensitive. For instance, in order to dispatch accurately and support the dynamic price, lots of smart meters are installed at user's house to collect the real-time data, but all these collected data are related to user privacy. In this paper, we propose a data aggregation scheme based on secret sharing with fault tolerance in smart grid, which ensures that control center gets the integrated data without revealing user's privacy. Meanwhile, we also consider fault tolerance during the data aggregation. At last, we analyze the security of our scheme and carry out experiments to validate the results.

Cloud computing has become a widely used computing paradigm providing on-demand computing and storage capabilities based on pay-as-you-go model. Recently, many organizations, especially in the field of big data, have been adopting the cloud model to perform data analytics through leasing powerful Virtual Machines (VMs). VMs can be attractive targets to attackers as well as untrusted cloud providers who aim to get unauthorized access to the business critical-data. The obvious security solution is to perform data analytics on encrypted data through the use of cryptographic keys as that of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). However, it is very easy to obtain AES cryptographic keys from the VM's Random Access Memory (RAM). In this paper, we present a novel key-scattering (KS) approach to protect the cryptographic keys while encrypting/decrypting data. Our solution is highly portable and interoperable. Thus, it could be integrated within today's existing cloud architecture without the need for further modifications. The feasibility of the approach has been proven by implementing a functioning prototype. The evaluation results show that our approach is substantially more resilient to brute force attacks and key extraction tools than the standard AES algorithm, with acceptable execution time.

In the recent years many companies are shifting towards cloud for expanding their business profit with least additional cost. Cloud computing is a growing technology which has emerged from the development of grid computing, virtualization and utility computing. Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources like networks, servers, storage, applications, and services that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. There was a huge data loss during the recent Chennai floods during Dec 2015. If these data would have been stored at distributed data centers great loss could have been prevented. Though, such natural calamities are tempting many users to shift towards the cloud storage, security threats are inhibiting them to shift towards the cloud. Many solutions have been addressed for these security issues but they do not give guaranteed security. By guaranteed security we mean confidentiality, integrity and availability. Some of the existing techniques for providing security are Cryptographic Protocols, Data Sanitization, Predicate Logic, Access Control Mechanism, Honeypots, Sandboxing, Erasure Coding, RAID(Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks), Homomorphic Encryption and Split-Key Encryption. All these techniques either cannot work alone or adds computational and time complexity. An alternate scheme of combining encryption and channel coding schemes at one-go is proposed for increasing the levels of security. Hybrid encryption scheme is proposed to be used in the interleaver block of Turbo coder for avoiding burst error. Hybrid encryption avoids sharing of secret key via the unsecured channel. This provides both security and reliability by reducing error propagation effect with small additional cost and computational overhead. Time complexity can be reduced when encryption and encoding are done as a single process.

This paper proposes a novel scheme for RFID anti-counterfeiting by applying bisectional multivariate quadratic equations (BMQE) system into an RF tag data encryption. In the key generation process, arbitrarily choose two matrix sets (denoted as A and B) and a base Rab such that [AB] = λRABT, and generate 2n BMQ polynomials (denoted as p) over finite field Fq. Therefore, (Fq, p) is taken as a public key and (A, B, λ) as a private key. In the encryption process, the EPC code is hashed into a message digest dm. Then dm is padded to d'm which is a non-zero 2n×2n matrix over Fq. With (A, B, λ) and d'm, Sm is formed as an n-vector over F2. Unlike the existing anti-counterfeit scheme, the one we proposed is based on quantum cryptography, thus it is robust enough to resist the existing attacks and has high security.

Security of the information is the main problem in network communications nowadays. There is no algorithm which ensures the one hundred percent reliability of the transmissions. The current society uses the Internet, to exchange information such as from private images to financial data. The cryptographic systems are the mechanisms developed to protect and hide the information from intruders. However, advancing technology is also used by intruders to breach the security of the systems. Hence, every time cryptosystems developed based on complex Mathematics. Elliptic curve cryptography(ECC) is one of the technique in such kind of cryptosystems. Security of the elliptic curves lies in hardness of solving the discrete logarithms problems. In this research, a new cryptographic system is built by using the elliptic curve cryptography based on square matrices to achieve a secure communication between two parties. First, an invertible matrix is chosen arbitrarily in the the field used in the system. Then, by using the Cayley Hamilton theorem, private key matrices are generated for both parties. Next, public key vectors of the both parties are generated by using the private keys of them and arbitrary points of the given elliptic curve. Diffie Hellman protocol is used to authenticate the key exchange. ElGamal plus Menezes Qu Vanstone encryption protocols are used to encrypt the messages. MATLAB R2015a is used to implement and test the proper functioning of the built cryptosystem.

Devices in the internet of things (IoT) are frequently (i) resource-constrained, and (ii) deployed in unmonitored, physically unsecured environments. Securing these devices requires tractable cryptographic protocols, as well as cost effective tamper resistance solutions. We propose and evaluate cryptographic protocols that leverage physical unclonable functions (PUFs): circuits whose input to output mapping depends on the unique characteristics of the physical hardware on which it is executed. PUF-based protocols have the benefit of minimizing private key exposure, as well as providing cost-effective tamper resistance. We present and experimentally evaluate an elliptic curve based variant of a theoretical PUF-based authentication protocol proposed previously in the literature. Our work improves over an existing proof-of-concept implementation, which relied on the discrete logarithm problem as proposed in the original work. In contrast, our construction uses elliptic curve cryptography, which substantially reduces the computational and storage burden on the device. We describe PUF-based algorithms for device enrollment, authentication, decryption, and digital signature generation. The performance of each construction is experimentally evaluated on a resource-constrained device to demonstrate tractability in the IoT domain. We demonstrate that our implementation achieves practical performance results, while also providing realistic security. Our work demonstrates that PUF-based protocols may be practically and securely deployed on low-cost resource-constrained IoT devices.

Easy sharing files in public network that is intended only for certain people often resulting in the leaking of sharing folders or files and able to be read also by others who are not authorized. Secure data is one of the most challenging issues in data sharing systems. Here, Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) is a reliable asymmetric encryption mechanism which deals with secure data and used for data encryption. It is not necessary encrypted to one particular user, but recipient is only able to decrypt if and only if the attribute set of his private key match with the specified policy in the ciphertext. In this paper, we propose a secure data exchange using CP-ABE with authentication feature. The data is attribute-based encrypted to satisfy confidentiality feature and authenticated to satisfy data authentication simultaneously.

The transmission of data over a common transmission media revolute the world of information sharing from personal desktop to cloud computing. But the risk of the information theft has increased in the same ratio by the third party working on the same channel. The risk can be avoided using the suitable encryption algorithm. Using the best suited algorithm the transmitted data will be encrypted before placing it on the common channel. Using the public key or the private key the encrypted data can be decrypted by the authenticated user. It will avoid the risk of information theft by the unauthenticated user. In this work we have proposed an encryption algorithm which uses the ASCII code to encrypt the plain text. The common key will be used by sender or receiver to encrypt and decrypt the text for secure communication.

Secret key establishment is considered to be one of the main challenging issues in cryptography. Many security algorithms are implemented in practice using complicated mathematical methods to exchange secret keys, but those methods are not desirable in power limited terminals such as cellular and sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a physical layer method for exchanging secret key bits in precoding based multi-input multi-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The proposed method uniquely relates the key bits to the indices of the precoding matrix used for MIMO channel precoding. The basic idea of the technique is to utilize a MIMO-OFDM precoding codebook. Comparative analysis with respect to the average number of mismatch bits, named key error rate (KER), shows an interesting lead for the new method relative to existing work. In addition, it will be shown that the proposed technique requires lower computation per byte per secret key.

Security of secret data has been a major issue of concern from ancient time. Steganography and cryptography are the two techniques which are used to reduce the security threat. Cryptography is an art of converting secret message in other than human readable form. Steganography is an art of hiding the existence of secret message. These techniques are required to protect the data theft over rapidly growing network. To achieve this there is a need of such a system which is very less susceptible to human visual system. In this paper a new technique is going to be introducing for data transmission over an unsecure channel. In this paper secret data is compressed first using LZW algorithm before embedding it behind any cover media. Data is compressed to reduce its size. After compression data encryption is performed to increase the security. Encryption is performed with the help of a key which make it difficult to get the secret message even if the existence of the secret message is reveled. Now the edge of secret message is detected by using canny edge detector and then embedded secret data is stored there with the help of a hash function. Proposed technique is implemented in MATLAB and key strength of this project is its huge data hiding capacity and least distortion in Stego image. This technique is applied over various images and the results show least distortion in altered image.

Remote data integrity checking is of crucial importance in cloud storage. It can make the clients verify whether their outsourced data is kept intact without downloading the whole data. In some application scenarios, the clients have to store their data on multicloud servers. At the same time, the integrity checking protocol must be efficient in order to save the verifier's cost. From the two points, we propose a novel remote data integrity checking model: ID-DPDP (identity-based distributed provable data possession) in multicloud storage. The formal system model and security model are given. Based on the bilinear pairings, a concrete ID-DPDP protocol is designed. The proposed ID-DPDP protocol is provably secure under the hardness assumption of the standard CDH (computational Diffie-Hellman) problem. In addition to the structural advantage of elimination of certificate management, our ID-DPDP protocol is also efficient and flexible. Based on the client's authorization, the proposed ID-DPDP protocol can realize private verification, delegated verification, and public verification.
 

Secure group communication systems have become increasingly important for many emerging network applications. An efficient and robust group key management approach is indispensable to a secure group communication system. Motivated by the theory of hyper-sphere, this paper presents a new group key management approach with a group controller (GC). In our new design, a hyper-sphere is constructed for a group and each member in the group corresponds to a point on the hyper-sphere, which is called the member's private point. The GC computes the central point of the hyper-sphere, intuitively, whose “distance” from each member's private point is identical. The central point is published such that each member can compute a common group key, using a function by taking each member's private point and the central point of the hyper-sphere as the input. This approach is provably secure under the pseudo-random function (PRF) assumption. Compared with other similar schemes, by both theoretical analysis and experiments, our scheme (1) has significantly reduced memory and computation load for each group member; (2) can efficiently deal with massive membership change with only two re-keying messages, i.e., the central point of the hyper-sphere and a random number; and (3) is efficient and very scalable for large-size groups.

Data deduplication is a technique for eliminating duplicate copies of data, and has been widely used in cloud storage to reduce storage space and upload bandwidth. Promising as it is, an arising challenge is to perform secure deduplication in cloud storage. Although convergent encryption has been extensively adopted for secure deduplication, a critical issue of making convergent encryption practical is to efficiently and reliably manage a huge number of convergent keys. This paper makes the first attempt to formally address the problem of achieving efficient and reliable key management in secure deduplication. We first introduce a baseline approach in which each user holds an independent master key for encrypting the convergent keys and outsourcing them to the cloud. However, such a baseline key management scheme generates an enormous number of keys with the increasing number of users and requires users to dedicatedly protect the master keys. To this end, we propose Dekey , a new construction in which users do not need to manage any keys on their own but instead securely distribute the convergent key shares across multiple servers. Security analysis demonstrates that Dekey is secure in terms of the definitions specified in the proposed security model. As a proof of concept, we implement Dekey using the Ramp secret sharing scheme and demonstrate that Dekey incurs limited overhead in realistic environments.

Owing to dynamic topology changes in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), nodes have the freedom of movement. This characteristic necessitates the process of rekeying to secure multicast transmission. Furthermore, a secure inter cluster communication technique is also mandatory to improve the performance of multicast transmission. In this paper, we propose an inter cluster communication and rekeying technique for multicast security in MANET. The technique facilitates inter cluster communication by distributing private key shares to the nodes, which is performed by the centralised key manager. By tamper proofing the data using private key share, inter cluster communication is accomplished. Furthermore, the rekeying mechanism is invoked when a node joins the cluster. Our rekeying technique incurs low overhead and computation cost. Our technique is simulated in network simulator tool. The simulation results show the proficiency of our technique.

Privacy preservation is very essential in various real life applications such as medical science and financial analysis. This paper focuses on implementation of an asymmetric secure multi-party computation protocol using anonymization and public-key encryption where all parties have access to trusted third party (TTP) who (1) doesn't add any contribution to computation (2) doesn't know who is the owner of the input received (3) has large number of resources (4) decryption key is known to trusted third party (TTP) to get the actual input for computation of final result. In this environment, concern is to design a protocol which deploys TTP for computation. It is proposed that the protocol is very proficient (in terms of secure computation and individual privacy) for the parties than the other available protocols. The solution incorporates protocol using asymmetric encryption scheme where any party can encrypt a message with the public key but decryption can be done by only the possessor of the decryption key (private key). As the protocol works on asymmetric encryption and packetization it ensures following: (1) Confidentiality (Anonymity) (2) Security (3) Privacy (Data).

In 2013, Biswas and Misic proposed a new privacy-preserving authentication scheme for WAVE-based vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), claiming that they used a variant of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). However, our study has discovered that the authentication scheme proposed by them is vulnerable to a private key reveal attack. Any malicious receiving vehicle who receives a valid signature from a legal signing vehicle can gain access to the signing vehicle private key from the learned valid signature. Hence, the authentication scheme proposed by Biswas and Misic is insecure. We thus propose an improved version to overcome this weakness. The proposed improved scheme also supports identity revocation and trace. Based on this security property, the CA and a receiving entity (RSU or OBU) can check whether a received signature has been generated by a revoked vehicle. Security analysis is also conducted to evaluate the security strength of the proposed authentication scheme.