Visible to the public Biblio

Found 1586 results

Filters: Keyword is cryptography  [Clear All Filters]
2018-04-02
Sridhar, S., Smys, S..  2017.  Intelligent Security Framework for Iot Devices Cryptography Based End-to-End Security Architecture. 2017 International Conference on Inventive Systems and Control (ICISC). :1–5.

Internet of Thing (IoT) provide services by linking the different platform devices. They have the limitation in providing intelligent service. The IoT devices are heterogeneous which includes wireless sensors to less resource constrained devices. These devices are prone to hardware/software and network attacks. If not properly secured, it may lead to security issues like privacy and confidentiality. To resolve the above problem, an Intelligent Security Framework for IoT Devices is proposed in this paper. The proposed method is made up of (1) the light weight Asymmetric cryptography for securing the End-To-End devices which protects the IoT service gateway and the low power sensor nodes and (2) implements Lattice-based cryptography for securing the Broker devices/Gateway and the cloud services. The proposed architecture implements Asymmetric Key Encryption to share session key between the nodes and then uses this session key for message transfer This protects the system from Distributed Denial of Service Attacks, eavesdropping and Quantum algorithm attacks. The proposed protocol uses the unique Device ID of the sensors to generate key pair to establish mutual authentication between Devices and Services. Finally, the Mutual authentication mechanism is implemented in the gateway.

Lin, W., Wang, K., Zhang, Z., Chen, H..  2017.  Revisiting Security Risks of Asymmetric Scalar Product Preserving Encryption and Its Variants. 2017 IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS). :1116–1125.

Cloud computing has emerged as a compelling vision for managing data and delivering query answering capability over the internet. This new way of computing also poses a real risk of disclosing confidential information to the cloud. Searchable encryption addresses this issue by allowing the cloud to compute the answer to a query based on the cipher texts of data and queries. Thanks to its inner product preservation property, the asymmetric scalar-product-preserving encryption (ASPE) has been adopted and enhanced in a growing number of works toperform a variety of queries and tasks in the cloud computingsetting. However, the security property of ASPE and its enhancedschemes has not been studied carefully. In this paper, we show acomplete disclosure of ASPE and several previously unknownsecurity risks of its enhanced schemes. Meanwhile, efficientalgorithms are proposed to learn the plaintext of data and queriesencrypted by these schemes with little or no knowledge beyondthe ciphertexts. We demonstrate these risks on real data sets.

Boicea, A., Radulescu, F., Truica, C. O., Costea, C..  2017.  Database Encryption Using Asymmetric Keys: A Case Study. 2017 21st International Conference on Control Systems and Computer Science (CSCS). :317–323.

Data security has become an issue of increasing importance, especially for Web applications and distributed databases. One solution is using cryptographic algorithms whose improvement has become a constant concern. The increasing complexity of these algorithms involves higher execution times, leading to an application performance decrease. This paper presents a comparison of execution times for three algorithms using asymmetric keys, depending on the size of the encryption/decryption keys: RSA, ElGamal, and ECIES. For this algorithms comparison, a benchmark using Java APIs and an application for testing them on a test database was created.

Innokentievich, T. P., Vasilevich, M. V..  2017.  The Evaluation of the Cryptographic Strength of Asymmetric Encryption Algorithms. 2017 Second Russia and Pacific Conference on Computer Technology and Applications (RPC). :180–183.

We propose a method for comparative analysis of evaluation of the cryptographic strength of the asymmetric encryption algorithms RSA and the existing GOST R 34.10-2001. Describes the fundamental design ratios, this method is based on computing capacity used for decoding and the forecast for the development of computer technology.

Yassein, M. B., Aljawarneh, S., Qawasmeh, E., Mardini, W., Khamayseh, Y..  2017.  Comprehensive Study of Symmetric Key and Asymmetric Key Encryption Algorithms. 2017 International Conference on Engineering and Technology (ICET). :1–7.

Cloud computing emerged in the last years to handle systems with large-scale services sharing between vast numbers of users. It provides enormous storage for data and computing power to users over the Internet. There are many issues with the high growth of data. Data security is one of the most important issues in cloud computing. There are many algorithms and implementation for data security. These algorithms provided various encryption methods. In this work, We present a comprehensive study between Symmetric key and Asymmetric key encryption algorithms that enhanced data security in cloud computing system. We discuss AES, DES, 3DES and Blowfish for symmetric encryption algorithms, and RSA, DSA, Diffie-Hellman and Elliptic Curve, for asymmetric encryption algorithms.

Focardi, R., Squarcina, M..  2017.  Run-Time Attack Detection in Cryptographic APIs. 2017 IEEE 30th Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF). :176–188.

Cryptographic APIs are often vulnerable to attacks that compromise sensitive cryptographic keys. In the literature we find many proposals for preventing or mitigating such attacks but they typically require to modify the API or to configure it in a way that might break existing applications. This makes it hard to adopt such proposals, especially because security APIs are often used in highly sensitive settings, such as financial and critical infrastructures, where systems are rarely modified and legacy applications are very common. In this paper we take a different approach. We propose an effective method to monitor existing cryptographic systems in order to detect, and possibly prevent, the leakage of sensitive cryptographic keys. The method collects logs for various devices and cryptographic services and is able to detect, offline, any leakage of sensitive keys, under the assumption that a key fingerprint is provided for each sensitive key. We define key security formally and we prove that the method is sound, complete and efficient. We also show that without key fingerprinting completeness is lost, i.e., some attacks cannot be detected. We discuss possible practical implementations and we develop a proof-of-concept log analysis tool for PKCS\#11 that is able to detect, on a significant fragment of the API, all key-management attacks from the literature.

Baldimtsi, F., Camenisch, J., Dubovitskaya, M., Lysyanskaya, A., Reyzin, L., Samelin, K., Yakoubov, S..  2017.  Accumulators with Applications to Anonymity-Preserving Revocation. 2017 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS P). :301–315.

Membership revocation is essential for cryptographic applications, from traditional PKIs to group signatures and anonymous credentials. Of the various solutions for the revocation problem that have been explored, dynamic accumulators are one of the most promising. We propose Braavos, a new, RSA-based, dynamic accumulator. It has optimal communication complexity and, when combined with efficient zero-knowledge proofs, provides an ideal solution for anonymous revocation. For the construction of Braavos we use a modular approach: we show how to build an accumulator with better functionality and security from accumulators with fewer features and weaker security guarantees. We then describe an anonymous revocation component (ARC) that can be instantiated using any dynamic accumulator. ARC can be added to any anonymous system, such as anonymous credentials or group signatures, in order to equip it with a revocation functionality. Finally, we implement ARC with Braavos and plug it into Idemix, the leading implementation of anonymous credentials. This work resolves, for the first time, the problem of practical revocation for anonymous credential systems.

Wei, R., Shen, H., Tian, H..  2017.  An Improved (k,p,l)-Anonymity Method for Privacy Preserving Collaborative Filtering. GLOBECOM 2017 - 2017 IEEE Global Communications Conference. :1–6.

Collaborative Filtering (CF) is a successful technique that has been implemented in recommender systems and Privacy Preserving Collaborative Filtering (PPCF) aroused increasing concerns of the society. Current solutions mainly focus on cryptographic methods, obfuscation methods, perturbation methods and differential privacy methods. But these methods have some shortcomings, such as unnecessary computational cost, lower data quality and hard to calibrate the magnitude of noise. This paper proposes a (k, p, I)-anonymity method that improves the existing k-anonymity method in PPCF. The method works as follows: First, it applies Latent Factor Model (LFM) to reduce matrix sparsity. Then it improves Maximum Distance to Average Vector (MDAV) microaggregation algorithm based on importance partitioning to increase homogeneity among records in each group which can retain better data quality and (p, I)-diversity model where p is attacker's prior knowledge about users' ratings and I is the diversity among users in each group to improve the level of privacy preserving. Theoretical and experimental analyses show that our approach ensures a higher level of privacy preserving based on lower information loss.

Ranakoti, P., Yadav, S., Apurva, A., Tomer, S., Roy, N. R..  2017.  Deep Web Online Anonymity. 2017 International Conference on Computing and Communication Technologies for Smart Nation (IC3TSN). :215–219.

Deep web, a hidden and encrypted network that crawls beneath the surface web today has become a social hub for various criminals who carry out their crime through the cyber space and all the crime is being conducted and hosted on the Deep Web. This research paper is an effort to bring forth various techniques and ways in which an internet user can be safe online and protect his privacy through anonymity. Understanding how user's data and private information is phished and what are the risks of sharing personal information on social media.

2018-03-19
Qiu, Y., Ma, M..  2017.  A Secure PMIPv6-Based Group Mobility Scheme for 6L0WPAN Networks. 2017 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC). :1–6.

The Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN), which is a promising technology to promote the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), has been proposed to connect millions of IP-based sensing devices over the open Internet. To support the mobility of these resource constrained sensing nodes, the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) has been proposed as the standard. Although the standard has specified some issues of security and mobility in 6LoWPANs, the issues of supporting secure group handovers have not been addressed much by the current existing solutions. In this paper, to reduce the handover latency and signaling cost, an efficient and secure group mobility scheme is designed to support seamless handovers for a group of resource constrained 6LoWPAN devices. With the consideration of the devices holding limited energy capacities, only simple hash and symmetric encryption method is used. The security analysis and the performance evaluation results show that the proposed 6LoWPAN group handover scheme could not only enhance the security functionalities but also support fast authentication for handovers.

Roselin, A. G., Nanda, P., Nepal, S..  2017.  Lightweight Authentication Protocol (LAUP) for 6LoWPAN Wireless Sensor Networks. 2017 IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS. :371–378.

6LoWPAN networks involving wireless sensors consist of resource starving miniature sensor nodes. Since secured authentication of these resource-constrained sensors is one of the important considerations during communication, use of asymmetric key distribution scheme may not be the perfect choice to achieve secure authentication. Recent research shows that Lucky Thirteen attack has compromised Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) with Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode for key establishment. Even though EAKES6Lo and S3K techniques for key establishment follow the symmetric key establishment method, they strongly rely on a remote server and trust anchor for secure key distribution. Our proposed Lightweight Authentication Protocol (LAUP) used a symmetric key method with no preshared keys and comprised of four flights to establish authentication and session key distribution between sensors and Edge Router in a 6LoWPAN environment. Each flight uses freshly derived keys from existing information such as PAN ID (Personal Area Network IDentification) and device identities. We formally verified our scheme using the Scyther security protocol verification tool for authentication properties such as Aliveness, Secrecy, Non-Injective Agreement and Non-Injective Synchronization. We simulated and evaluated the proposed LAUP protocol using COOJA simulator with ContikiOS and achieved less computational time and low power consumption compared to existing authentication protocols such as the EAKES6Lo and SAKES.

Pathare, K. G., Chouragade, P. M..  2017.  Reliable Data Sharing Using Revocable-Storage Identity-Based Encryption in Cloud Storage. 2017 International Conference on Recent Trends in Electrical, Electronics and Computing Technologies (ICRTEECT). :173–176.

Security has always been concern when it comes to data sharing in cloud computing. Cloud computing provides high computation power and memory. Cloud computing is convenient way for data sharing. But users may sometime needs to outsourced the shared data to cloud server though it contains valuable and sensitive information. Thus it is necessary to provide cryptographically enhanced access control for data sharing system. This paper discuss about the promising access control for data sharing in cloud which is identity-based encryption. We introduce the efficient revocation scheme for the system which is revocable-storage identity-based encryption scheme. It provides both forward and backward security of ciphertext. Then we will have glance at the architecture and steps involved in identity-based encryption. Finally we propose system that provide secure file sharing system using identity-based encryption scheme.

Keerthana, S., Monisha, C., Priyanka, S., Veena, S..  2017.  De Duplication Scalable Secure File Sharing on Untrusted Storage in Big Data. 2017 International Conference on Information Communication and Embedded Systems (ICICES). :1–6.

Data Deduplication provides lots of benefits to security and privacy issues which can arise as user's sensitive data at risk of within and out of doors attacks. Traditional secret writing that provides knowledge confidentiality is incompatible with knowledge deduplication. Ancient secret writing wants completely different users to encode their knowledge with their own keys. Thus, identical knowledge copies of completely different various users can result in different ciphertexts that makes Deduplication not possible. Convergent secret writing has been planned to enforce knowledge confidentiality whereas creating Deduplication possible. It encrypts/decrypts a knowledge copy with a confluent key, that is obtained by computing the cryptographical hash price of the content of the information copy. Once generation of key and encryption, the user can retain the keys and send ciphertext to cloud.

Rawal, B. S., Vivek, S. S..  2017.  Secure Cloud Storage and File Sharing. 2017 IEEE International Conference on Smart Cloud (SmartCloud). :78–83.
Internet-based online cloud services provide enormous volumes of storage space, tailor made computing resources and eradicates the obligation of native machines for data maintenance as well. Cloud storage service providers claim to offer the ability of secure and elastic data-storage services that can adapt to various storage necessities. Most of the security tools have a finite rate of failure, and intrusion comes with more complex and sophisticated techniques; the security failure rates are skyrocketing. Once we upload our data into the cloud, we lose control of our data, which certainly brings new security risks toward integrity and confidentiality of our data. In this paper, we discuss a secure file sharing mechanism for the cloud with the disintegration protocol (DIP). The paper also introduces new contribution of seamless file sharing technique among different clouds without sharing an encryption key.
Ukwandu, E., Buchanan, W. J., Russell, G..  2017.  Performance Evaluation of a Fragmented Secret Share System. 2017 International Conference On Cyber Situational Awareness, Data Analytics And Assessment (Cyber SA). :1–6.
There are many risks in moving data into public storage environments, along with an increasing threat around large-scale data leakage. Secret sharing scheme has been proposed as a keyless and resilient mechanism to mitigate this, but scaling through large scale data infrastructure has remained the bane of using secret sharing scheme in big data storage and retrievals. This work applies secret sharing methods as used in cryptography to create robust and secure data storage and retrievals in conjunction with data fragmentation. It outlines two different methods of distributing data equally to storage locations as well as recovering them in such a manner that ensures consistent data availability irrespective of file size and type. Our experiments consist of two different methods - data and key shares. Using our experimental results, we were able to validate previous works on the effects of threshold on file recovery. Results obtained also revealed the varying effects of share writing to and retrieval from storage locations other than computer memory. The implication is that increase in fragment size at varying file and threshold sizes rather than add overheads to file recovery, do so on creation instead, underscoring the importance of choosing a varying fragment size as file size increases.
Kabir, T., Adnan, M. A..  2017.  A Dynamic Searchable Encryption Scheme for Secure Cloud Server Operation Reserving Multi-Keyword Ranked Search. 2017 4th International Conference on Networking, Systems and Security (NSysS). :1–9.
Cloud computing is becoming more and more popular day by day due to its maintenance, multitenancy and performance. Data owners are motivated to outsource their data to the cloud servers for resource pooling and productivity where multiple users can work on the same data concurrently. These servers offer great convenience and reduced cost for the computation, storage and management of data. But concerns can persist for loss of control over certain sensitive information. The complexity of security is largely intensified when data is distributed over a greater number of devices and data is shared among unrelated users. So these sensitive data should be encrypted for solving these security issues that many consumers cannot afford to tackle. In this paper, we present a dynamic searchable encryption scheme whose update operation can be completed by cloud server while reserving the ability to support multi-keyword ranked search. We have designed a scheme where dynamic operations on data like insert, update and delete are performed by cloud server without decrypting the data. Thus this scheme not only ensures dynamic operations on data but also provides a secure technique by performing those tasks without decryption. The state-of-the-art methods let the data users retrieve the data, re-encrypt it under the new policy and then send it again to the cloud. But our proposed method saves this high computational overhead by reducing the burden of performing dynamic operation by the data owners. The secure and widely used TF × IDF model is used along with kNN algorithm for construction of the index and generation of the query. We have used a tree-based index structure, so our proposed scheme can achieve a sub-linear search time. We have conducted experiments on Amazon EC2 cloud server with three datasets by updating a file, appending a file and deleting a file from the document collection and compared our result with the state-of-the-art method. Results show th- t our scheme has an average running time of 42ms which is 75% less than the existing method.
Jacob, C., Rekha, V. R..  2017.  Secured and Reliable File Sharing System with De-Duplication Using Erasure Correction Code. 2017 International Conference on Networks Advances in Computational Technologies (NetACT). :221–228.
An effective storage and management of file systems is very much essential now a days to avoid the wastage of storage space provided by the cloud providers. Data de-duplication technique has been used widely which allows only to store a single copy of a file and thus avoids duplication of file in the cloud storage servers. It helps to reduce the amount of storage space and save bandwidth of cloud service and thus in high cost savings for the cloud service subscribers. Today data that we need to store are in encrypted format to ensure the security. So data encryption by data owners with their own keys makes the de-duplication impossible for the cloud service subscriber as the data encryption with a key converts data into an unidentifiable format called cipher text thus encrypting, even the same data, with different keys may result in different cipher texts. But de-duplication and encryption need to work in hand to hand to ensure secure, authorized and optimized storage. In this paper, we propose a scheme for file-level de-duplication on encrypted files like text, images and even on video files stored in cloud based on the user's privilege set and file privilege set. This paper proposed a de-duplication system which distributes the files across different servers. The system uses an Erasure Correcting Code technique to re-construct the files even if the parts of the files are lost by attacking any server. Thus the proposed system can ensure both the security and reliability of encrypted files.
2018-03-05
Zimba, A., Wang, Z., Chen, H..  2017.  Reasoning Crypto Ransomware Infection Vectors with Bayesian Networks. 2017 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI). :149–151.

Ransomware techniques have evolved over time with the most resilient attacks making data recovery practically impossible. This has driven countermeasures to shift towards recovery against prevention but in this paper, we model ransomware attacks from an infection vector point of view. We follow the basic infection chain of crypto ransomware and use Bayesian network statistics to infer some of the most common ransomware infection vectors. We also employ the use of attack and sensor nodes to capture uncertainty in the Bayesian network.

Gonzalez, D., Hayajneh, T..  2017.  Detection and Prevention of Crypto-Ransomware. 2017 IEEE 8th Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics and Mobile Communication Conference (UEMCON). :472–478.

Crypto-ransomware is a challenging threat that ciphers a user's files while hiding the decryption key until a ransom is paid by the victim. This type of malware is a lucrative business for cybercriminals, generating millions of dollars annually. The spread of ransomware is increasing as traditional detection-based protection, such as antivirus and anti-malware, has proven ineffective at preventing attacks. Additionally, this form of malware is incorporating advanced encryption algorithms and expanding the number of file types it targets. Cybercriminals have found a lucrative market and no one is safe from being the next victim. Encrypting ransomware targets business small and large as well as the regular home user. This paper discusses ransomware methods of infection, technology behind it and what can be done to help prevent becoming the next victim. The paper investigates the most common types of crypto-ransomware, various payload methods of infection, typical behavior of crypto ransomware, its tactics, how an attack is ordinarily carried out, what files are most commonly targeted on a victim's computer, and recommendations for prevention and safeguards are listed as well.

Osaiweran, A., Marincic, J., Groote, J. F..  2017.  Assessing the Quality of Tabular State Machines through Metrics. 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS). :426–433.

Software metrics are widely used to measure the quality of software and to give an early indication of the efficiency of the development process in industry. There are many well-established frameworks for measuring the quality of source code through metrics, but limited attention has been paid to the quality of software models. In this article, we evaluate the quality of state machine models specified using the Analytical Software Design (ASD) tooling. We discuss how we applied a number of metrics to ASD models in an industrial setting and report about results and lessons learned while collecting these metrics. Furthermore, we recommend some quality limits for each metric and validate them on models developed in a number of industrial projects.

Sultana, K. Z., Deo, A., Williams, B. J..  2017.  Correlation Analysis among Java Nano-Patterns and Software Vulnerabilities. 2017 IEEE 18th International Symposium on High Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE). :69–76.

Ensuring software security is essential for developing a reliable software. A software can suffer from security problems due to the weakness in code constructs during software development. Our goal is to relate software security with different code constructs so that developers can be aware very early of their coding weaknesses that might be related to a software vulnerability. In this study, we chose Java nano-patterns as code constructs that are method-level patterns defined on the attributes of Java methods. This study aims to find out the correlation between software vulnerability and method-level structural code constructs known as nano-patterns. We found the vulnerable methods from 39 versions of three major releases of Apache Tomcat for our first case study. We extracted nano-patterns from the affected methods of these releases. We also extracted nano-patterns from the non-vulnerable methods of Apache Tomcat, and for this, we selected the last version of three major releases (6.0.45 for release 6, 7.0.69 for release 7 and 8.0.33 for release 8) as the non-vulnerable versions. Then, we compared the nano-pattern distributions in vulnerable versus non-vulnerable methods. In our second case study, we extracted nano-patterns from the affected methods of three vulnerable J2EE web applications: Blueblog 1.0, Personalblog 1.2.6 and Roller 0.9.9, all of which were deliberately made vulnerable for testing purpose. We found that some nano-patterns such as objCreator, staticFieldReader, typeManipulator, looper, exceptions, localWriter, arrReader are more prevalent in affected methods whereas some such as straightLine are more vivid in non-affected methods. We conclude that nano-patterns can be used as the indicator of vulnerability-proneness of code.

Sugumar, G., Mathur, A..  2017.  Testing the Effectiveness of Attack Detection Mechanisms in Industrial Control Systems. 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security Companion (QRS-C). :138–145.

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are found in critical infrastructure such as for power generation and water treatment. When security requirements are incorporated into an ICS, one needs to test the additional code and devices added do improve the prevention and detection of cyber attacks. Conducting such tests in legacy systems is a challenge due to the high availability requirement. An approach using Timed Automata (TA) is proposed to overcome this challenge. This approach enables assessment of the effectiveness of an attack detection method based on process invariants. The approach has been demonstrated in a case study on one stage of a 6- stage operational water treatment plant. The model constructed captured the interactions among components in the selected stage. In addition, a set of attacks, attack detection mechanisms, and security specifications were also modeled using TA. These TA models were conjoined into a network and implemented in UPPAAL. The models so implemented were found effective in detecting the attacks considered. The study suggests the use of TA as an effective tool to model an ICS and study its attack detection mechanisms as a complement to doing so in a real plant-operational or under design.

Cohen, A., Cohen, A., Médard, M., Gurewitz, O..  2017.  Individually-Secure Multi-Source Multicast. 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT). :3105–3109.

The principal mission of Multi-Source Multicast (MSM) is to disseminate all messages from all sources in a network to all destinations. MSM is utilized in numerous applications. In many of them, securing the messages disseminated is critical. A common secure model is to consider a network where there is an eavesdropper which is able to observe a subset of the network links, and seek a code which keeps the eavesdropper ignorant regarding all the messages. While this is solved when all messages are located at a single source, Secure MSM (SMSM) is an open problem, and the rates required are hard to characterize in general. In this paper, we consider Individual Security, which promises that the eavesdropper has zero mutual information with each message individually. We completely characterize the rate region for SMSM under individual security, and show that such a security level is achievable at the full capacity of the network, that is, the cut-set bound is the matching converse, similar to non-secure MSM. Moreover, we show that the field size is similar to non-secure MSM and does not have to be larger due to the security constraint.

Kadhe, S., Sprintson, A..  2017.  Security for Minimum Storage Regenerating Codes and Locally Repairable Codes. 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT). :1028–1032.

We consider the problem of designing repair efficient distributed storage systems, which are information-theoretically secure against a passive eavesdropper that can gain access to a limited number of storage nodes. We present a framework that enables design of a broad range of secure storage codes through a joint construction of inner and outer codes. As case studies, we focus on two specific families of storage codes: (i) minimum storage regenerating (MSR) codes, and (ii) maximally recoverable (MR) codes, which are a class of locally repairable codes (LRCs). The main idea of this framework is to utilize the existing constructions of storage codes to jointly design an outer coset code and inner storage code. Finally, we present a construction of an outer coset code over small field size to secure locally repairable codes presented by Tamo and Barg for the special case of an eavesdropper that can observe any subset of nodes of maximum possible size.

Baldi, M., Chiaraluce, F., Senigagliesi, L., Spalazzi, L., Spegni, F..  2017.  Security in Heterogeneous Distributed Storage Systems: A Practically Achievable Information-Theoretic Approach. 2017 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC). :1021–1028.

Distributed storage systems and caching systems are becoming widespread, and this motivates the increasing interest on assessing their achievable performance in terms of reliability for legitimate users and security against malicious users. While the assessment of reliability takes benefit of the availability of well established metrics and tools, assessing security is more challenging. The classical cryptographic approach aims at estimating the computational effort for an attacker to break the system, and ensuring that it is far above any feasible amount. This has the limitation of depending on attack algorithms and advances in computing power. The information-theoretic approach instead exploits capacity measures to achieve unconditional security against attackers, but often does not provide practical recipes to reach such a condition. We propose a mixed cryptographic/information-theoretic approach with a twofold goal: estimating the levels of information-theoretic security and defining a practical scheme able to achieve them. In order to find optimal choices of the parameters of the proposed scheme, we exploit an effective probabilistic model checker, which allows us to overcome several limitations of more conventional methods.