Biblio

Provable Data Possession (PDP) is one of the data security techniques to make sure that the data stored in the cloud storage exists. In PDP, the integrity of the data stored in the cloud storage is probabilistically verified by the user or a third-party auditor. In the conventional PDP, the user creates the metadata used for audition. From the viewpoint of user convenience, it is desirable to be able to audit without operations other than uploading. In other words, the challenge is to provide a transparent PDP that verifies the integrity of files according to the general cloud storage system model so as not to add operations to users. We propose a scheme in which the cloud generates the metadata used during verification, and the user only uploads files. It is shown that the proposed scheme is resistant to the forgery of cloud proof and the acquisition of data by a third-party auditor.

In cloud computing application scenarios involving computationally weak clients, the natural need for applied cryptography solutions requires the delegation of the most expensive cryptography algorithms to a computationally stronger cloud server. Group exponentiation is an important operation used in many public-key cryptosystems and, more generally, cryptographic protocols. Solving the problem of delegating group exponentiation in the case of a single, possibly malicious, server, was left open since early papers in the area. Only recently, we have solved this problem for a large class of cyclic groups, including those commonly used in cryptosystems proved secure under the intractability of the discrete logarithm problem. In this paper we solve this problem for an important class of non-cyclic groups, which includes RSA groups when the modulus is the product of two safe primes, a common setting in applications using RSA-based cryptosystems. We show a delegation protocol for fixed-exponent exponentiation in such groups, satisfying natural correctness, security, privacy and efficiency requirements, where security holds with exponentially small probability. In our protocol, with very limited offline computation and server computation, a client can delegate an exponentiation to an exponent of the same length as a group element by only performing two exponentiations to an exponent of much shorter length (i.e., the length of a statistical parameter). We obtain our protocol by a non-trivial adaptation to the RSA group of our previous protocol for cyclic groups.

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.

Signcryption is a cryptographic primitive that simultaneously realizes both the functions of public key encryption and digital signature in a logically single step, and with a cost significantly lower than that required by the traditional “signature and encryption” approach. Recently, an efficient certificateless signcryption scheme without using bilinear pairings was proposed by Zhu et al., which is claimed secure based on the assumptions that the compute Diffie-Hellman problem and the discrete logarithm problem are difficult. Although some security arguments were provided to show the scheme is secure, in this paper, we find that the signcryption construction due to Zhu et al. is not as secure as claimed. Specifically, we describe an adversary that can break the IND-CCA2 security of the scheme without any Unsigncryption query. Moreover, we demonstrate that the scheme is insecure against key replacement attack by describing a concrete attack approach.