We study the problem how to construct an RFID mutual authentication protocol between tags and readers. Juels (in Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2006) proposed an open question which asks whether there exists a fully privacy-preserving RFID authentication protocol in which the time complexity of a successful authentication phase can be done in sub-linear time $o(n)$ where $n$ is the number of tags participating in the RFID system. In this work, we answer this question positively in an amortized view. Precisely, we design a fully privacy-preserving protocol in which the amortized cost of a successful authentication phase only requires time $O(n^{3/4})$. In addition, our protocol is a hybrid from the randomized hash lock scheme of Weis et. al., the hash chain scheme of Ohkubo et. al., and the efficient identification scheme of Dimitriou. We combine them delicately to obtain the desired authentication protocol.

In almost any RFID system, a reader needs to identify, and optionally authenticate, a multitude of tags. If each tag has a unique secret, identification and authentication are trivial, however, the reader (or a back-end server) needs to perform a brute-force search for each tag-reader interaction. In this paper, we suggest a simple, efficient and secure technique that reduces reader computation to $O(\sqrt N \cdot \log N)$. Our technique is based on the well-known ``meet-in-the-middle'' strategy used in the past to attack certain symmetric ciphers.

In this paper we analyze different techniques to blindly recover the parameters of turbo-code encoders with only the knowledge of noisy eavesdropped binary stream. We compare different strategies to reconstruct convolutional encoders, particularly when both are recursive systematic coders. We explain the intrinsic indetermination due to these techniques but also how to overcome such an issue in the case of turbo-code encoders. Moreover, we generalize Burel and al.'s particular reconstruction of the second (n,1)-encoder for (n,k)-encoders.

We design communication efficient two-party and multi-party protocols for the longest common subsequence (LCS) and related problems. Our protocols achieve privacy with respect to passive adversaries, under reasonable cryptographic assumptions. We benefit from the somewhat surprising interplay of an efficient block-retrieval PIR (Gentry-Ramzan, ICALP 2005) with the classic “four Russians” algorithmic design. This result is the first improvement to the communication complexity for this application over generic results (such as Yao’s garbled circuit protocol) and, as such, is interesting as a contribution to the theory of communication efficiency for secure two-party and multiparty applications.

This paper presents a recursive hiding scheme for 2 out of 3 secret sharing. In recursive hiding of secrets, the user encodes additional information about smaller secrets in the shares of a larger secret without an expansion in the size of the latter, thereby increasing the efficiency of secret sharing. We present applications of our proposed protocol to images as well as text.

Some sensor network settings involve disconnected or unattended operation with periodic visits by a mobile sink. An unattended sensor network operating in a hostile environment can collect data that represents a high-value target for the adversary. Since an unattended sensor can not immediately off-load sensed data to a safe external entity (such as a sink), the adversary can easily mount a focused attack aiming to erase or modify target data. To maximize chances of data survival, sensors must collaboratively attempt to mislead the adversary and hide the location, the origin and the contents of collected data. In this paper, we focus on applications of well-known security techniques to maximize chances of data survival in unattended sensor networks, where sensed data can not be off-loaded to a sink in real time. Our investigation yields some interesting insights and surprising results. The highlights of our work are: (1) thorough exploration of the data survival challenge, (2) exploration of the design space for possible solutions, (3) construction of several practical and effective techniques, and (4) their evaluation.

In this note, we report on the first large-scale and practical application of multiparty computation, which took place in January 2008. We also report on the novel cryptographic protocols that were used.

Unattended wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) operating in hostile environments face the risk of compromise. % by a mobile adversary. Unable to off-load collected data to a sink or some other trusted external entity, sensors must protect themselves by attempting to mitigate potential compromise and safeguarding their data. In this paper, we focus on techniques that allow unattended sensors to recover from intrusions by soliciting help from peer sensors. We define a realistic adversarial model and show how certain simple defense methods can result in sensors re-gaining secrecy and authenticity of collected data, despite adversary's efforts to the contrary. We present an extensive analysis and a set of simulation results that support our observations and demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed techniques.

Cuckoo hashing is an efficient and practical dynamic dictionary. It provides expected amortized constant update time, worst case constant lookup time, and good memory utilization. Various experiments demonstrated that cuckoo hashing is highly suitable for modern computer architectures and distributed settings, and offers significant improvements compared to other schemes. In this work we construct a practical {\em history-independent} dynamic dictionary based on cuckoo hashing. In a history-independent data structure, the memory representation at any point in time yields no information on the specific sequence of insertions and deletions that led to its current content, other than the content itself. Such a property is significant when preventing unintended leakage of information, and was also found useful in several algorithmic settings. Our construction enjoys most of the attractive properties of cuckoo hashing. In particular, no dynamic memory allocation is required, updates are performed in expected amortized constant time, and membership queries are performed in worst case constant time. Moreover, with high probability, the lookup procedure queries only two memory entries which are independent and can be queried in parallel. The approach underlying our construction is to enforce a canonical memory representation on cuckoo hashing. That is, up to the initial randomness, each set of elements has a unique memory representation.

Remote user authentication scheme is one of the simplest and the most convenient authentication mechanisms to deal with secret data over insecure networks. These types of schemes are applicable to the areas such as computer networks, wireless networks, remote login systems, operation systems and database management systems.The goal of a remote user authentication scheme is to identify a valid card holder as having the rights and privileges indicated by the issuer of the card. In recent years, so many remote user authentication schemes have been proposed to authenticate a legitimate user, but none of them can solve all possible problems and withstand all possible attacks. This paper presents a secure remote user authentication scheme with smart cards. The proposed scheme provides the essential security requirements and achieves particular attributes.

We consider the problem of building robust fuzzy extractors, which allow two parties holding similar random variables W, W' to agree on a secret key R in the presence of an active adversary. Robust fuzzy extractors were defined by Dodis et al. in Crypto 2006 to be noninteractive, i.e., only one message P, which can be modified by an unbounded adversary, can pass from one party to the other. This allows them to be used by a single party at different points in time (e.g., for key recovery or biometric authentication), but also presents an additional challenge: what if R is used, and thus possibly observed by the adversary, before the adversary has a chance to modify P. Fuzzy extractors secure against such a strong attack are called post-application robust. We construct a fuzzy extractor with post-application robustness that extracts a shared secret key of up to (2m-n)/2 bits (depending on error-tolerance and security parameters), where n is the bit-length and m is the entropy of W. The previously best known result, also of Dodis et al., extracted up to (2m-n)/3 bits (depending on the same parameters).

In a directed signature scheme, a verifier can exclusively verify the signatures designated to himself, and shares with the signer the ability to prove correctness of the signature to a third party when necessary. Directed signature schemes are suitable for applications such as bill of tax and bill of health. This paper studies directed signatures in the identity-based setting. We first present the syntax and security notion that includes unforgeability and invisibility, then propose a concrete identity-based directed signature scheme from bilinear pairings. We then prove our scheme existentially unforgeable under the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption, and invisible under the decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption, both in the random oracle model.

We propose a new hybrid protocol for cryptographically secure biometric authentication. The main advantages of the proposed protocol over previous solutions can be summarised as follows: (1) potential for much better accuracy using different types of biometric signals, including behavioural ones; and (2) improved user privacy, since user identities are not transmitted at any point in the protocol execution. The new protocol takes advantage of state-of-the-art identification classifiers, which provide not only better accuracy, but also the possibility to perform authentication without knowing who the user claims to be. Cryptographic security is based on the Paillier public key encryption scheme.

In this paper, we present three embedding schemes for extensions of least significant bit overwriting to both of the two lowest bit planes in digital images. Our approaches are inspired by the work of Fridrich et al. [8] who proposed wet paper coding as an efficient method for steganographic schemes. Our new works generalize it to the embedding in two least significant bits, that is to say, combine two novel extensions of least significant bits embedding and the double-layered embedding developed in [16] with wet paper coding, respectively. The proposed schemes improve steganographic security and are less vulnerable to steganalytic attacks compared with original schemes with shared selection channels between the sender and the recipient.

In the last years, DNA sequencing techniques have advanced to the point that DNA identification and paternity testing has become almost a commodity. Due to the critical nature of DNA related data, this causes substantial privacy issues. In this paper, we introduce cryptographic privacy enhancing protocols that allow to perform the most common DNA-based identity, paternity and ancestry tests and thus implement privacy-enhanced online genealogy services or research projects. In the semi-honest attacker model, the protocols guarantee that no sensitive information about the involved DNA is exposed, and are resilient against common forms of measurement errors during DNA sequencing. The protocols are practical and efficient, both in terms of communication and computation complexity.

A growing number of online services, such as Google, Yahoo!, and Amazon, are starting to charge users for their storage. Customers often use these services to store valuable data such as email, family photos and videos, and disk backups. Today, a customer must entirely trust such external services to maintain the integrity of hosted data and return it intact. Unfortunately, no service is infallible. To make storage services accountable for data loss, we present protocols that allow a third-party auditor to periodically verify the data stored by a service and assist in returning the data intact to the customer. Most importantly, our protocols are privacy-preserving, in that they never reveal the data contents to the auditor. Our solution removes the burden of verification from the customer, alleviates both the customer’s and storage service’s fear of data leakage, and provides a method for independent arbitration of data retention contracts.

The need for secure logging is well-understood by the security professionals, including both researchers and practitioners. The ability to efficiently verify all (or some) log entries is important to any application employing secure logging techniques. In this paper, we begin by examining state-of-the-art in secure logging and identify some problems inherent to systems based on trusted third-party servers. We then propose a different approach to secure logging based upon recently developed Forward-Secure Sequential Aggregate (FssAgg) authentication techniques. Our approach offers both space-efficiency and provable security. We illustrate two concrete schemes -- one private-verifiable and one public-verifiable -- that offer practical secure logging without any reliance on on-line trusted third parties or secure hardware. We also investigate the concept of immutability in the context of forward secure sequential aggregate authentication to provide finer grained verification. Finally, we report on some experience with a prototype built upon a popular code version control system.

In click-based graphical password schemes that allow arbitrary click locations on image, a click should be verified as correct if it is close within a predefined distance to the originally chosen location. This condition should hold even when for security reasons the password hash is stored in the system, not the password itself. To solve this problem, a robust discretization method has been proposed, recently. In this paper, we show that previous work on discretization does not give optimal results with respect to the entropy of the graphical passwords and propose a new discretization method to increase the password space. To improve the security further, we also present several methods that use multiple hash computations for password verification.

Current remote e-voting schemes aim at a number of security objectives. However, this is not enough for providing secure online elections in practice. Beyond a secure e-voting protocol, there are many organizational and technical security requirements that have to be satisfied by the operational environment in which the scheme is implemented. We have investigated four state-of-the-art e-voting protocols in order to identify the organizational and technical requirements which these protocols need to be met in order to work correctly. Satisfying these requirements is a costly task which reduces the potential advantages of e-voting considerably. We introduce the concept of a Voting Service Provider (VSP) which carries out electronic elections as a trusted third party and is responsible for satisfying the organizational and technical requirements. We show which measures the VSP takes to meet these requirements. To establish trust in the VSP we propose a Common Criteria evaluation and a legal framework. Following this approach, we show that the VSP enables secure, cost-effective, and thus feasible online elections.

We provide formal definitions and efficient secure techniques for -- turning noisy information into keys usable for any cryptographic application, and, in particular, -- reliably and securely authenticating biometric data. Our techniques apply not just to biometric information, but to any keying material that, unlike traditional cryptographic keys, is (1) not reproducible precisely and (2) not distributed uniformly. We propose two primitives: a fuzzy extractor reliably extracts nearly uniform randomness R from its input; the extraction is error-tolerant in the sense that R will be the same even if the input changes, as long as it remains reasonably close to the original. Thus, R can be used as a key in a cryptographic application. A secure sketch produces public information about its input w that does not reveal w, and yet allows exact recovery of w given another value that is close to w. Thus, it can be used to reliably reproduce error-prone biometric inputs without incurring the security risk inherent in storing them. We define the primitives to be both formally secure and versatile, generalizing much prior work. In addition, we provide nearly optimal constructions of both primitives for various measures of "closeness" of input data, such as Hamming distance, edit distance, and set difference.

The ASIRRA CAPTCHA [EDHS2007], recently proposed at ACM CCS 2007, relies on the problem of distinguishing images of cats and dogs (a task that humans are very good at). The security of ASIRRA is based on the presumed difficulty of classifying these images automatically. In this paper, we describe a classifier which is 82.7% accurate in telling apart the images of cats and dogs used in ASIRRA. This classifier is a combination of support-vector machine classifiers trained on color and texture features extracted from images. Our classifier allows us to solve a 12-image ASIRRA challenge automatically with probability 10.3%. This probability of success is significantly higher than the estimate given in [EDHS2007] for machine vision attacks. The weakness we expose in the current implementation of ASIRRA does not mean that ASIRRA cannot be deployed securely. With appropriate safeguards, we believe that ASIRRA offers an appealing balance between usability and security. One contribution of this work is to inform the choice of safeguard parameters in ASIRRA deployments.

A number of recent voting schemes provide the property of voter verifiability: voters can confirm that their votes are accurately counted in the tally. The Farnel type voting schemes are based on the observation that to achieve voter-verifiability it is not necessary for the voter to carry away a receipt corresponding to their own vote. The Farnel approach then is to provide voters, when they cast their vote, with copies of receipts of one or more randomly selected, previous cast votes. This idea has a number of attractive features: ballot secrecy is achieved up front and does not have to be provided by anonymising mixes etc during tabulation. In fact, plaintext receipts can be used in contrast to the encrypted receipts of many other voter-verifiable schemes. Furthermore, any fears that voters might have that their vote is not truly concealed in an encrypted receipt are mitigated. The Farnel mechanism also mitigates randomization style attacks. In this paper we explore some enhancements to the original Farnel scheme and ways that the Farnel concept can be combined with some existing voter-verifiable schemes, namely Prˆet-`a-Voter, ThreeBallot, and Randell-Ryan.

The time memory trade-off (TMTO) algorithm, first introduced by Hellman, is a method for quickly inverting a one-way function, using pre-computed tables. The distinguished point method (DP) is a technique that reduces the number of table lookups performed by Hellman's algorithm. In this paper we propose a new variant of the DP technique, named variable DP (VDP), having properties very different from DP. It has an effect on the amount of memory required to store the pre-computed tables. We also show how to combine variable chain length techniques like DP and VDP with a more recent trade-off algorithm called the rainbow table method.

The ThreeBallot voting system is an end-to-end (E2E) voter-verifiable voting system. Each voter fills out three ballots according to a few simple rules and takes a copy of one of them home as a receipt for verification purposes. All ballots are posted on a public bulletin board so that any voter may verify the result. In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of attacks using the voter's receipt and the bulletin board. Focusing on two-candidate races, we determine thresholds for when the voter's vote can be reconstructed from a receipt, and when a coercer can effectively verify if a voter followed instructions by looking for pre-specified patterns on the bulletin board. Combining these two results allows us to determine safe ballot sizes that resist known attacks. We also generalize a previous observation that an individual receipt can leak information about a voter's choices.

In voting systems where a mark in a fixed position may mean a vote for Alice on a ballot,and a vote for Bob on another ballot, an attacker may coerce voters to put their mark at a certain position, enforcing effectively a random vote. This attack is meaningful if the voting system allows to take receipts with them and/or posts them to a bulletin board. The coercer may also ask for a blank receipt. We analyze this kind of attack and prove that it requires the same effort as a comparable attack would require against any voting system, even one without receipts.

We explore the problem of secret-key distribution in _unidirectional_ channels, those in which a sender transmits information blindly to a receiver. We consider two approaches: (1) Key sharing across _space_, i.e., across simultaneously emitted values that may follow different data paths and (2) Key sharing across _time_, i.e., in temporally staggered emissions. Our constructions are of general interest, treating, for instance, the basic problem of constructing highly compact secret shares. Our main motivating problem, however, is that of practical key management in RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification) systems. We describe the application of our techniques to RFID-enabled supply chains and a prototype privacy-enhancing system.

WEP is a protocol for securing wireless networks. In the past years, many attacks on WEP have been published, totally breaking WEP’s security. This thesis summarizes all major attacks on WEP. Additionally a new attack, the PTW attack, is introduced, which was partially developed by the author of this document. Some advanced versions of the PTW attack which are more suiteable in certain environments are described as well. Currently, the PTW attack is fastest publicly known key recovery attack against WEP protected networks.

In 2005 Das et al. [5] proposed a remote user authentication scheme using bilinear pairings. Fang and Huang [7] analyzed the scheme and pointed out some weaknesses. They also proposed an improvement. Recently, Giri and Srivastava [9] observed that the improved scheme is still insecure to off-line attack and an improvement. However, the improved scheme is still insecure. In this paper, we show some weaknesses in the existing scheme and propose an improvement. The proposed scheme also enables users to choose and change the password without the help of the remote server.

This paper presents a critical analysis of the AACS drive-host authentication scheme. A few weaknesses are identified which could lead to various attacks on the scheme. In particular, we observe that the scheme is susceptible to unknown key-share and man-in-the-middle attacks. Modifications of the scheme are suggested in order to provide better security. A proof of security of the modified scheme is also presented. The modified scheme achieves better efficiency than the original scheme.

In \cite{NIST}, four different DRBGs are recommended for cryptographic purpose. Each generator is based on some underlying cryptographic concept. The article examines each of the concept to determine what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for the DRBG to be secured in its generation process. In addition, the effects of failure of typical cryptographic requirements of each underlying concept are discussed. From \cite{MC}, permutation based DRBGs are never indistinguishable from a true random source. From \cite{DB}, elliptic based DRBGs are secured given a set of problems regarding elliptic curve remains difficult. This article demostrates that a pseudo-random family is required for both hash based and HMAC based DRBGs.

For ubiquitous communication self-organising ad-hoc networks become more and more important. We consider mobile phones as appropriate secure gateways to provide access to the Internet for external machines with low communication needs. A message-based approach is best in such a scenario with moving mobile phones and machines. In this paper we propose a security model for access control to the communication infrastructure, which is also message oriented. To meet the requirements of ubiquitously communicating machines, all algorithms on the sender's side are based on symmetric cryptography resulting in low computation requirements. Our sophisticated symmetric key infrastructure for access control is based on unique combinations of keys and is completed with an effective key management. This results in a carrier grade security level although many parties share the same keys. Adopting the Subscriber Identity Module as a secure storage and computing module achieves the trustworthiness of the mobile phone. This makes it possible to use the mobile phone not only as a user terminal but also as a trusted infrastructure component of the mobile network. This document is an update of earlier work [BWS07] presented at the Workshop in Information Security Theory and Practices 2007 in Crete, Greece.

One of the most substantial ways to protect users' sensitive information is encryption. This paper is about the keyword index search system on encrypted documents. It has been thought that the search with errors over encrypted data is impossible because 1 bit difference over plaintexts may reduce to enormous bits difference over cyphertexts. We propose a novel idea to deal with the search with errors over encrypted data. We develop two similarity search schemes, implement the prototypes and provide substantial analysis. We define security requirements for the similarity search over encrypted data. The first scheme can achieve perfect privacy in similarity search but the second scheme is more efficient.

At Eurocrypt 2006, Paterson and Yau demonstrated how flaws in the Linux implementation of IPsec could be exploited to break encryption-only configurations of ESP, the IPsec encryption protocol. Their work highlighted the dangers of not using authenticated encryption in fielded systems, but did not constitute an attack on the actual IPsec standards themselves; in fact, the attacks of Paterson and Yau should be prevented by any standards-compliant IPsec implementation. In contrast, this paper describes new attacks which break any RFC-compliant implementation of IPsec making use of encryption-only ESP. The new attacks are both efficient and realistic: they are ciphertext-only and need only the capability to eavesdrop on ESP-encrypted traffic and to inject traffic into the network. The paper also reports our experiences in applying the attacks to a variety of implementations of IPsec, and reflects on what these experiences tell us about how security standards should be written so as to simplify the task of software developers.

Remote user authentication schemes allow a valid user to login a remote server. In 2000, Hwang and Li's proposed a new remote user authentication scheme with smart cards. In the recent years,some researchers pointed out the security weaknesses of Hwang and Li's scheme and they also proposed some modified schemes to avoid these weaknesses. This paper analyzes that Hwang and Li's scheme does not satisfy some essential security requirements. Hwang and Li's scheme and all the modified schemes do not support mutual authentication between the remote user and the remote server also there is no session key generation phase for secure communication. In addition, in Hwang and Li's scheme, the remote user is not free to change his password. This paper present an ideal remote user authentication scheme with smart cards that not only resolves all the security problems of Hwang and Li's scheme, but also provides all the essential security requirements and forward secrecy to the remote server.

In this short paper we propose a pseudorandom number generator over EC based on Pollard-like method. In contrast to the well known Elliptic Curve Random Number Generator (see e.g. ANSI and NIST draft standards) the generator is based on a random walk over the group of EC-points like in the original Pollard’s rho algorithm and only resembles a little bit the linear congruential generator over elliptic curve. Compared to other approaches, the method allows to decrease the cost of generating pseudorandom numbers. This generator could be used in resource constrained devices like smart cards which have already been equipped with EC-based tools for other cryptographic purposes.

Cryptography is an important tool in the design and implementation of electronic voting schemes for it provides the property of verifiability, which is not provided in the traditional voting. But in the real life, neither can most voters understand the profound theory of cryptographic e-voting nor can they perform the complicated cryptographic computation. An e-voting system is presented in this paper to leverage the use of cryptography between theory and practice. It combines the advantages of Moran-Naor's voting scheme and voting schemes based on homomorphic encryption. It makes use of cryptographic techniques, but it hides the details of cryptographic computation from voters. Voters can be convinced that the ballot is cast as intended. The tally can be verified in public. Compared with Moran-Naor's voting scheme, the new system has three advantages: the ballots can be recovered when the voting machine breaks down, the costly cut-and-choose zero-knowledge proofs for shuffling votes made by the voting machine are avoided and the partial tally result in each voting machine is kept secret.

This paper presents CRUST, a stackable file system layer designed to provide secure file sharing over remote untrusted storage systems. CRUST is intended to be layered over insecure network file systems without changing the existing systems. In our approach, data at rest is kept encrypted, and data integrity and access control are provided by cryptographic means. Our design completely avoids public-key cryptography operations and uses more efficient symmetric-key alternatives to achieve improved performance. As a generic and self-contained system, CRUST includes its own in-band key distribution mechanism and does not rely on any special capabilities of the server or the clients. We have implemented CRUST as a Linux file system and shown that it performs comparably with typical underlying file systems, while providing significantly stronger security.

The problem of key management in access hierarchies is how to assign keys to users and classes such that each user, after receiving her secret key(s), is able to {\em independently} compute access keys for (and thus obtain access to) the resources at her class and all descendant classes in the hierarchy. If user privileges additionally are time-based (which is likely to be the case for all of the applications listed above), the key(s) a user receives should permit access to the resources only at the appropriate times. This paper present a new, provably secure, and efficient solution that can be used to add time-based capabilities to existing hierarchical schemes. It achieves the following performance bounds: (i) to be able to obtain access to an arbitrary contiguous set of time intervals, a user is required to store at most 3 keys; (ii) the keys for a user can be computed by the system in constant time; (iii) key derivation by the user within the authorized time intervals involves a small constant number of inexpensive cryptographic operations; and (iv) if the total number of time intervals in the system is $n$, then the increase of the public storage space at the server due to our solution is only by a small asymptotic factor, e.g., $O(\log^* n \log\log n)$ with a small constant.

In this paper, we develop an information theoretic differential side-channel attack. An embedded device containing a secret key is modeled as a black box with a leakage function whose output is captured by an adversary through the noisy measurement of a physical observable e.g. the power consumed by the device. We assume only that the measured values depend somehow on the leakage and thus on the word being processed by the device. Without any knowledge on the particular dependency, this fact is exploited to mount a side-channel attack. We build a distinguisher which uses the Mutual Information between the observed and the leaked values as a statistical test. The Mutual Information is maximal when the hypothetical key guessed by the attacker equals the key in the device. Our approach is confirmed by experimental results. We perform power analysis on an embedded device using our Mutual Information based distinguisher and show that the correct key is clearly distinguishable. Finally, our approach allows to compute a good estimate of the minimal number of traces required to perform a successful attack and gives an upper bound on the information leakage in a single observation.

Kallahalla et al. presented a RSA-based Forward Key Rotation mechanism in secure storage scheme PLUTUS to ensure that the key used for encrypting updated files is related to the keys for all files in the file group. The encryption scheme based on Forward Key Rotation is such a scheme that only the authorized person is allowed access to the designated files and the previous versions. In this paper, we present a Forward Key Rotation storage scheme based on discrete logarithm and prove its security under random oracle model. Moreover, we propose another improved Forward Key storage scheme from pairing on elliptic curves. Compared to the scheme presented by Kallahalla et al., our scheme uses relatively short keys to provide equivalent security. In addition, the re-generated keys can be verified to ensure that the keys are valid in the improved scheme.

This paper illustrates the use of ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE), a recently proposed primitive, in the setting of group key management. Specifically, we use the CP-ABE scheme of Bethencourt, Sahai and Waters to implement flat table group key management. Unlike past implementations of flat table, our proposal is resistant to collusion attacks. We also provide efficient mechanisms to refresh user secret keys (for perfect forward secrecy) and to delegate managerial duties to subgroup controllers (for scalability). Finally, we discuss performance issues and directions for future research.

Recently, a chaos-based image encryption scheme called RCES (also called RSES) was proposed. This paper analyzes the security of RCES, and points out that it is insecure against the known/chosen-plaintext attacks: the number of required known/chosen plain-images is only one or two. In addition, the security of RCES against the brute-force attack was overestimated. Both theoretical and experimental analyses are given to show the performance of the suggested known/chosen-plaintext attacks. The insecurity of RCES is due to its special design, which makes it a typical example of insecure image encryption schemes. Some lessons are drawn from RCES to show some common principles for ensuring the high level of security of an image encryption scheme.

In this paper, we investigate the problem of how to prove the authorship of textual documents. First we define the basic functionalities of an authorship proof scheme (APS) based on natural language watermarking, and identify two essential security requirements for an APS to be secure against various attacks. We review existing natural language watermarking schemes, and we propose two new schemes with improved security.

The threshold voltage VT of EEPROM cells is a very important technological parameter for storing data and keys in a cryptographic device like smartcards. Furthermore, main objective of this paper is to check whether it is possible to get the key stored in the EEPROM cell through measuring the current consumption of the cryptographic device during read key command for encryption before and after baking at a certain temperature. This stress (baking) of the charge in the floating gate of the cells shifts the threshold voltage. Especially this effect will be considered whether the unknown key in the EEPROM cells can be estimated by using the charge shift in the floating gate. The test labs might need to check during an evaluation procedure of the smartcards if parts or whole key can be estimated successfully by stressing the threshold parameter VT. The result of this evaluation is (will be) an input for countermeasures against possible attacks. It is also an additional input for further design structures in order to avoid information gain after baking the EEPROM cells at a certain temperature.

We have shown how, at a cost of about $2^{52}$ calls to the MD5 compression function, for any two target messages $m_1$ and $m_2$, values $b_1$ and $b_2$ can be constructed such that the concatenated values $m_1\|b_1$ and $m_2\|b_2$ collide under MD5. Although the practical attack potential of this construction of \emph{target collisions} is limited, it is of greater concern than random collisions for MD5. In this note we sketch our construction. To illustrate its practicality, we present two MD5 based X.509 certificates with identical signatures but different public keys \emph{and} different Distinguished Name fields, whereas our previous construction of colliding X.509 certificates required identical name fields. We speculate on other possibilities for abusing target collisions.

Wireless sensors are employed in a wide range of applications. One common feature of most sensor settings is the need to communicate sensed data to some collection point or sink. This communication can be direct (to a mobile collector) or indirect -- via other sensors towards a remote sink. In either case, a sensor might not be able to communicate to a sink at will. Instead it collects data and waits (for a potentially long time) for a signal to upload accumulated data directly. In a hostile setting, a sensor may be compromised and its post-compromise data can be manipulated. One important issue is Forward Security -- how to ensure that pre-compromise data cannot be manipulated? Since a typical sensor is limited in storage and communication facilities, another issue is how to minimize resource consumption due to accumulated data. It turns out that current techniques are insufficient to address both challenges. To this end, we explore the notion of Forward-Secure Sequential Aggregate (FssAgg) Authentication Schemes. We consider FssAgg authentication schemes in the contexts of both conventional and public key cryptography and construct a FssAgg MAC scheme and a FssAgg signature scheme, each suitable under different assumptions. This work represents the initial investigation of Forward-Secure Aggregation and, although the proposed schemes are not optimal, it opens a new direction for follow-on research.

During the last years, large-scale simulations of realistic physical environments which support the interaction of multiple participants over the Internet have become increasingly available and economically viable, most notably in the computer gaming industry. Such systems, commonly called networked virtual environments (NVEs), are usually based on a client-server architecture where for performance reasons and bandwidth restrictions, the simulation is partially delegated to the clients. This inevitable architectural choice renders the simulation vulnerable to attacks against the semantic integrity of the simulation: malicious clients may attempt to compromise the physical and logical rules governing the simulation, or to alter the causality of events a posteriori. In this paper, we initiate the systematic study of semantic integrity in NVEs from a security point of view. We argue that naive policies to enforce semantic integrity involve intolerable network load, and are therefore not practically feasible. We present a new provably secure semantic integrity protocol based on cryptographic primitives which enables the server system to audit the local computations of the clients on demand. Our approach facilitates low network and CPU load, incurs reasonable engineering overhead, and maximally decouples the auditing process from the soft real time constraints of the simulation.

We present AIE (Authenticated Interleaved Encryption), a new scheme that allows nodes of a network to exchange messages securely (i.e. encrypted and authenticated) without sharing a common key or using public key cryptography. Our scheme is well adapted to networks, such as ad hoc, overlay or sensor networks, where nodes have limited capabilities and can share only a small number of symmetric keys. It provides privacy and integrity. An eavesdropper listening to a communication is unable to decrypt it and modify it without being detected. We show that our proposal can be used in wireless sensor networks to send encrypted packets to very dynamic sets of nodes without having to establish and maintain group keys. These sets of nodes can be explicitly specified by the source or can be specified by the network according to some criteria, such as their location, proximity to an object, temperature range. As a result, a node can, for example, send encrypted data to all the nodes within a given geographical area, without having to identify the destination nodes in advance. Finally we show that our proposal can be used to implement a secure and scalable aggregation scheme for wireless sensor networks.

The goal of a sovereign join operation is to compute a query across independent database relations such that nothing beyond the join results is revealed. Each relation involved in a sovereign join is owned by a distinct entity and the party posing the query is distinct from the relation owners; it is not permitted to access the original relations. One notable recent research result proposed a secure technique for executing sovereign joins. It entails data owners sending their relations to an independent database service provider which executes a sovereign join with the aid of a tamper-resistant secure coprocessor. This achieves the goal of preventing information leakage during query execution. However, as we show in this paper, the proposed technique is actually insecure as it fails to prevent an attacker from learning the query results. We also suggest some measures to remedy the security problems.

This paper describes a new practical DoS attack that can be mounted against the ``encryption-only'' configuration (i.e. without authenticated integrity) of ESP as allowed by IPSec. This finding can serve as a strong argument to convince those in charge of the IPSec standardization to improve it by banning the ``encryption-only'' configuration from the standard.

It is well understood that passwords must be very long and complex to have sufficient entropy for security purposes. Unfortunately, these passwords tend to be hard to memorize, and so alternatives are sought. Smart Cards, Biometrics, and Reverse Turing Tests (human-only solvable puzzles) are options, but another option is to use pass-phrases. This paper explores methods for making pass-phrases suitable for use with password-based authentication and key-exchange (PAKE) protocols, and in particular, with schemes resilient to server-file compromise. In particular, the $\Omega$-method of Gentry, MacKenzie and Ramzan, is combined with the Bellovin-Merritt protocol to provide mutual authentication (in the random oracle model [CGH04,BBP04,MRH04]. Furthermore, since common password-related problems are typographical errors, and the CAPSLOCK key, we show how a dictionary can be used with the Damerau-Levenshtein string-edit distance metric to construct a case-insensitive pass-phrase system that can tolerate zero, one, or two spelling-errors per word, with no loss in security. Furthermore, we show that the system can be made to accept pass-phrases that have been arbitrarily reordered, with a security cost that can be calculated. While a pass-phrase space of $2^{128}$ is not achieved by this scheme, sizes in the range of $2^{52}$ to $2^{112}$ result from various selections of parameter sizes. An attacker who has acquired the server-file must exhaust over this space, while an attacker without the server-file cannot succeed with non-negligible probability.

We consider broadcast encryption schemes wherein a center needs to broadcast a secret message to a privileged set of receivers. We prescribe a probability distribution $P$ on the privileged set. In this setting, the transmission overhead can be viewed as a random variable over $P$ and we define its expected value as the average transmission overhead (or ato). Given $P$, the Shannon's entropy function $H(.)$ provides a lower bound on the average number of bits required to identify every privileged set. This provides a natural lower bound for the ato in terms of $H(P)$. For session key distribution, we consider the subset cover framework and bound the ato in terms of the size of the cover. We further specialize our bound to accommodate storage constraints at receivers. We consider two families of distributions for $P$ that occur naturally in broadcast networks. -- Each receiver independently joins the privileged set with probability $p$. -- The privileged set is selected uniformly from a collection of subsets of receivers. We evaluate the ato of some practical schemes such as the subset difference method, the LSD scheme and the Partition-and-Power scheme under these distributions. Our investigations lead us to conclude that each scheme is inherently tailored to perform optimally for specific distributions.

Web users are increasingly victims of phishing, spoofing and malware attacks. In this article, we discuss existing and proposed defense mechanisms. We highlight the vulnerabilities of current defenses, and the challenges of validating and adopting new defenses.

In spite of the use of standard web security measures (SSL/TLS), users enter sensitive information such as passwords into scam web sites. Such scam sites cause substantial damages to individuals and corporations. In this work, we analyze these attacks, and find they often exploit usability failures of browsers. We developed and describe TrustBar, a browser extension for improved secure identification indicators. Users can assign a name/logo to a secure site, presented by TrustBar when the browser presents that secure site; otherwise, TrustBar presents the certified site's owner name, and the name/logo of the Certificate Authority (CA) who identified the owner. Some of these ideas are already adopted by browsers, following our work. We describe usability experiments, which measure, and prove the effectiveness, of TrustBar's improved security and identification indicators. We derive general secure-usability principles from our experiments and experience with TrustBar

We provide algorithms to solve the free riders problem in broadcast encryption. In this problem, the broadcast server is allowed to choose some small subset F of the revoked set R of users to allow to decrypt the broadcast, despite having been revoked. This may allow the server to significantly reduce network traffic while only allowing a small set of non-privileged users to decrypt the broadcast. Although there are worst-case instances of broadcast encryption schemes where the free riders problem is difficult to solve (or even approximate), we show that for many specific broadcast encryption schemes, there are efficient algorithms. In particular, for the complete subtree method and some other schemes in the subset-cover framework, we show how to find the optimal assignment of free riders in O(|R||F|) time, which is independent of the total number of users. We also define an approximate version of this problem, and study specific distributions of R for which this relaxation yields even faster algorithms. Along the way we develop the first approximation algorithms for the following problem: given two integer sequences a_1 >= a_2>= ... >= a_n and b_1 >= b_2 >= ... >= b_n, output for all i, an integer j' for which a_{j'} + b_{i-j'} <= (1+\epsilon) min_j a_j + b_{i-j}. We show that if the differences a_i - a_{i+1}, b_i-b_{i+1} are bounded, then there is an O(n^{4/3}/\epsilon^{2/3})-time algorithm for this problem, improving upon the O(n^2) time of the naive algorithm.

Efficient authentication is one of important security requirements in mobile ad hoc network (MANET) routing systems. The techniques of digital signatures are generally considered as the best candidates to achieve strong authentication. However, using normal digital signature schemes is too costly to MANET due to the computation overheads. Considering the feasibility of incorporating digital signatures in MANET, we incorporate the notion of online/offline signatures, where the computational overhead is shifted to the offline phase. However, due to the diversity of different routing protocols, a universal scheme that suits all MANET routing systems does not exist in the literature. Notably, an authentication scheme for the AODV routing is believed to be not suitable to the DSR routing. In this paper, we first introduce an efficient ID-based online/offline scheme for authentication in AODV and then provide a formal transformation to convert the scheme to an ID-based online/offline multisignature scheme. Our scheme is unique, in the sense that a single ID-based online/offline signature scheme can be applied to both AODV and DSR routing protocols. We provide the generic construction as well as the concrete schemes to show an instantiation of the generic transformation. We also provide security proofs for our schemes based on the random oracle model. Finally, we provide an application of our schemes in the dynamic source routing protocol.

A coupon is an electronic data that represents the right to access a service provided by a service provider (e.g. gift certificates or movie tickets). Recently, a privacy-protecting multi-coupon system that allows a user to withdraw a predefined number of single coupons from the service provider has been proposed by Chen et al. at Financial Crypto 2005. In this system, every coupon has the same value which is predetermined by the system. The main drawbacks of Chen et al. proposal are that the redemption protocol of their system is inefficient, and that no formal security model is proposed. In this paper, we consequently propose a formal security model for coupon systems and design a practical multi-coupon system with new features: the quantity of single coupons in a multi-coupon is not defined by the system and the value of each coupon is chosen in a predefined set of values.

Many theoretical PIR (Private Information Retrieval) constructions have been proposed in the past years. Though information theoretically secure, most of them are impractical to deploy due to the prohibitively high communication and computation complexity. The recent trend in outsourcing databases fuels the research on practical PIR schemes. In this paper, we propose a new PIR system by making use of trusted hardware. Our system is proven to be information theoretically secure. Furthermore, we derive the computation complexity lower bound for hardware-based PIR schemes and show that our construction meets the lower bounds for both the communication and computation costs, respectively.

A linear $(q^d,q,t)$-perfect hash family of size $s$ in a vector space $V$ of order $q^d$ over a field $F$ of order $q$ consists of a set $\phi_1,\ldots,\phi_s$ of linear functionals from $V$ to $F$ with the following property: for all $t$ subsets $X\subseteq V$ there exists $i\in\{1,\ldots,s\}$ such that $\phi_i$ is injective when restricted to $F$. A linear $(q^d,q,t)$-perfect hash family of minimal size $d(t-1)$ is said to be {\em optimal}. In this paper we extend the theory for linear perfect hash families based on sequences developed by Blackburn and Wild. We develop techniques which we use to construct new optimal linear $(q^2,q,5)$-perfect hash families and $(q^4,q,3)$-perfect hash families. The sequence approach also explains a relationship between linear $(q^3,q,3)$-perfect hash families and linear $(q^2,q,4)$-perfect hash families.

In this article, we provide an overview of cryptography and cryptographic key management as they are specified in IPsec, a popular suite of standards for providing communications security and network access control for Internet communications. We focus on the latest generation of the IPsec standards, recently published as Request for Comments 4301–4309 by the Internet Engineering Task Force, and how they have evolved from earlier versions of the standards.

After the terror attacks of 9/11, the U.S. Congress passed legislation that requires in the US Visa Waiver Program to begin issuing issuing machine readable passports that are tamper resistant and incorporate biometric and document authentication identifiers. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has issued specifications for Machine Readable Travel Documents (MRTD) that are equipped with a smart card processor to perform biometric identification of the holder. Some countries, such as the United States, will issue machine readable passports that serve only as passports. Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, intend to issue more sophisticated, multi-application passports that can also serve as national identity cards. We have conducted a detailed security analysis of these specificationsm, and we illustrate possible scenarios that could cause a compromise in the security and privacy of holders of such travel documents. Finally, we suggest improved cryptographic protocols and high-assurance smart card operating systems to prevent these compromises and to support electronic visas as well as passports.

Batch verification of digital signatures is used to improve the computational complexity when large number of digital signatures must be verified. Lee at al. [2] proposed a new method to identify bad signatures in batches efficiently. We show that the method is flawed.

We enumerate requirements and give constructions for the vote storage unit of an electronic voting machine. In this application, the record of votes must survive even an unexpected failure of the machine; hence the data structure should be durable. At the same time, the order in which votes are cast must be hidden to protect the privacy of voters, so the data structure should be history-independent. Adversaries may try to surreptitiously add or delete votes from the storage unit after the election has concluded, so the storage should be tamper-evident. Finally, we must guard against an adversarial voting machine's attempts to mark ballots through the representation of the data structure, so we desire a subliminal-free representation. We leverage the properties of Programmable Read Only Memory (PROM), a special kind of write-once storage medium, to meet these requirements. We give constructions for data structures on PROM storage that simultaneously satisfy all our desired properties. Our techniques can significantly reduce the need to verify code running on a voting machine.

This paper presents a practical digital signature scheme to be used in conjunction with network coding. Our scheme simultaneously provides authentication and detects malicious nodes that intentionally corrupt content on the network. The homomorphic property of the signatures allows nodes to sign any linear comination of the incoming packets without contacting the signing authority, but it is computationally infeasible for a node to sign a linear combination of the packets without disclosing what linear combination was used in the generation of the packet. Furthermore, we prove that the signature scheme is secure under well known cryptographic assumptions of the hardness of the Discrete-Log problem and the computational co-Diffie-Hellman problem on elliptic curves. Our scheme has a three-fold advantage over schemes based on homomorphic hashing: Firstly, we do not need to securely transmit hash values of the packets that the source transmits; secondly, since our scheme is based on elliptic curves, smaller security parameters suffice and this translates to improved efficiency since the bit lengths involved are smaller; finally, our scheme provides authentication of the data in addition to detecting pollution of packets.

High levels of security often imply that the computation time should be independent of the value of involved secrets. When the expected answer of the solver is either a solution or unsatisfiable, then the previous assumption leads to algorithms that take always the computation time of the worst case. This is particularly disturbing for NP-hard combinatorial problems. In this work we start from the observation that sometimes (specially for hard problems) users find it acceptable to receive as answer either a solution, the answer unsatisfiable or a failure with meaning don't know. More exactly users accept incomplete solvers. As argued in [Silaghi,Flairs 05], for certain problems privacy reasons lead users to prefer having an answer meaning don't know even when the secure multi-party computation could have proven unsatisfiable (to avoid revealing that all alternatives are infeasible). While the solution proposed there is slower than complete algorithms, here we show secure stochastic solutions that are faster than complete solvers, allowing to address larger problem instances. Two new refined concepts of privacy are introduced, namely 'requested t-privacy' that factors out treatment of knowledge of the protocol in t-privacy, and a slightly weaker version called 'non-uniform requested t-privacy'. In the last section we discuss arithmetic circuits for complete and stochastic solutions to constraint optimization problems.

A linear $(q^d,q,t)$-perfect hash family of size $s$ in a vector space $V$ of order $q^d$ over a field $F$ of order $q$ consists of a sequence $\phi_1,\ldots,\phi_s$ of linear functions from $V$ to $F$ with the following property: for all $t$ subsets $X\subseteq V$ there exists $i\in\{1,\ldots,s\}$ such that $\phi_i$ is injective when restricted to $F$. A linear $(q^d,q,t)$-perfect hash family of minimal size $d(t-1)$ is said to be optimal. In this paper we use projective geometry techniques to completely determine the values of $q$ for which optimal linear $(q^3,q,3)$-perfect hash families exist and give constructions in these cases. We also give constructions of optimal linear $(q^2,q,5)$-perfect hash families.

This document revisits the PEKE (Probabilistic Encryption Key Exchange) cryptosystem and proposes the enhanced PEKEv1.25 that performs a hash computation on the original PEKE output in order to improve the security assurance and to broaden the field of use. For a key establishment application where only the server side publishes a long-term public key and can adequately protect the private key counterpart from implementation attacks, we claim that PEKE is unsurpassed in security and efficiency, among the finite field arithmetic cryptosystems (e.g. RSA and finite field Diffie-Hellman). We use an original definition for the type of key encapsulation service provided by PEKE, hoping that this abstract definition captures the characteristics of the protocol and usage context. However, we only suggest that related security proofs are encouraging for the security of PEKE.

Bid opening in e-auction is efficient when a homomorphic secret sharing function is employed to seal the bids and homomorphic secret reconstruction is employed to open the bids. However, this high efficiency is based on an assumption: the bids are valid (e.g. within a special range). An undetected invalid bid can compromise correctness and fairness of the auction. Unfortunately, validity verification of the bids is ignored in the auction schemes employing homomorphic secret sharing (called homomorphic auction in this paper). In this paper, an attack against the homomorphic auction in the absence of bid validity check is presented and a necessary bid validity check mechanism is proposed. Then a batch cryptographic technique is introduced and applied to improve the efficiency of bid validity check.

We consider the problem of efficient key management and user revocation in cryptographic file systems that allow shared access to files. A performance-efficient solution to user revocation in such systems is lazy revocation, a method that delays the re-encryption of a file until the next write to that file. We formalize the notion of key-updating schemes for lazy revocation, an abstraction to manage cryptographic keys in file systems with lazy revocation, and give a security definition for such schemes. We give two composition methods that combine two secure key-updating schemes into a new secure scheme that permits a larger number of user revocations. We prove the security of two slightly modified existing constructions and propose a novel binary tree construction that is also provable secure in our model. Finally, we give a systematic analysis of the computational and communication complexity of the three constructions and show that the novel construction improves the previously known constructions.

This is a survey of mechanisms to control or prevent spam, with emphsis on cryptographic protocols. We also present a new cryptographic protocol, Secure Automated Resolution Protocol, which can be used to penalize spammers (and for other applications).

Within the next year, travelers from dozens of nations may be carrying a new form of passport in response to a mandate by the United States government. The e-passport, as it is sometimes called, represents a bold initiative in the deployment of two new technologies: Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) and biometrics. Important in their own right, e-passports are also the harbinger of a wave of next-generation ID cards: several national governments plan to deploy identity cards integrating RFID and biometrics for domestic use. We explore the privacy and security implications of this impending worldwide experiment in next-generation authentication technology. We describe privacy and security issues that apply to e-passports, then analyze these issues in the context of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standard for e-passports.

Although many watermarking schemes consider the case of universal verifiability, it is undesirable in some applications. Designated verification is a possible solution for this problem. Watermarking scheme with (non-interactive) designated verification through non-invertible schemes was proposed by Lee et al in 2003, to resolve multiple watermarking problem. Yoo et al [14] proposed a very similar watermarking scheme. In this paper, we propose a cryptanalytic attack on both of these schemes that allows a dishonest watermarker to send illegal watermarked images and to convince the designated verifier or customer that received watermarked images are valid. We modify the above schemes to overcome the attack. Further, we also propose a new robust watermarking scheme with (non-interactive) designated verification through non-invertible watermarks. Interestingly, our scheme can be extended for joint copyright protection (security of ownership rights for images to be owned by more than one entity).

The most significant pairing-based cryptographic protocol to be proposed so far is undoubtedly the Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) protocol of Boneh and Franklin. In their paper \cite{boneh-franklin} they give details of how their scheme might be implemented in practise on certain supersingular elliptic curves of prime characteristic. They also point out that the scheme could as easily be implemented on certain special non-supersingular curves for the same level of security. An obvious question to be answered is -- which is most efficient? Motivated by the work of Gallant, Lambert and Vanstone \cite{gallant-lambert-vanstone} we demonstrate that, perhaps counter to intuition, certain ordinary curves closely related to the supersingular curves originally recommended by Boneh and Franklin, provide better performance. We illustrate our technique by implementing the fastest pairing algorithm to date (on elliptic curves of prime characteristic) for contemporary levels of security. We also point out that many of the non-supersingular families of curves recently discovered and proposed for use in pairing-based cryptography can also benefit (to an extent) from the same technique.

Often an attacker tries to disconnect a network by destroying nodes or edges, while the defender counters using various resilience mechanisms. Examples include a music industry body attempting to close down a peer-to-peer file-sharing network; medics attempting to halt the spread of an infectious disease by selective vaccination; and a police agency trying to decapitate a terrorist organisation. Albert, Jeong and Barabasi famously analysed the static case, and showed that vertex-order attacks are effective against scale-free networks. We extend this work to the dynamic case by developing a framework based on evolutionary game theory to explore the interaction of attack and defence strategies. We show, first, that naive defences don't work against vertex-order attack; second, that defences based on simple redundancy don't work much better, but that defences based on cliques work well; third, that attacks based on centrality work better against clique defences than vertex-order attacks do; and fourth, that defences based on complex strategies such as delegation plus clique resist centrality attacks better than simple clique defences. Our models thus build a bridge between network analysis and evolutionary game theory, and provide a framework for analysing defence and attack in networks where topology matters. They suggest definitions of efficiency of attack and defence, and may even explain the evolution of insurgent organisations from networks of cells to a more virtual leadership that facilitates operations rather than directing them. Finally, we draw some conclusions and present possible directions for future research.

This work is concerned with the security of the standard T10 OSD protocol, a capability-based protocol for object stores designed by the OSD SNIA working group. The Object Store security protocol is designed to provide access control enforcement in a distributed storage setting such as a Storage Area Network (SAN) environment. In this work we consider in particular the ability of the OSD protocol to enforce *confinement*, which is the property that even misbehaving participants can not leak secret information across predefined boundaries. We observe that being a "pure capability" protocol, the plain vanilla OSD protocol is incapable of enforcing confinement. We show, however, that given a trustworthy infrastructure for authentication and secure channels, the protocol can be used in a manner that achieves the desired property (and does not require any change in the message format). Thus we demonstrate that object stores can in principle be used in a standard fashion in applications that require protection against leakage of secret data. Having identified a problem and proposed a solution, we proceed to prove formally that the proposed protocol indeed meets all its security goals. In the process we refine common cryptographic models in order to be able to reason about confinement, and then devise a precise model for a distributed capability-based access-control mechanism. To our knowledge, this is the first time such a model for access-control is defined in a cryptographic setting, and defining it highlights what can and cannot be achieved by such mechanisms.

We develop a couple of new methods to reduce transmission overheads in broadcast encryption. The methods are based on the idea of assigning {\it one key per each partition using one-way key chains} after partitioning the users. One method adopts {\it skipping chains} on partitions containing up to $p$ revoked users and the other adopts {\it cascade chains} on partitions with layer structure. The scheme using the former reduces the transmission overhead down to $\frac r{p+1}$ asymptotically as $r$ grows, and the scheme using the latter keeps the transmission overhead very small when $r$ approaches 0, where $r$ is the number of revoked users. Combining the two schemes, we propose a new broadcast encryption scheme with least transmission overhead. Our schemes also possess a remarkable feature that any number of new users can join at any time without key update, which is not available for most of known practical schemes.

We announce the construction of a pair of valid X.509 certificates with identical signatures.

We present a novel idea for user authentication that we call pass-thoughts. Recent advances in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology indicate that there is potential for a new type of human-computer interaction: a user transmitting thoughts directly to a computer. The goal of a pass-thought system would be to extract as much entropy as possible from a user’s brain signals upon “transmitting” a thought. Provided that these brain signals can be recorded and processed in an accurate and repeatable way, a pass-thought system might provide a quasi two-factor, changeable, authentication method resilient to shoulder-surfing. The potential size of the space of a pass-thought system would seem to be unbounded in theory, due to the lack of bounds on what composes a thought, although in practice it will be finite due to system constraints. In this paper, we discuss the motivation and potential of pass-thought authentication, the status quo of BCI technology, and outline the design of what we believe to be a currently feasible pass-thought system. We also briefly mention the need for general exploration and open debate regarding ethical considerations for such technologies.

An ad-hoc anonymous identification scheme is a new multi-user cryptographic primitive that allows participants from a user population to form ad hoc groups, and then prove membership anonymously in such groups. Recently, Nguyen \cite{Lan05} proposed an ID-based ad-hoc anonymous identification scheme from bilinear pairings. However, in this paper, we propose an attack on Nguyen's ID-based ad-hoc anonymous identification scheme. We show that any one can impersonate a valid group member to perform the anonymous identification protocol successfully. Furthermore, we propose a solution to improve this scheme against our attack.

We identify and describe a new type of phishing attack that circumvents what is probably today's most efficient defense mechanism in the war against phishing, namely the shutting down of sites run by the phisher. This attack is carried out using what we call a distributed phishing attack (DPA). The attack works by a per-victim personalization of the location of sites collecting credentials and a covert transmission of credentials to a hidden coordination center run by the phisher. We show how our attack can be simply and efficiently implemented and how it can increase the success rate of attacks while at the same time concealing the tracks of the phisher. We briefly describe a technique that may be helpful to combat DPAs.

We propose a new broadcast encryption scheme $\pi$ based on the idea of `one key per each punctured interval'. Let $N$ and $r$ be the numbers of total users and revoked users, respectively. In our scheme with $p$-punctured $c$-intervals, the transmission overhead is asymptotically {\normalsize$\frac r{p+1}$} as $r$ grows. We also introduce two variants of our scheme to improve the efficiency for small $r$. Our scheme is very flexible with two parameters $p$ and $c$. We may take $p$ as large as possible if a user device allows a large key storage, and set $c$ as small as possible if the storage size and the computing power is limited. Our scheme also possesses another remarkable feature that any number of new users can join at any time without key refreshment, which is not possible in other known practical schemes.

A contactless smartcard is a smartcard that can communicate with other devices without any physical connection, using Radio-Frequency Identifier (RFID) technology. Contactless smartcards are becoming increasingly popular, with applications like credit-cards, national-ID, passports, physical access. The security of such applications is clearly critical. A key feature of RFID-based systems is their very short range: typical systems are designed to operate at a range of ~10cm. In this study we show that contactless smartcard technology is vulnerable to relay attacks: An attacker can trick the reader into communicating with a victim smartcard that is very far away. A ``low-tech'' attacker can build a pick-pocket system that can remotely use a victim contactless smartcard, without the victim's knowledge. The attack system consists of two devices, which we call the ``ghost'' and the ``leech''. We discuss basic designs for the attacker's equipment, and explore their possible operating ranges. We show that the ghost can be up to 50m away from the card reader---3 orders of magnitude higher than the nominal range. We also show that the leech can be up to 50cm away from the the victim card. The main characteristics of the attack are: orthogonality to any security protocol, unlimited distance between the attacker and the victim, and low cost of the attack system.

In this report, we point out a serious security flaw in Microsoft Word and Excel. The stream cipher RC4 with key length up to 128 bits is used in Microsoft Word and Excel to protect the documents. But when an encrypted document gets modified and saved, the initialization vector remains the same and thus the same keystream generated from RC4 is applied to encrypt the different versions of that document. The consequence is disastrous since a lot of information of the document could be recovered easily.

The recent advances in multimedia technology have made the manipulation of digital images, videos or audio files easy. On the one hand the broad availability of these new capabilities enabled numerous new applications. On the other hand, for the same reasons, digital media can easily be forged by almost anyone. To counteract this risk, fragile watermarks were proposed to protect the integrity and authenticity of digital multimedia objects. Traditional watermarking schemes employ non-cryptographic and signal processing oriented techniques, which fail to provide any provable security guarantee against malicious modification attempts. In this paper, we give for the first time a provably secure authentication mechanism for digital multimedia files that is based on both cryptographic signatures and invertible watermarks. While traditional watermarking schemes introduce some small irreversible distortion in the digital content, invertible watermarks can be completely removed from a watermarked work.

Bribe and coercion are common in conventional voting systems and usually will lead to a biased result that imparts the desired democracy. However, these problems become more difficult to solve when using e-voting schemes. Up to now, many e-voting schemes have been proposed to provide receipt-freeness and uncoercibility to solve these problems. Unfortunately, none is both secure and practical enough. In this paper, we describe an e-voting scheme that can solve or at least lessen the problems of bribe and coercion, and can be realized with current techniques. By using smart cards to randomize part content of the ballot, the voter can not construct a receipt. By using physical voting booths, bribers and coercers can not monitor the voter while he votes. Unlike conventional voting systems, the voter of the proposed scheme can choose any voting booth that is convenient and safe to him. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed schemes is optimal in that time and communication complexity for the voter is independent of the number of voting authorities.

Distributed control systems (DCS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems were developed to reduce labor costs, and to allow system-wide monitoring and remote control from a central location. Control systems are widely used in critical infrastructures such as electric grid, natural gas, water, and wastewater industries. While control systems can be vulnerable to a variety of types of cyber attacks that could have devastating consequences, little research has been done to secure the control systems. This paper presents a suite of security protocols optimized for SCADA/DCS systems which include: point-to-point secure channels, authenticated broadcast channels, authenticated emergency channels, and revised authenticated emergency channels. These protocols are designed to address the specific challenges that SCADA systems have.

One of the driving forces behind the development of 3G systems is the potential to deliver complex content to consumers. This is evident from the growing collaboration between broadcast and mobile network operators, and the expectation that future broadcast receivers will be able to forward content to mobile devices. One challenge in providing such a service is the requirement for content protection. An aspect of this that is particularly relevant to mobile systems is the ability to control where content is viewed. Although 3G networks can provide location of a user’s receiver, this device may be in a different location from the device that renders the content. Thus the provider cannot be certain where the content will be viewed. This paper proposes two protocols that will provide the location of the end device in a secure manner that can be trusted by the content provider.

Unsolicited and undesirable e-mail (spam) is a growing problem for Internet users and service providers. We present the Secure Internet Content Selection (SICS) protocol, an efficient cryptographic mechanism for spam-control, based on allocation of responsibility (liability). With SICS, e-mail is sent with a content label, and a cryptographic protocol ensures labels are authentic and penalizes falsely labeled e-mail (spam). The protocol supports trusted senders (penalized by loss of trust) and unknown senders (penalized financially). The recipient can determine the compensation amount for falsely labeled e-mail (spam)). SICS is practical, with negligible overhead, gradual adoption path, and use of existing relationships; it is also flexible and appropriate for most scenarios, including deployment by end users and/or ISPs and support for privacy and legitimate, properly labeled commercial e-mail. SICS improves on other crypto-based proposals for spam controls, and complements non-cryptographic spam controls

This paper presents the theoretical blueprint of a new secure token called the Externalized Microprocessor (XmP). Unlike a smart-card, the XmP contains no ROM at all. While exporting all the device's executable code to potentially untrustworthy terminals poses formidable security problems, the advantages of ROM-less secure tokens are numerous: chip masking time disappears, bug patching becomes a mere terminal update and hence does not imply any roll-out of cards in the field. Most importantly, code size ceases to be a limiting factor. This is particularly significant given the steady increase in on-board software complexity. After describing the machine's instruction-set we will introduce two XmP variants. The first design is a public-key oriented architecture which relies on a new RSA screening scheme and features a relatively low communication overhead at the cost of computational complexity, whereas the second variant is secret-key oriented and relies on simple MACs and hash functions but requires more communication. For each of these two designs, we propose two protocols that execute and dynamically authenticate arbitrary programs. We also provide a strong security model for these protocols and prove their security under appropriate complexity assumptions.

The XTR public key system was introduced at Crypto 2000. Application of XTR in cryptographic protocols leads to substantial savings both in communication and computational overhead without compromising security. It is regarded that XTR is suitable for a variety of environments, including low-end smart cards, and XTR is the excellent alternative to either RSA or ECC. In \cite{LV00a,SL01}, authors remarked that XTR single exponentiation (XTR-SE) is less susceptible than usual exponentiation routines to environmental attacks such as timing attacks and Differential Power Analysis (DPA). In this paper, however, we investigate the security of side channel attack (SCA) on XTR. This paper shows that XTR-SE is immune against simple power analysis (SPA) under assumption that the order of the computation of XTR-SE is carefully considered. However we show that XTR-SE is vulnerable to Data-bit DPA (DDPA)\cite{Cor99}, Address-bit DPA (ADPA)\cite{IIT02}, and doubling attack \cite{FV03}. Moreover, we propose two countermeasures that prevent from DDPA and a countermeasure against ADPA. One of the countermeasures using randomization of the base element proposed to defeat DDPA, i.e., randomization of the base element using field isomorphism, could be used to break doubling attack. Thus if we only deal with SPA, DDPA, ADPA, and doubling attack as the attack algorithm for XTR-SE, XTR-SE should be added following countermeasures: randomization of the base element using field isomorphism (DDPA and doubling attack) + randomized addressing (ADPA). But the proposed countermeasure against doubling attack is very inefficient. So to maintain the advantage of efficiency of XTR a good countermeasure against doubling attack is actually necessary.

WinZip is a popular compression utility for Microsoft Windows computers, the latest version of which is advertised as having "easy-to-use AES encryption to protect your sensitive data." We exhibit several attacks against WinZip's new encryption method, dubbed "AE-2" or "Advanced Encryption, version two." We then discuss secure alternatives. Since at a high level the underlying WinZip encryption method appears secure (the core is exactly Encrypt-then-Authenticate using AES-CTR and HMAC-SHA1), and since one of our attacks was made possible because of the way that WinZip Computing, Inc.~decided to fix a different security problem with its previous encryption method AE-1, our attacks further underscore the subtlety of designing cryptographically secure software.

We present a voting protocol that protects voters' privacy and achieves universal verifiability, receipt-freeness, and uncoercibility without ad hoc physical assumptions or procedural constraints (such as untappable channels, voting booths, smart cards, third-party randomizers, and so on). We discuss under which conditions the scheme allows voters to cast write-in ballots, and we show how it can be practically implemented through voter-verified (paper) ballots. The scheme allows voters to combine voting credentials with their chosen votes applying the homomorphic properties of certain probabilistic cryptosystems.

Database outsourcing is a popular industry trend which involves organizations delegating their data management needs to an external service provider. In this model, a service provider hosts its clients’ databases and offers mechanisms for clients to create, store, update and access (query) their databases. Since a service provider is almost never fully trusted, security and privacy of outsourced data are important concerns. This paper focuses on integrity and authenticity issues in outsourced databases. Whenever someone queries a hosted database, the returned results must be demonstrably authentic: the querier needs to establish – in an efficient manner – that both integrity and authenticity (with respect to the actual data owner) are assured. To this end, some recent work examined two relevant signature schemes: one based on a condensed variant of batch RSA and the other – on aggregated signature scheme by Boneh, et al. In this paper, we introduce the notion of immutability for aggregated signature schemes. Immutability refers to the difficulty of computing new valid aggregated signatures from a set of other aggregated signatures. This is an important feature, particularly for outsourced databases, as lack thereof would enable a frequent querier to eventually amass enough aggregated signatures to answer other (un-posed) queries, thus becoming a de facto service provider. Since the schemes considered in [19] do not offer immutability, we propose several practical methods to achieve it.

Scan based test is a double edged sword. On one hand, it is a powerful test technique. On the other hand, it is an equally powerful attack tool. In this paper we show that scan chains can be used as a side channel to recover secret keys from a hardware implementation of the Data Encryption Standard (DES). By loading pairs of known plaintexts with one-bit difference in the normal mode and then scanning out the internal state in the test mode, we first determine the position of all scan elements in the scan chain. Then, based on a systematic analysis of the structure of the non-linear substitution boxes, and using three additional plaintexts we discover the DES secret key. Finally, some assumptions in the attack are discussed.

It is often necessary for two or more or more parties that do not fully trust each other to selectively share data. We propose a search scheme based on Bloom filters and Pohlig-Hellman encryption. A semi-trusted third party can transform one party's search queries to a form suitable for querying the other party's database, in such a way that neither the third party nor the database owner can see the original query. Furthermore, the encryption keys used to construct the Bloom filters are not shared with this third party. Provision can be made for third-party ``warrant servers'', as well as ``censorship sets'' that limit the data to be shared.

The 9/11 tragedy triggered an increased interest in biometric passports. According to several sources \cite{sp2}, the electronic ID market is expected to increase by more than 50\% {\sl per annum} over the three coming years, excluding China. \smallskip To cost-effectively address this foreseen explosion, a very inexpensive memory card (phonecard-like card) capable of performing fingerprint matching is paramount.\smallskip This paper presents such a solution. The proposed protocol is based on the following idea: the card stores the user's fingerprint information to which random minutiae were added at enrolment time (we denote this scrambled template by $t$). The card also stores a binary string $w$ encoding which of the minutiae in $t$ actually belong to the holder. When an identification session starts, the terminal reads $t$ from the card and, based upon the incoming scanner data, determines which of the minutiae in $t$ are genuine. The terminal forms a candidate $w'$ and sends it to the card. All the card needs to do is test that the Hamming weight of $w \oplus w'$ is smaller than a security threshold $d$. \smallskip It follows that the card only needs to embark passive data storage capabilities, one exclusive-or gate, a shift register, a counter and a comparator (less than 40 logical gates).

In PODC 2003, Park et al. \cite{PCSR} first introduce a connection between fair exchange and sequential two-party multi-signature scheme and provide a novel method of constructing fair exchange protocol by distributing the computation of RSA signature. This approach avoids the design of verifiable encryption scheme at the expense of having co-signer store a piece of prime signer's secret key. Dodis and Reyzin \cite{DR} showed that the protocol in \cite{PCSR} is totally breakable in the registration phase, then presented a remedy scheme which is provably secure in the random oracle model, by utilizing Boldyreva non-interactive two-party multi-signature scheme \cite{Bo}. Security in the random oracle model does not imply security in the real world. In this paper, we provide the first two efficient committed signatures which are provably secure in the standard complexity model from strong RSA assumption. Then we construct efficient optimistic fair exchange protocols from those new primitives.

When data or the processing on the data have some uncertainty, discretization of those data can lead to significantly different output. For example, in certain graphical password schemes, a slight uncertainty in the clicking places can produce a different password. We present a discretization method, called robust discretization, which gives stable outputs in the presence of uncertainties. Robust discretization enables us to implement graphical password schemes that are much more flexible and versatile than previously know ones.

While bringing considerable flexibility and extending the horizons of mobile computing, mobile code raises major security issues. Hence, mobile code, such as Java applets, needs to be analyzed before execution. The byte-code verifier checks low-level security properties that ensure that the downloaded code cannot bypass the virtual machine's security mechanisms. One of the statically ensured properties is {\sl type safety}. The type-inference phase is the overwhelming resource-consuming part of the verification process. This paper addresses the RAM bottleneck met while verifying mobile code in memory-constrained environments such as smart-cards. We propose to modify classic type-inference in a way that significantly reduces the memory consumption in the memory-constrained device at the detriment of its distrusted memory-rich environment. The outline of our idea is the following, throughout execution, the memory frames used by the verifier are MAC-ed and exported to the terminal and then retrieved upon request. Hence a distrusted memory-rich terminal can be safely used for convincing the embedded device that the downloaded code is secure. The proposed protocol was implemented on JCOP20 and JCOP30 Java cards using IBM's JCOP development tool.

In this paper we describe a low-tech and user friendly solution for secure two-way communication between two parties over a network of untrusted devices. We present a solution in which displays play a central role. Our approach guarantees privacy and allows to check the authenticity of information presented on displays. Furthermore, we provide the user with a secure return channel. To this end we propose to provide every user with a small decryption display which is, for example, integrated in a credit card and requires very limited computing power. The authentication and security are based on visual cryptography which was first introduced by Naor and Shamir in 1994. We solve some practical shortcomings of traditional visual cryptography and develop protocols for two-way authentication and privacy in untrusted environments.