Towards secure end-to-end data aggregation in AMI through delayed-integrity-verification

The integrity and authenticity of the energy usage data in Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is crucial to ensure the correct energy load to facilitate generation, distribution and customer billing. Any malicious tampering to the data must be detected immediately. This paper introduces secure end-to-end data aggregation for AMI, a security protocol that allows the concentrators to securely aggregate the data collected from the smart meters, while enabling the utility back-end that receives the aggregated data to verify the integrity and data originality. Compromise of concentrators can be detected. The aggregated data is protected using Chameleon Signatures and then forwarded to the utility back-end for verification, accounting, and analysis. Using the Trapdoor Chameleon Hash Function, the smart meters can periodically send an evidence to the utility back-end, by computing an alternative message and a random value (m', r) such that m' consists of all previous energy usage measurements of the smart meter in a specified period of time. By verifying that the Chameleon Hash Value of (m', r) and that the energy usage matches those aggregated by the concentrators, the utility back-end is convinced of the integrity and authenticity of the data from the smart meters. Any data anomaly between smart meters and concentrators can be detected, thus indicating potential compromise of concentrators

ECC2K-130 on NVIDIA GPUs

A major cryptanalytic computation is currently underway on multiple platforms, including standard CPUs, FPGAs, PlayStations and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), to break the Certicom ECC2K-130 challenge. This challenge is to compute an elliptic-curve discrete logarithm on a Koblitz curve over $\rm F_{2^{131}}$ . Optimizations have reduced the cost of the computation to approximately 277 bit operations in 261 iterations. GPUs are not designed for fast binary-field arithmetic; they are designed for highly vectorizable floating-point computations that fit into very small amounts of static RAM. This paper explains how to optimize the ECC2K-130 computation for this unusual platform. The resulting GPU software performs more than 63 million iterations per second, including 320 million $\rm F_{2^{131}}$ multiplications per second, on a $500 NVIDIA GTX 295 graphics card. The same techniques for finite-field arithmetic and elliptic-curve arithmetic can be reused in implementations of larger systems that are secure against similar attacks, making GPUs an interesting option as coprocessors when a busy Internet server has many elliptic-curve operations to perform in parallel

Privacy-Preserving Predicate Proof of Attributes with CL-Anonymous Credential

Abstract The anonymous credential system allows users to convince relying parties the possession of a credential released by an issuer. To adhere to the minimal information disclose principle, the anonymous credential facilitates predicate proofs of attributes without revealing the values. In this paper, we extend the pairing-based CL-anonymous credential system and present a series of attributes proof protocols. They enable users to prove to relying parties the AND and OR relations over multiple attributes, as well as equality to a given value and lying into a given interval over some single attribute

Daily Eastern News: November 16, 2012

https://thekeep.eiu.edu/den_2012_nov/1011/thumbnail.jp

Dharma Dogs: A Narrative Approach to Understanding the Connection of Sentience Between Humans and Canines

India has the highest population of stray dogs in the world1. Dharamsala, a cross-cultural community in the north Indian Himalayan foothills, is home to a number of particularly overweight and happy canines. However, the street dogs of Dharamsala are not an accurate representation of the state of stay dogs across India. This paper explores why this may be through narrative stories about the day-to-day interactions between humans and dogs. The following research addresses religious motives as well as the lack thereof

Privacy in the Smart City - Applications, Technologies, Challenges and Solutions

Many modern cities strive to integrate information technology into every aspect of city life to create so-called smart cities. Smart cities rely on a large number of application areas and technologies to realize complex interactions between citizens, third parties, and city departments. This overwhelming complexity is one reason why holistic privacy protection only rarely enters the picture. A lack of privacy can result in discrimination and social sorting, creating a fundamentally unequal society. To prevent this, we believe that a better understanding of smart cities and their privacy implications is needed. We therefore systematize the application areas, enabling technologies, privacy types, attackers and data sources for the attacks, giving structure to the fuzzy term “smart city”. Based on our taxonomies, we describe existing privacy-enhancing technologies, review the state of the art in real cities around the world, and discuss promising future research directions. Our survey can serve as a reference guide, contributing to the development of privacy-friendly smart cities