Blockchain in Education

This report introduces the fundamental principles of the Blockchain focusing on its potential for the education sector. It explains how this technology may both disrupt institutional norms and empower learners. It proposes eight scenarios for the application of the Blockchain in an education context, based on the current state of technology development and deployment.JRC.B.4-Human Capital and Employmen

Trusted and Privacy-preserving Embedded Systems: Advances in Design, Analysis and Application of Lightweight Privacy-preserving Authentication and Physical Security Primitives

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) enables RFID readers to perform fully automatic wireless identification of objects labeled with RFID tags and is widely deployed to many applications, such as access control, electronic tickets and payment as well as electronic passports. This prevalence of RFID technology introduces various risks, in particular concerning the privacy of its users and holders. Despite the privacy risk, classical threats to authentication and identification systems must be considered to prevent the adversary from impersonating or copying (cloning) a tag. This thesis summarizes the state of the art in secure and privacy-preserving authentication for RFID tags with a particular focus on solutions based on Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs). It presents advancements in the design, analysis and evaluation of secure and privacy-preserving authentication protocols for RFID systems and PUFs. Formalizing the security and privacy requirements on RFID systems is essential for the design of provably secure and privacy-preserving RFID protocols. However, existing RFID security and privacy models in the literature are often incomparable and in part do not reflect the capabilities of real-world adversaries. We investigate subtle issues such as tag corruption aspects that lead to the impossibility of achieving both mutual authentication and any reasonable notion of privacy in one of the most comprehensive security and privacy models, which is the basis of many subsequent works. Our results led to the refinement of this privacy model and were considered in subsequent works on privacy-preserving RFID systems. A promising approach to enhance the privacy in RFID systems without lifting the computational requirements on the tags are anonymizers. These are special devices that take off the computational workload from the tags. While existing anonymizer-based protocols are subject to impersonation and denial-of-service attacks, existing RFID security and privacy models do not include anonymizers. We present the first security and privacy framework for anonymizer-enabled RFID systems and two privacy-preserving RFID authentication schemes using anonymizers. Both schemes achieve several appealing features that were not simultaneously achieved by any previous proposal. The first protocol is very efficient for all involved entities, achieves privacy under tag corruption. It is secure against impersonation attacks and forgeries even if the adversary can corrupt the anonymizers. The second scheme provides for the first time anonymity and untraceability of tags against readers as well as secure tag authentication against collisions of malicious readers and anonymizers using tags that cannot perform public-key cryptography (i.e., modular exponentiations). The RFID tags commonly used in practice are cost-efficient tokens without expensive hardware protection mechanisms. Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) promise to provide an effective security mechanism for RFID tags to protect against basic hardware attacks. However, existing PUF-based RFID authentication schemes are not scalable, allow only for a limited number of authentications and are subject to replay, denial-of-service and emulation attacks. We present two scalable PUF-based authentication schemes that overcome these problems. The first protocol supports tag and reader authentication, is resistant to emulation attacks and highly scalable. The second protocol uses a PUF-based key storage and addresses an open question on the feasibility of destructive privacy, i.e., the privacy of tags that are destroyed during tag corruption. The security of PUFs relies on assumptions on physical properties and is still under investigation. PUF evaluation results in the literature are difficult to compare due to varying test conditions and different analysis methods. We present the first large-scale security analysis of ASIC implementations of the five most popular electronic PUF types, including Arbiter, Ring Oscillator, SRAM, Flip-Flop and Latch PUFs. We present a new PUF evaluation methodology that allows a more precise assessment of the unpredictability properties than previous approaches and we quantify the most important properties of PUFs for their use in cryptographic schemes. PUFs have been proposed for various applications, including anti-counterfeiting and authentication schemes. However, only rudimentary PUF security models exist, limiting the confidence in the security claims of PUF-based security mechanisms. We present a formal security framework for PUF-based primitives, which has been used in subsequent works to capture the properties of image-based PUFs and in the design of anti-counterfeiting mechanisms and physical hash functions

Reflective-Physically Unclonable Function based System for Anti-Counterfeiting

Physically unclonable functions (PUF) are physical security mechanisms, which utilize inherent randomness in processes used to instantiate physical objects. In this dissertation, an extensive overview of the state of the art in implementations, accompanying definitions and their analysis is provided. The concept of the reflective-PUF is presented as a product security solution. The viability of the concept, its evaluation and the requirements of such a system is explored

An Approach to Guide Users Towards Less Revealing Internet Browsers

When browsing the Internet, HTTP headers enable both clients and servers send extra data in their requests or responses such as the User-Agent string. This string contains information related to the sender’s device, browser, and operating system. Previous research has shown that there are numerous privacy and security risks result from exposing sensitive information in the User-Agent string. For example, it enables device and browser fingerprinting and user tracking and identification. Our large analysis of thousands of User-Agent strings shows that browsers differ tremendously in the amount of information they include in their User-Agent strings. As such, our work aims at guiding users towards using less exposing browsers. In doing so, we propose to assign an exposure score to browsers based on the information they expose and vulnerability records. Thus, our contribution in this work is as follows: first, provide a full implementation that is ready to be deployed and used by users. Second, conduct a user study to identify the effectiveness and limitations of our proposed approach. Our implementation is based on using more than 52 thousand unique browsers. Our performance and validation analysis show that our solution is accurate and efficient. The source code and data set are publicly available and the solution has been deployed

Design and implementation of a credible blockchain-based e-health records platform

>Magister Scientiae - MScWith the development of information and network technologies, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) management system has gained wide spread application in managing medical records. One of the major challenges of EHRs is the independent nature of medical institutions. This non-collaborative nature puts a significant barrier between patients, doctors, medical researchers and medical data. Moreover, unlike the unique and strong anti-tampering nature of traditional paper-based records, electronic health records stored in centralization database are vulnerable to risks from network attacks, forgery and tampering. In view of the data sharing difficulties and information security problems commonly found in existing EHRs, this dissertation designs and develops a credible Blockchain-based electronic health records (CB-EHRs) management system

Design and Implementation of a Credible Blockchain-based E-health Records Platform

Masters of ScienceWith the development of information and network technologies, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) management system has gained wide spread application in managing medical records. One of the major challenges of EHRs is the independent nature of medical institutions. This non-collaborative nature puts a significant barrier between patients, doctors, medical researchers and medical data. Moreover, unlike the unique and strong anti-tampering nature of traditional paper-based records, electronic health records stored in centralization database are vulnerable to risks from network attacks, forgery and tampering. In view of the data sharing difficulties and information security problems commonly found in existing EHRs, this dissertation designs and develops a credible Blockchain-based electronic health records (CB-EHRs) management system. To improve security, the proposed system combines digital signature (using MD5 and RSA) with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). The advantages of these are strong anti-tampering, high stability, high security, low cost, and easy implementation. To test the efficacy of the system, implementation was done using Java web programming technology. Tests were carried out to determine the efficiency of the Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) consensus algorithm, functionality of the RBAC mechanism and the various system modules. Results obtained show that the system can manage and share EHRs safely and effectively. The expectation of the author is that the output of this research would foster the development and adaptation of EHRs management system