8,248 research outputs found
A new Definition and Classification of Physical Unclonable Functions
A new definition of "Physical Unclonable Functions" (PUFs), the first one
that fully captures its intuitive idea among experts, is presented. A PUF is an
information-storage system with a security mechanism that is
1. meant to impede the duplication of a precisely described
storage-functionality in another, separate system and
2. remains effective against an attacker with temporary access to the whole
original system.
A novel classification scheme of the security objectives and mechanisms of
PUFs is proposed and its usefulness to aid future research and security
evaluation is demonstrated. One class of PUF security mechanisms that prevents
an attacker to apply all addresses at which secrets are stored in the
information-storage system, is shown to be closely analogous to cryptographic
encryption. Its development marks the dawn of a new fundamental primitive of
hardware-security engineering: cryptostorage. These results firmly establish
PUFs as a fundamental concept of hardware security.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures; Proceedings "CS2 '15 Proceedings of the Second
Workshop on Cryptography and Security in Computing Systems", Amsterdam, 2015,
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Using quantum key distribution for cryptographic purposes: a survey
The appealing feature of quantum key distribution (QKD), from a cryptographic
viewpoint, is the ability to prove the information-theoretic security (ITS) of
the established keys. As a key establishment primitive, QKD however does not
provide a standalone security service in its own: the secret keys established
by QKD are in general then used by a subsequent cryptographic applications for
which the requirements, the context of use and the security properties can
vary. It is therefore important, in the perspective of integrating QKD in
security infrastructures, to analyze how QKD can be combined with other
cryptographic primitives. The purpose of this survey article, which is mostly
centered on European research results, is to contribute to such an analysis. We
first review and compare the properties of the existing key establishment
techniques, QKD being one of them. We then study more specifically two generic
scenarios related to the practical use of QKD in cryptographic infrastructures:
1) using QKD as a key renewal technique for a symmetric cipher over a
point-to-point link; 2) using QKD in a network containing many users with the
objective of offering any-to-any key establishment service. We discuss the
constraints as well as the potential interest of using QKD in these contexts.
We finally give an overview of challenges relative to the development of QKD
technology that also constitute potential avenues for cryptographic research.Comment: Revised version of the SECOQC White Paper. Published in the special
issue on QKD of TCS, Theoretical Computer Science (2014), pp. 62-8
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Privacy-preserving scheme for mobile ad hoc networks.
This paper proposes a decentralized trust establishment protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), where nodes establish security associations. In order to achieve privacy and security, we use homomorphic encryption and polynomial intersection so as to find the intersection of two sets. The first set represents a list of recommenders of the initiator and the second set is a list of trusted recommenders of the responder. The intersection of the sets represents a list of nodes that recommend the first node and their recommendations are trusted by the second node. In our experimental results we show that our scheme is effective even if there are 30 trusted nodes
Solutions and Tools for Secure Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks
Secure communication is considered a vital requirement in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications. Such a requirement embraces different aspects, including confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of exchanged information, proper management of security material, and effective prevention and reaction against security threats and attacks. However, WSNs are mainly composed of resource-constrained devices. That is, network nodes feature reduced capabilities, especially in terms of memory storage, computing power, transmission rate, and energy availability.
As a consequence, assuring secure communication in WSNs results to be more difficult than in other kinds of network. In fact, trading effectiveness of adopted solutions with their efficiency becomes far more important. In addition, specific device classes or technologies may require to design ad hoc security solutions. Also, it is necessary to efficiently manage security material, and dynamically cope with changes of security requirements. Finally, security threats and countermeasures have to be carefully considered since from the network design phase.
This Ph.D. dissertion considers secure communication in WSNs, and provides the following contributions. First, we provide a performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 security services. Then, we focus on the ZigBee technology and its security services, and propose possible solutions to some deficiencies and inefficiencies. Second, we present HISS, a highly scalable and efficient key management scheme, able to contrast collusion attacks while displaying a graceful degradation of performance. Third, we present STaR, a software component for WSNs that secures multiple traffic flows at the same time. It is transparent to the application, and provides runtime reconfigurability, thus coping with dynamic changes of security requirements. Finally, we describe ASF, our attack simulation framework for WSNs. Such a tool helps network designers to quantitatively evaluate effects of security attacks, produce an attack ranking based on their severity, and thus select the most appropriate countermeasures
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