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

SEABASS: Symmetric-keychain Encryption and Authentication for Building Automation Systems

There is an increasing security risk in Building Automation Systems (BAS) in that its communication is unprotected, resulting in the adversary having the capability to inject spurious commands to the actuators to alter the behaviour of BAS. The communication between the Human-Machine-Interface (HMI) and the controller (PLC) is vulnerable as there is no secret key being used to protect the authenticity, confidentiality and integrity of the sensor data and commands. We propose SEABASS, a lightweight key management scheme to distribute and manage session keys between HMI and PLCs, providing a secure communication channel between any two communicating devices in BAS through a symmetric-key based hash-chain encryption and authentication of message exchange. Our scheme facilitates automatic renewal of session keys periodically based on the use of a reversed hash-chain. A prototype was implemented using the BACnet/IP communication protocol and the preliminary results show that the symmetric keychain approach is lightweight and incurs low latency

Reinventing Media Activism: Public Interest Advocacy in the Making of U.S. Communication-Information Policy, 1960-2002

This report is a long-term analysis of citizens' collective action to influence public policy toward communication and information. The work discusses in greater detail what is meant by communication and information policy (CIP) and why we think it is worthwhile to study it as a distinctive domain of public policy and citizen action. The report concentrates on citizen action in the United States and looks backwards, tracing the long-term evolutionary trajectory of communications-information advocacy in the USA since the 1960s. We focus on the concept of citizen collective action and explain its relevance to CIP.Research supported by the Ford Foundation's Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom Program. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, or the Ford Foundation

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

Key management for wireless sensor network security

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have attracted great attention not only in industry but also in academia due to their enormous application potential and unique security challenges. A typical sensor network can be seen as a combination of a number of low-cost sensor nodes which have very limited computation and communication capability, memory space, and energy supply. The nodes are self-organized into a network to sense or monitor surrounding information in an unattended environment, while the self-organization property makes the networks vulnerable to various attacks.Many cryptographic mechanisms that solve network security problems rely directly on secure and efficient key management making key management a fundamental research topic in the field of WSNs security. Although key management for WSNs has been studied over the last years, the majority of the literature has focused on some assumed vulnerabilities along with corresponding countermeasures. Specific application, which is an important factor in determining the feasibility of the scheme, has been overlooked to a large extent in the existing literature.This thesis is an effort to develop a key management framework and specific schemes for WSNs by which different types of keys can be established and also can be distributed in a self-healing manner; explicit/ implicit authentication can be integrated according to the security requirements of expected applications. The proposed solutions would provide reliable and robust security infrastructure for facilitating secure communications in WSNs.There are five main parts in the thesis. In Part I, we begin with an introduction to the research background, problems definition and overview of existing solutions. From Part II to Part IV, we propose specific solutions, including purely Symmetric Key Cryptography based solutions, purely Public Key Cryptography based solutions, and a hybrid solution. While there is always a trade-off between security and performance, analysis and experimental results prove that each proposed solution can achieve the expected security aims with acceptable overheads for some specific applications. Finally, we recapitulate the main contribution of our work and identify future research directions in Part V

Scalable and Robust Distributed Algorithms for Privacy-Preserving Applications

We live in an era when political and commercial entities are increasingly engaging in sophisticated cyber attacks to damage, disrupt, or censor information content and to conduct mass surveillance. By compiling various patterns from user data over time, untrusted parties could create an intimate picture of sensitive personal information such as political and religious beliefs, health status, and so forth. In this dissertation, we study scalable and robust distributed algorithms that guarantee user privacy when communicating with other parties to either solely exchange information or participate in multi-party computations. We consider scalability and robustness requirements in three privacy-preserving areas: secure multi-party computation (MPC), anonymous broadcast, and blocking-resistant Tor bridge distribution. We propose decentralized algorithms for MPC that, unlike most previous work, scale well with the number of parties and tolerate malicious faults from a large fraction of the parties. Our algorithms do not require any trusted party and are fully load-balanced. Anonymity is an essential tool for achieving privacy; it enables individuals to communicate with each other without being identified as the sender or the receiver of the information being exchanged. We show that our MPC algorithms can be effectively used to design a scalable anonymous broadcast protocol. We do this by developing a multi-party shuffling protocol that can efficiently anonymize a sequence of messages in the presence of many faulty nodes. Our final approach for preserving user privacy in cyberspace is to improve Tor; the most popular anonymity network in the Internet. A current challenge with Tor is that colluding corrupt users inside a censorship territory can completely block user\u27s access to Tor by obtaining information about a large fraction of Tor bridges; a type of relay nodes used as the Tor\u27s primary mechanism for blocking-resistance. We describe a randomized bridge distribution algorithm, where all honest users are guaranteed to connect to Tor in the presence of an adversary corrupting an unknown number of users. Our simulations suggest that, with minimal resource costs, our algorithm can guarantee Tor access for all honest users after a small (logarithmic) number of rounds

Unified architecture of mobile ad hoc network security (MANS) system

In this dissertation, a unified architecture of Mobile Ad-hoc Network Security (MANS) system is proposed, under which IDS agent, authentication, recovery policy and other policies can be defined formally and explicitly, and are enforced by a uniform architecture. A new authentication model for high-value transactions in cluster-based MANET is also designed in MANS system. This model is motivated by previous works but try to use their beauties and avoid their shortcomings, by using threshold sharing of the certificate signing key within each cluster to distribute the certificate services, and using certificate chain and certificate repository to achieve better scalability, less overhead and better security performance. An Intrusion Detection System is installed in every node, which is responsible for colleting local data from its host node and neighbor nodes within its communication range, pro-processing raw data and periodically broadcasting to its neighborhood, classifying normal or abnormal based on pro-processed data from its host node and neighbor nodes. Security recovery policy in ad hoc networks is the procedure of making a global decision according to messages received from distributed IDS and restore to operational health the whole system if any user or host that conducts the inappropriate, incorrect, or anomalous activities that threaten the connectivity or reliability of the networks and the authenticity of the data traffic in the networks. Finally, quantitative risk assessment model is proposed to numerically evaluate MANS security

Key Management Systems for Smart Grid Advanced Metering Infrastructure: A Survey

Smart Grids are evolving as the next generation power systems that involve changes in the traditional ways of generation, transmission and distribution of power. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is one of the key components in smart grids. An AMI comprises of systems and networks, that collects and analyzes data received from smart meters. In addition, AMI also provides intelligent management of various power-related applications and services based on the data collected from smart meters. Thus, AMI plays a significant role in the smooth functioning of smart grids. AMI is a privileged target for security attacks as it is made up of systems that are highly vulnerable to such attacks. Providing security to AMI is necessary as adversaries can cause potential damage against infrastructures and privacy in smart grid. One of the most effective and challenging topic's identified, is the Key Management System (KMS), for sustaining the security concerns in AMI. Therefore, KMS seeks to be a promising research area for future development of AMI. This survey work highlights the key security issues of advanced metering infrastructures and focuses on how key management techniques can be utilized for safeguarding AMI. First of all, we explore the main features of advanced metering infrastructures and identify the relationship between smart grid and AMI. Then, we introduce the security issues and challenges of AMI. We also provide a classification of the existing works in literature that deal with secure key management system in AMI. Finally, we identify possible future research directions of KMS in AMI