A non-interactive deniable authentication scheme in the standard model

Deniable authentication protocols enable a sender to authenticate a message to a receiver such that the receiver is unable to prove the identity of the sender to a third party. In contrast to interactive schemes, non-interactive deniable authentication schemes improve communication efficiency. Currently, several non-interactive deniable authentication schemes have been proposed with provable security in the random oracle model. In this paper, we study the problem of constructing non-interactive deniable authentication scheme secure in the standard model without bilinear groups. An efficient non-interactive deniable authentication scheme is presented by combining the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol with authenticated encryption schemes. We prove the security of our scheme by sequences of games and show that the computational cost of our construction can be dramatically reduced by applying pre-computation technique

A publicly verifiable quantum signature scheme based on asymmetric quantum cryptography

In 2018, Shi et al. \u27s showed that Kaushik et al.\u27s quantum signature scheme is defective. It suffers from the forgery attack. They further proposed an improvement, trying to avoid the attack. However, after examining we found their improved quantum signature is deniable, because the verifier can impersonate the signer to sign a message. After that, when a dispute occurs, he can argue that the signature was not signed by him. It was from the signer. To overcome the drawback, in this paper, we raise an improvement to make it publicly verifiable and hence more suitable to be applied in real life. After cryptanalysis, we confirm that our improvement not only resist the forgery attack but also is undeniable

End-to-End Encrypted Group Messaging with Insider Security

Our society has become heavily dependent on electronic communication, and preserving the integrity of this communication has never been more important. Cryptography is a tool that can help to protect the security and privacy of these communications. Secure messaging protocols like OTR and Signal typically employ end-to-end encryption technology to mitigate some of the most egregious adversarial attacks, such as mass surveillance. However, the secure messaging protocols deployed today suffer from two major omissions: they do not natively support group conversations with three or more participants, and they do not fully defend against participants that behave maliciously. Secure messaging tools typically implement group conversations by establishing pairwise instances of a two-party secure messaging protocol, which limits their scalability and makes them vulnerable to insider attacks by malicious members of the group. Insiders can often perform attacks such as rendering the group permanently unusable, causing the state of the group to diverge for the other participants, or covertly remaining in the group after appearing to leave. It is increasingly important to prevent these insider attacks as group conversations become larger, because there are more potentially malicious participants. This dissertation introduces several new protocols that can be used to build modern communication tools with strong security and privacy properties, including resistance to insider attacks. Firstly, the dissertation addresses a weakness in current two-party secure messaging tools: malicious participants can leak portions of a conversation alongside cryptographic proof of authorship, undermining confidentiality. The dissertation introduces two new authenticated key exchange protocols, DAKEZ and XZDH, with deniability properties that can prevent this type of attack when integrated into a secure messaging protocol. DAKEZ provides strong deniability in interactive settings such as instant messaging, while XZDH provides deniability for non-interactive settings such as mobile messaging. These protocols are accompanied by composable security proofs. Secondly, the dissertation introduces Safehouse, a new protocol that can be used to implement secure group messaging tools for a wide range of applications. Safehouse solves the difficult cryptographic problems at the core of secure group messaging protocol design: it securely establishes and manages a shared encryption key for the group and ephemeral signing keys for the participants. These keys can be used to build chat rooms, team communication servers, video conferencing tools, and more. Safehouse enables a server to detect and reject protocol deviations, while still providing end-to-end encryption. This allows an honest server to completely prevent insider attacks launched by malicious participants. A malicious server can still perform a denial-of-service attack that renders the group unavailable or "forks" the group into subgroups that can never communicate again, but other attacks are prevented, even if the server colludes with a malicious participant. In particular, an adversary controlling the server and one or more participants cannot cause honest participants' group states to diverge (even in subtle ways) without also permanently preventing them from communicating, nor can the adversary arrange to covertly remain in the group after all of the malicious participants under its control are removed from the group. Safehouse supports non-interactive communication, dynamic group membership, mass membership changes, an invitation system, and secure property storage, while offering a variety of configurable security properties including forward secrecy, post-compromise security, long-term identity authentication, strong deniability, and anonymity preservation. The dissertation includes a complete proof-of-concept implementation of Safehouse and a sample application with a graphical client. Two sub-protocols of independent interest are also introduced: a new cryptographic primitive that can encrypt multiple private keys to several sets of recipients in a publicly verifiable and repeatable manner, and a round-efficient interactive group key exchange protocol that can instantiate multiple shared key pairs with a configurable knowledge relationship

A non-interactive deniable authentication scheme based on designated verifier proofs

A deniable authentication protocol enables a receiver to identify the source of the given messages but unable to prove to a third party the identity of the sender. In recent years, several non-interactive deniable authentication schemes have been proposed in order to enhance efficiency. In this paper, we propose a security model for non-interactive deniable authentication schemes. Then a non-interactive deniable authentication scheme is presented based on designated verifier proofs. Furthermore, we prove the security of our scheme under the DDH assumption

Anonymous deniable predicate authentication scheme with revocability

In authentication protocols, anonymity is for privacy, while deniability is for anti-forensics after completion of the protocols. We propose a syntax and security definitions of an anonymous deniable predicate authentication scheme with revocability (rADPA). This new cryptographic primitive is to attain revocation function and strong privacy guarantee with predicate authentication, where a predicate is a boolean function over attributes of participants. We also give a generic construction of our rADPA scheme. Our approach is to build-in the revocable attribute-based encryption scheme proposed by K.Yamada et al. (ESORICS2017) into the anonymous deniable predicate authentication scheme proposed by S.Yamada et al. (PKC2012). Finally, we discuss how our rADPA scheme can be instantiated by employing concrete building blocks in our generic construction

On Provable Security for Complex Systems

We investigate the contribution of cryptographic proofs of security to a systematic security engineering process. To this end we study how to model and prove security for concrete applications in three practical domains: computer networks, data outsourcing, and electronic voting. We conclude that cryptographic proofs of security can benefit a security engineering process in formulating requirements, influencing design, and identifying constraints for the implementation

Remote electronic voting: studying and improving Helios

Dissertação de mestrado em Engenharia InformáticaA former North American President once said that the ballot is stronger than the bullet. In fact, the most civilized and organized way for a people express their opinion is by voting. However, there are people with bad intentions that affect voting and elections, being normal situations of coercion, collusion, fraud or forgery that disturb and cause alterations in the outcome of a vote. Thus, it becomes necessary to find ways to protect the voters, through vote secrecy and transparency, so that in end of a voting, democracy and justice prevail. Since the secret ballot papers until the electronic voting machines, passing through punched cards, technology in voting systems is evolving to ensure a greater security in elections, as well as greater efficiency, lower costs and other characteristics wanted in this type of systems. Nowadays, remote electronic voting is seen as the ultimate goal to achieve. The difficulty of developing such system is to ensure that it meets all the security requirements without infringing each other and without compromising the usability of the system itself. Thus, cryptography becomes an essential tool for obtaining security and integrity on electronic voting systems. This master thesis focuses on the world of electronic voting, in particular, the remote electronic voting. The objective is to find a system of this kind, with real world applications, to be studied and analyzed in a security point of view. Hence, we made a research on voting and, more deeply, a research on electronic voting schemes, in order to learn how to conceive it, which include the different stages that compose an election, types of voting and the entities involved, and what requirements to fulfill, both the security and functional. Because cryptography is used in most schemes, a detailed study was also performed on the primitives most common in protocols of electronic voting. However, there are not many schemes that pass from theory to practice. Fortunately, we found Helios, a well known scheme that implements various cryptographic techniques for everyone, under certain assumptions, be able to audit polls conducted with this system. A study was performed in order to explain how it was constructed and to identify its strengths and weaknesses. We also present some ongoing work by different people to improve Helios. Finally, we propose improvements on our own, to fight against coercion, to decrease the levels of assumptions and overcome corruption issues. Furthermore, we propose measures to protect the virtual voting booth and a mobile application to cast votes.Um antigo Presidente norte americano disse um dia que o voto é 'mais forte que a bala. De facto, a forma mais civilizada e organizada de um povo exprimir as suas opiniões é através de votações. Infelizmente, também este mundo é afectado por pessoas com más intenções, sendo normais as situações de coação, conluio, fraude ou falsificação que perturbam e causam alterações no resultado de urna votação. Assim, torna-se necessário arranjar formas de proteger os votantes, através de segredo de voto e transparência, de forma que, no final, a democracia e justiça de uma votação prevaleçam. Desde dos boletins de papel secreto até às máquinas de voto electrónico, passando pelas punched cards, a tecnologia em sistemas de votação vem evoluindo de modo a garantir uma maior segurança em eleições, assim como maior eficiência, menor custos e outras características que se querem neste tipo de sistemas. Nos dias de hoje, o voto electrónico remoto é visto como o grande objectivo a cumprir. A grande dificuldade de se desenvolver tal sistema é garantir que o sistema cumpra todos os requisitos de segurança sem que se violem entre si e sem que isso prejudique a usabilidade do sistema em si. Assim, a criptografia torna-se uma ferramenta essencial para se obter segurança e integridade em sistemas de voto electrónico. Esta tese de mestrado foca-se no mundo do voto electrónico, mais especificamente o voto electrónico remoto. O grande objectivo seria arranjar um sistema desse tipo, que tivesse aplicação real, para ser estudado e analisado do ponto de vista de segurança. Fez-se então uma pesquisa necessária sobre votações e, mais aprofundada, uma sobre esquemas de voto electrónico, de modo a aprender como se concebem, tanto as fases que a constituem como as entidades que normalmente fazem parte, e quais os requisitos a cumprir, tanto os funcionais como os de segurança. Como a criptografia entra em grande parte dos esquemas, também um estudo aprofundado foi realizado sobre as primitivas mais comuns em protocolos de voto electrónico. No entanto, não existem muitos esquemas que passem da teoria à prática. Felizmente, encontrou-se o Helios, um sistema que põe em prática diversas técnicas criptográficas para que qualquer pessoa, dentro de certas assumpções, possa auditar votações conduzidas por este sistema, ficando a privacidade nas mãos do Helios. Um estudo foi realizado de modo a explicar como foi construído e identificar os seus pontos fortes e fracos. Também são apresentados alguns trabalhos em curso sobre este sistema. Finalmente, propõem-se outros tipos de melhoramentos que visam: combater coação, diminuir o nível das assumpções e ultrapassar problemas de corrupção. Propõem-se ainda medidas para proteger a cabine virtual de votação e uma aplicação móvel