Still Wrong Use of Pairings in Cryptography

Several pairing-based cryptographic protocols are recently proposed with a wide variety of new novel applications including the ones in emerging technologies like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), e-health systems and wearable technologies. There have been however a wide range of incorrect use of these primitives. The paper of Galbraith, Paterson, and Smart (2006) pointed out most of the issues related to the incorrect use of pairing-based cryptography. However, we noticed that some recently proposed applications still do not use these primitives correctly. This leads to unrealizable, insecure or too inefficient designs of pairing-based protocols. We observed that one reason is not being aware of the recent advancements on solving the discrete logarithm problems in some groups. The main purpose of this article is to give an understandable, informative, and the most up-to-date criteria for the correct use of pairing-based cryptography. We thereby deliberately avoid most of the technical details and rather give special emphasis on the importance of the correct use of bilinear maps by realizing secure cryptographic protocols. We list a collection of some recent papers having wrong security assumptions or realizability/efficiency issues. Finally, we give a compact and an up-to-date recipe of the correct use of pairings.Comment: 25 page

Securing Communication in the IoT-based Health Care Systems

Rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) and its whole ecosystems are opening a lot of opportunities that can improve humans' quality of life in many aspects. One of the promising area where IoT can enhance our life is in the health care sector. However, security and privacy becomes the main concern in the electronic Health (eHealth) systems and it becomes more challenging with the integration of IoT. Furthermore, most of the IoT-based health care system architecture is designed to be cross-organizational due to many different stakeholders in its overall ecosystems – thus increasing the security complexity. There are several aspects of security in the IoT-based health care system, among them are key management, authentication and encryption/decryption to ensure secure communication and access to health sensing information. This paper introduces a key management method that includes mutual authentication and secret key agreement to establish secure communication between any IoT health device with any entity from different organization or domain through Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC)

Achieving Secure and Efficient Cloud Search Services: Cross-Lingual Multi-Keyword Rank Search over Encrypted Cloud Data

Multi-user multi-keyword ranked search scheme in arbitrary language is a novel multi-keyword rank searchable encryption (MRSE) framework based on Paillier Cryptosystem with Threshold Decryption (PCTD). Compared to previous MRSE schemes constructed based on the k-nearest neighbor searcha-ble encryption (KNN-SE) algorithm, it can mitigate some draw-backs and achieve better performance in terms of functionality and efficiency. Additionally, it does not require a predefined keyword set and support keywords in arbitrary languages. However, due to the pattern of exact matching of keywords in the new MRSE scheme, multilingual search is limited to each language and cannot be searched across languages. In this pa-per, we propose a cross-lingual multi-keyword rank search (CLRSE) scheme which eliminates the barrier of languages and achieves semantic extension with using the Open Multilingual Wordnet. Our CLRSE scheme also realizes intelligent and per-sonalized search through flexible keyword and language prefer-ence settings. We evaluate the performance of our scheme in terms of security, functionality, precision and efficiency, via extensive experiments

A Study on Sanctuary and Seclusion Issues in Internet-of-Things

Internet-of-Things (IoT) are everywhere in our daily life. They are used in our homes, in hospitals, deployed outside to control and report the changes in environment, prevent fires, and many more beneficial functionality. However, all those benefits can come of huge risks of seclusion loss and sanctuary issues. To secure the IoT devices, many research works have been con-ducted to countermeasure those problems and find a better way to eliminate those risks, or at least minimize their effects on the user�s seclusion and sanctuary requirements. The study consists of four segments. The first segment will explore the most relevant limitations of IoT devices and their solutions. The second one will present the classification of IoT attacks. The next segment will focus on the mechanisms and architectures for authentication and access control. The last segment will analyze the sanctuary issues in different layers

Vehicular Internet: Security & Privacy Challenges and Opportunities

The vehicular internet will drive the future of vehicular technology and intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Whether it is road safety, infotainment, or driver-less cars, the vehicular internet will lay the foundation for the future of road travel. Governments and companies are pursuing driver-less vehicles as they are considered to be more reliable than humans and, therefore, safer. The vehicles today are not just a means of transportation but are also equipped with a wide range of sensors that provide valuable data. If vehicles are enabled to share data that they collect with other vehicles or authorities for decision-making and safer driving, they thereby form a vehicular network. However, there is a lot at stake in vehicular networks if they are compromised. With the stakes so high, it is imperative that the vehicular networks are secured and made resilient to any attack or attempt that may have serious consequences. The vehicular internet can also be the target of a cyber attack, which can be devastating. In this paper, the opportunities that the vehicular internet offers are presented and then various security and privacy aspects are discussed and some solutions are presented

A secure IoT cloud storage system with fine-grained access control and decryption key exposure resistance

Internet of Things (IoT) cloud provides a practical and scalable solution to accommodate the data management in large-scale IoT systems by migrating the data storage and management tasks to cloud service providers (CSPs). However, there also exist many data security and privacy issues that must be well addressed in order to allow the wide adoption of the approach. To protect data confidentiality, attribute-based cryptosystems have been proposed to provide fine-grained access control over encrypted data in IoT cloud. Unfortunately, the existing attributed-based solutions are still insufficient in addressing some challenging security problems, especially when dealing with compromised or leaked user secret keys due to different reasons. In this paper, we present a practical attribute-based access control system for IoT cloud by introducing an efficient revocable attribute-based encryption scheme that permits the data owner to efficiently manage the credentials of data users. Our proposed system can efficiently deal with both secret key revocation for corrupted users and accidental decryption key exposure for honest users. We analyze the security of our scheme with formal proofs, and demonstrate the high performance of the proposed system via experiments