An efficient self-healing key distribution scheme

Self-healing key distribution schemes enable a group user to recover session keys from two broadcast messages he received before and after those sessions, even if the broadcast messages for the middle sessions are lost due to network failure. These schemes are quite suitable in supporting secure communication over unreliable networks such as sensor networks and ad hoc networks. An efficient self-healing key distribution scheme is proposed in this paper. The scheme bases on the concept of access polynomial and self-healing key distribution model constructed by Hong et al. The new scheme reduces communication and computation overheads greatly yet still keeps the constant storageoverhead

Cooperating broadcast and cellular conditional access system for digital television

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The lack of interoperability between Pay‐TV service providers and a horizontally integrated business transaction model have compromised the competition in the Pay‐TV market. In addition, the lack of interactivity with customers has resulted in high churn rate and improper security measures have contributed into considerable business loss. These issues are the main cause of high operational costs and subscription fees in the Pay‐TV systems. This paper presents a novel end‐to‐end system architecture for Pay‐TV systems cooperating mobile and broadcasting technologies. It provides a cost‐effective, scalable, dynamic and secure access control mechanism supporting converged services and new business opportunities in Pay‐TV systems. It enhances interactivity, security and potentially reduces customer attrition and operational cost. In this platform, service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalise their services and adopt appropriate security measures. It breaks up the rigid relationship between a viewer and set‐top box as imposed by traditional conditional access systems, thus, a viewer can fully enjoy his entitlements via an arbitrary set‐top box. Having thoroughly considered state‐of‐the‐art technologies currently being used across the world, the thesis highlights novel use cases and presents the full design and implementation aspects of the system. The design section is enriched by providing possible security structures supported thereby. A business collaboration structure is proposed, followed by a reference model for implementing the system. Finally, the security architectures are analysed to propose the best architecture on the basis of security, complexity and set‐top box production cost criteria

A practical key management and distribution system for IPTV conditional access

Conditional Access (CA) is widely used by pay-television operators to restrict access to content to authorised subscribers. Commercial CA solutions are available for structured broadcast and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) environments, as well as Internet-based video-on-demand services, however these solutions are mostly proprietary, often inefficient for use on IP networks, and frequently depend on smartcards for maintaining security. An efficient, exible, and open conditional access system that can be implemented practically by operators with large numbers of subscribers would be beneficial to those operators and Set-Top-Box manufacturers in terms of cost savings for royalties and production costs. Furthermore, organisations such as the South African Broadcasting Corporation that are transitioning to Digital-Terrestrial-Television could use an open Conditional Access System (CAS) to restrict content to viewing within national borders and to ensure that only valid TV licence holders are able to access content. To this end, a system was developed that draws from the area of group key management. Users are grouped according to their subscription selections and these groups are authorised for each selection's constituent services. Group keys are updated with a key-tree based approach that includes a novel method for growing full trees that outperforms the standard method. The relations that are created between key trees are used to establish a hierarchy of keys which allows exible selection of services whilst maintaining their cryptographic protection. Conditions for security without dependence on smartcards are defined, and the system is expandable to multi-home viewing scenarios. A prototype implementation was used to assess the proposed system. Total memory consumption of the key-server, bandwidth usage for transmission of key updates, and client processing and storage of keys were all demonstrated to be highly scalable with number of subscribers and number of services

CloudHKA: A Cryptographic Approach for Hierarchical Access Control in Cloud Computing

Cloud services are blooming recently. They provide a convenient way for data accessing, sharing, and processing. A key ingredient for successful cloud services is to control data access while considering the specific features of cloud services. The specific features include great quantity of outsourced data, large number of users, honest-but-curious cloud servers, frequently changed user set, dynamic access control policies, and data accessing for light-weight mobile devices. This paper addresses a cryptographic key assignment problem for enforcing a hierarchical access control policy over cloud data. We propose a new hierarchical key assignment scheme CloudHKA that observes the Bell- LaPadula security model and efficiently deals with the user revocation issue practically. We use CloudHKA to encrypt outsourced data so that the data are secure against honest-but- curious cloud servers. CloudHKA possesses almost all advantages of the related schemes, e.g., each user only needs to store one secret key, supporting dynamic user set and access hierarchy, and provably-secure against collusive attacks. In particular, CloudHKA provides the following distinct features that make it more suitable for controlling access of cloud data. (1) A user only needs a constant computation time for each data accessing. (2) The encrypted data are securely updatable so that the user revocation can prevent a revoked user from decrypting newly and previously encrypted data. Notably, the updates can be outsourced by using public information only. (3) CloudHKA is secure against the legal access attack. The attack is launched by an authorized, but malicious, user who pre-downloads the needed information for decrypting data ciphertexts in his authorization period. The user uses the pre-downloaded information for future decryption even after he is revoked. Note that the pre-downloaded information are often a small portion of encrypted data only, e.g. the header- cipher in a hybrid encrypted data ciphertext. (4) Each user can be flexibly authorized the access rights of Write or Read, or both

A key Management Scheme for Access Control to GNSS Services

Conditional access is a challenging problem in GNSS scenarios. Most key management schemes present in literature can not cope with all GNSS related issues, such as extremely low bandwidth, stateless receivers and the absence of an aiding channel. After assessing existing techniques, a novel key management scheme called RevHash has been devised with particular emphasis on guaranteeing revocation capabilities to the system, in order for it to be robust against anomalies and attacks

A policy-based security framework for ad-hoc networks

Imperial Users onl