Towards Forward Secure Internet Traffic

Forward Secrecy (FS) is a security property in key-exchange algorithms which guarantees that a compromise in the secrecy of a long-term private-key does not compromise the secrecy of past session keys. With a growing awareness of long-term mass surveillance programs by governments and others, FS has become widely regarded as a highly desirable property. This is particularly true in the TLS protocol, which is used to secure Internet communication. In this paper, we investigate FS in pre-TLS 1.3 protocols, which do not mandate FS, but still widely used today. We conduct an empirical analysis of over 10 million TLS servers from three different datasets using a novel heuristic approach. Using a modern TLS client handshake algorithms, our results show 5.37% of top domains, 7.51% of random domains, and 26.16% of random IPs do not select FS key-exchange algorithms. Surprisingly, 39.20% of the top domains, 24.40% of the random domains, and 14.46% of the random IPs that do not select FS, do support FS. In light of this analysis, we discuss possible paths toward forward secure Internet traffic. As an improvement of the current state, we propose a new client-side mechanism that we call "Best Effort Forward Secrecy" (BEFS), and an extension of it that we call "Best Effort Forward Secrecy and Authenticated Encryption" (BESAFE), which aims to guide (force) misconfigured servers to FS using a best effort approach. Finally, within our analysis, we introduce a novel adversarial model that we call "discriminatory" adversary, which is applicable to the TLS protocol

On the Relations Between Diffie-Hellman and ID-Based Key Agreement from Pairings

This paper studies the relationships between the traditional Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol and the identity-based (ID-based) key agreement protocol from pairings. For the Sakai-Ohgishi-Kasahara (SOK) ID-based key construction, we show that identical to the Diffie-Hellman protocol, the SOK key agreement protocol also has three variants, namely \emph{ephemeral}, \emph{semi-static} and \emph{static} versions. Upon this, we build solid relations between authenticated Diffie-Hellman (Auth-DH) protocols and ID-based authenticated key agreement (IB-AK) protocols, whereby we present two \emph{substitution rules} for this two types of protocols. The rules enable a conversion between the two types of protocols. In particular, we obtain the \emph{real} ID-based version of the well-known MQV (and HMQV) protocol. Similarly, for the Sakai-Kasahara (SK) key construction, we show that the key transport protocol underlining the SK ID-based encryption scheme (which we call the "SK protocol") has its non-ID counterpart, namely the Hughes protocol. Based on this observation, we establish relations between corresponding ID-based and non-ID-based protocols. In particular, we propose a highly enhanced version of the McCullagh-Barreto protocol

Security and privacy aspects of mobile applications for post-surgical care

Mobile technologies have the potential to improve patient monitoring, medical decision making and in general the efficiency and quality of health delivery. They also pose new security and privacy challenges. The objectives of this work are to (i) Explore and define security and privacy requirements on the example of a post-surgical care application, and (ii) Develop and test a pilot implementation Post-Surgical Care Studies of surgical out- comes indicate that timely treatment of the most common complications in compliance with established post-surgical regiments greatly improve success rates. The goal of our pilot application is to enable physician to optimally synthesize and apply patient directed best medical practices to prevent post-operative complications in an individualized patient/procedure specific fashion. We propose a framework for a secure protocol to enable doctors to check most common complications for their patient during in-hospital post- surgical care. We also implemented our construction and cryptographic protocols as an iPhone application on the iOS using existing cryptographic services and libraries