A New Pairing-Free Certificateless Signcryption Scheme

Signcryption is a cryptographic primitive which provides unforgeability and confidentiality for digital communications. Many signcryption schemes have been constructed in the literature for secure communication between smart objects. But, many of these existing schemes are not secure and inefficient for resource constrained applications like WSNs, Mobile computing, VANETs and IoT applications. To enrich the security and efficiency issues, in this paper, we propose a new signcryption scheme in certificateless based framework and prove its security under the CDHP and ECDLP assumptions. The efficiency analysis indicates that our scheme is more efficient than other existing signcryption schemes and is well suitable for resource-constrained applications

A Comprehensive Survey on Signcryption Security Mechanisms in Wireless Body Area Networks

WBANs (Wireless Body Area Networks) are frequently depicted as a paradigm shift in healthcare from traditional to modern E-Healthcare. The vitals of the patient signs by the sensors are highly sensitive, secret, and vulnerable to numerous adversarial attacks. Since WBANs is a real-world application of the healthcare system, it’s vital to ensure that the data acquired by the WBANs sensors is secure and not accessible to unauthorized parties or security hazards. As a result, effective signcryption security solutions are required for the WBANs’ success and widespread use. Over the last two decades, researchers have proposed a slew of signcryption security solutions to achieve this goal. The lack of a clear and unified study in terms of signcryption solutions can offer a bird’s eye view of WBANs. Based on the most recent signcryption papers, we analyzed WBAN’s communication architecture, security requirements, and the primary problems in WBANs to meet the aforementioned objectives. This survey also includes the most up to date signcryption security techniques in WBANs environments. By identifying and comparing all available signcryption techniques in the WBANs sector, the study will aid the academic community in understanding security problems and causes. The goal of this survey is to provide a comparative review of the existing signcryption security solutions and to analyze the previously indicated solution given for WBANs. A multi-criteria decision-making approach is used for a comparative examination of the existing signcryption solutions. Furthermore, the survey also highlights some of the public research issues that researchers must face to develop the security features of WBANs.publishedVersio

PRACIS: Privacy-preserving and aggregatable cybersecurity information sharing

Cooperative cyberdefense has been recognized as an essential strategy to fight against cyberattacks. Cybersecurity Information Sharing (CIS), especially about threats and incidents, is a key aspect in this regard. CIS provides members with an improved situational awareness to prepare for and respond to future cyberthreats. Privacy preservation is critical in this context, since organizations can be reluctant to share information otherwise. This is particularly critical when CIS is facilitated through an untrusted infrastructure provided by a third party (e.g., the cloud). Despite this, current data formats and protocols for CIS do not guarantee any form of privacy preservation to participants. In this paper we introduce PRACIS, a scheme for CIS networks that guarantees private data forwarding and aggregation. PRACIS leverages the well-known Structured Threat Information Expression (STIX) standard data format. Remarkably, PRACIS can be seamlessly integrated with existing STIX-based message brokering middleware such as publish-subscribe architectures. PRACIS achieves these goals by combining standard format-preserving and homomorphic encryption primitives. We discuss experimental results obtained with a prototype implementation developed for a subset of STIX. Results show that entities may create up to 689 incidents per minute, far beyond the estimated average of 81. Moreover, aggregation of 104 incidents can be carried out in just 2.1 s, and the transmission overhead is just 13.5 kbps. Overall, these results suggest that the costs incurred by PRACIS are easily affordable in real-world scenarios.This work was partially supported by the MINECO grant TIN2013-46469-R (SPINY); the CAM grant S2013/ICE-3095 (CIBERDINE), which is co-funded by European FEDER; J. M. de Fuentes and L. Gonzalez were also supported by the Programa de Ayudas para la Movilidad of Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain

Securing internet of medical things with friendly-jamming schemes

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)-enabled e-healthcare can complement traditional medical treatments in a flexible and convenient manner. However, security and privacy become the main concerns of IoMT due to the limited computational capability, memory space and energy constraint of medical sensors, leading to the in-feasibility for conventional cryptographic approaches, which are often computationally-complicated. In contrast to cryptographic approaches, friendly jamming (Fri-jam) schemes will not cause extra computing cost to medical sensors, thereby becoming potential countermeasures to ensure security of IoMT. In this paper, we present a study on using Fri-jam schemes in IoMT. We first analyze the data security in IoMT and discuss the challenges. We then propose using Fri-jam schemes to protect the confidential medical data of patients collected by medical sensors from being eavesdropped. We also discuss the integration of Fri-jam schemes with various communication technologies, including beamforming, Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT) and full duplexity. Moreover, we present two case studies of Fri-jam schemes in IoMT. The results of these two case studies indicate that the Fri-jam method will significantly decrease the eavesdropping risk while leading to no significant influence on legitimate transmission

A blockchain-based Shamir's Threshold Cryptography Scheme for data protection in Industrial internet of Things settings

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), a typical Internet of Things (IoT) application, integrates the global industrial system with other advanced computing, analysis, and sensing technologies through Internet connectivity. Due to the limited storage and computing capacity of edge and IIoT devices, data sensed and collected by these devices are usually stored in the cloud. Encryption is commonly used to ensure privacy and confidentiality of IIoT data. However, the key used for data encryption and decryption is usually directly stored and managed by users or third-party organizations, which has security and privacy implications. To address this potential security and privacy risk, we propose a Shamir threshold cryptography scheme for IIoT data protection using blockchain: STCChain. Specifically, in our solution, the edge gateway uses a symmetric key to encrypt the data uploaded by the IoT device and stores it in the cloud. The symmetric key is protected by a private key generated by the edge gateway. To prevent the loss of the private key and privacy leakage, we use a Shamir secret sharing algorithm to divide the private key, encrypt it, and publish it on the blockchain. We implement a prototype of STCChain using Xuperchain, and the results show that STCChain can effectively prevent attackers from stealing data as well as ensuring the security of the encryption key

Biometric Cryptosystems : Authentication, Encryption and Signature for Biometric Identities

Biometrics have been used for secure identification and authentication for more than two decades since biometric data is unique, non-transferable, unforgettable, and always with us. Recently, biometrics has pervaded other aspects of security applications that can be listed under the topic of ``Biometric Cryptosystems''. Although the security of some of these systems is questionable when they are utilized alone, integration with other technologies such as digital signatures or Identity Based Encryption (IBE) schemes results in cryptographically secure applications of biometrics. It is exactly this field of biometric cryptosystems that we focused in this thesis. In particular, our goal is to design cryptographic protocols for biometrics in the framework of a realistic security model with a security reduction. Our protocols are designed for biometric based encryption, signature and remote authentication. We first analyze the recently introduced biometric remote authentication schemes designed according to the security model of Bringer et al.. In this model, we show that one can improve the database storage cost significantly by designing a new architecture, which is a two-factor authentication protocol. This construction is also secure against the new attacks we present, which disprove the claimed security of remote authentication schemes, in particular the ones requiring a secure sketch. Thus, we introduce a new notion called ``Weak-identity Privacy'' and propose a new construction by combining cancelable biometrics and distributed remote authentication in order to obtain a highly secure biometric authentication system. We continue our research on biometric remote authentication by analyzing the security issues of multi-factor biometric authentication (MFBA). We formally describe the security model for MFBA that captures simultaneous attacks against these systems and define the notion of user privacy, where the goal of the adversary is to impersonate a client to the server. We design a new protocol by combining bipartite biotokens, homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs and provide a security reduction to achieve user privacy. The main difference of this MFBA protocol is that the server-side computations are performed in the encrypted domain but without requiring a decryption key for the authentication decision of the server. Thus, leakage of the secret key of any system component does not affect the security of the scheme as opposed to the current biometric systems involving cryptographic techniques. We also show that there is a tradeoff between the security level the scheme achieves and the requirement for making the authentication decision without using any secret key. In the second part of the thesis, we delve into biometric-based signature and encryption schemes. We start by designing a new biometric IBS system that is based on the currently most efficient pairing based signature scheme in the literature. We prove the security of our new scheme in the framework of a stronger model compared to existing adversarial models for fuzzy IBS, which basically simulates the leakage of partial secret key components of the challenge identity. In accordance with the novel features of this scheme, we describe a new biometric IBE system called as BIO-IBE. BIO-IBE differs from the current fuzzy systems with its key generation method that not only allows for a larger set of encryption systems to function for biometric identities, but also provides a better accuracy/identification of the users in the system. In this context, BIO-IBE is the first scheme that allows for the use of multi-modal biometrics to avoid collision attacks. Finally, BIO-IBE outperforms the current schemes and for small-universe of attributes, it is secure in the standard model with a better efficiency compared to its counterpart. Another contribution of this thesis is the design of biometric IBE systems without using pairings. In fact, current fuzzy IBE schemes are secure under (stronger) bilinear assumptions and the decryption of each message requires pairing computations almost equal to the number of attributes defining the user. Thus, fuzzy IBE makes error-tolerant encryption possible at the expense of efficiency and security. Hence, we design a completely new construction for biometric IBE based on error-correcting codes, generic conversion schemes and weakly secure anonymous IBE schemes that encrypt a message bit by bit. The resulting scheme is anonymous, highly secure and more efficient compared to pairing-based biometric IBE, especially for the decryption phase. The security of our generic construction is reduced to the security of the anonymous IBE scheme, which is based on the Quadratic Residuosity assumption. The binding of biometric features to the user's identity is achieved similar to BIO-IBE, thus, preserving the advantages of its key generation procedure

Revealing the Landscape of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies in the Context of Data Markets for the IoT: A Systematic Literature Review

IoT data markets in public and private institutions have become increasingly relevant in recent years because of their potential to improve data availability and unlock new business models. However, exchanging data in markets bears considerable challenges related to disclosing sensitive information. Despite considerable research focused on different aspects of privacy-enhancing data markets for the IoT, none of the solutions proposed so far seems to find a practical adoption. Thus, this study aims to organize the state-of-the-art solutions, analyze and scope the technologies that have been suggested in this context, and structure the remaining challenges to determine areas where future research is required. To accomplish this goal, we conducted a systematic literature review on privacy enhancement in data markets for the IoT, covering 50 publications dated up to July 2020, and provided updates with 24 publications dated up to May 2022. Our results indicate that most research in this area has emerged only recently, and no IoT data market architecture has established itself as canonical. Existing solutions frequently lack the required combination of anonymization and secure computation technologies. Furthermore, there is no consensus on the appropriate use of blockchain technology for IoT data markets and a low degree of leveraging existing libraries or reusing generic data market architectures. We also identified significant challenges remaining, such as the copy problem and the recursive enforcement problem that-while solutions have been suggested to some extent-are often not sufficiently addressed in proposed designs. We conclude that privacy-enhancing technologies need further improvements to positively impact data markets so that, ultimately, the value of data is preserved through data scarcity and users' privacy and businesses-critical information are protected.Comment: 49 pages, 17 figures, 11 table

Security architecture for Fog-To-Cloud continuum system

Nowadays, by increasing the number of connected devices to Internet rapidly, cloud computing cannot handle the real-time processing. Therefore, fog computing was emerged for providing data processing, filtering, aggregating, storing, network, and computing closer to the users. Fog computing provides real-time processing with lower latency than cloud. However, fog computing did not come to compete with cloud, it comes to complete the cloud. Therefore, a hierarchical Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) continuum system was introduced. The F2C system brings the collaboration between distributed fogs and centralized cloud. In F2C systems, one of the main challenges is security. Traditional cloud as security provider is not suitable for the F2C system due to be a single-point-of-failure; and even the increasing number of devices at the edge of the network brings scalability issues. Furthermore, traditional cloud security cannot be applied to the fog devices due to their lower computational power than cloud. On the other hand, considering fog nodes as security providers for the edge of the network brings Quality of Service (QoS) issues due to huge fog device’s computational power consumption by security algorithms. There are some security solutions for fog computing but they are not considering the hierarchical fog to cloud characteristics that can cause a no-secure collaboration between fog and cloud. In this thesis, the security considerations, attacks, challenges, requirements, and existing solutions are deeply analyzed and reviewed. And finally, a decoupled security architecture is proposed to provide the demanded security in hierarchical and distributed fashion with less impact on the QoS.Hoy en día, al aumentar rápidamente el número de dispositivos conectados a Internet, el cloud computing no puede gestionar el procesamiento en tiempo real. Por lo tanto, la informática de niebla surgió para proporcionar procesamiento de datos, filtrado, agregación, almacenamiento, red y computación más cercana a los usuarios. La computación nebulizada proporciona procesamiento en tiempo real con menor latencia que la nube. Sin embargo, la informática de niebla no llegó a competir con la nube, sino que viene a completar la nube. Por lo tanto, se introdujo un sistema continuo jerárquico de niebla a nube (F2C). El sistema F2C aporta la colaboración entre las nieblas distribuidas y la nube centralizada. En los sistemas F2C, uno de los principales retos es la seguridad. La nube tradicional como proveedor de seguridad no es adecuada para el sistema F2C debido a que se trata de un único punto de fallo; e incluso el creciente número de dispositivos en el borde de la red trae consigo problemas de escalabilidad. Además, la seguridad tradicional de la nube no se puede aplicar a los dispositivos de niebla debido a su menor poder computacional que la nube. Por otro lado, considerar los nodos de niebla como proveedores de seguridad para el borde de la red trae problemas de Calidad de Servicio (QoS) debido al enorme consumo de energía computacional del dispositivo de niebla por parte de los algoritmos de seguridad. Existen algunas soluciones de seguridad para la informática de niebla, pero no están considerando las características de niebla a nube jerárquica que pueden causar una colaboración insegura entre niebla y nube. En esta tesis, las consideraciones de seguridad, los ataques, los desafíos, los requisitos y las soluciones existentes se analizan y revisan en profundidad. Y finalmente, se propone una arquitectura de seguridad desacoplada para proporcionar la seguridad exigida de forma jerárquica y distribuida con menor impacto en la QoS.Postprint (published version

Secure data sharing in cloud computing: a comprehensive review

Cloud Computing is an emerging technology, which relies on sharing computing resources. Sharing of data in the group is not secure as the cloud provider cannot be trusted. The fundamental difficulties in distributed computing of cloud suppliers is Data Security, Sharing, Resource scheduling and Energy consumption. Key-Aggregate cryptosystem used to secure private/public data in the cloud. This key is consistent size aggregate for adaptable decisions of ciphertext in cloud storage. Virtual Machines (VMs) provisioning is effectively empowered the cloud suppliers to effectively use their accessible resources and get higher benefits. The most effective method to share information resources among the individuals from the group in distributed storage is secure, flexible and efficient. Any data stored in different cloud data centers are corrupted, recovery using regenerative coding. Security is provided many techniques like Forward security, backward security, Key-Aggregate cryptosystem, Encryption and Re-encryption etc. The energy is reduced using Energy-Efficient Virtual Machines Scheduling in Multi-Tenant Data Centers