Biometric identity-based cryptography for e-Government environment

Government information is a vital asset that must be kept in a trusted environment and efficiently managed by authorised parties. Even though e-Government provides a number of advantages, it also introduces a range of new security risks. Sharing confidential and top-secret information in a secure manner among government sectors tend to be the main element that government agencies look for. Thus, developing an effective methodology is essential and it is a key factor for e-Government success. The proposed e-Government scheme in this paper is a combination of identity-based encryption and biometric technology. This new scheme can effectively improve the security in authentication systems, which provides a reliable identity with a high degree of assurance. In addition, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of using Finite-state machines as a formal method to analyse the proposed protocols

Modelling and simulation of a biometric identity-based cryptography

Government information is a vital asset that must be kept in a trusted environment and efficiently managed by authorised parties. Even though e-Government provides a number of advantages, it also introduces a range of new security risks. Sharing confidential and top-secret information in a secure manner among government sectors tend to be the main element that government agencies look for. Thus, developing an effective methodology is essential and it is a key factor for e-Government success. The proposed e-Government scheme in this paper is a combination of identity-based encryption and biometric technology. This new scheme can effectively improve the security in authentication systems, which provides a reliable identity with a high degree of assurance. In addition, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of using Finite-state machines as a formal method to analyse the proposed protocols

Some Implementation Issues for Security Services based on IBE

Identity Based Encryption (IBE) is a public key cryptosystem where a unique identity string, such as an e-mail address, can be used as a public key. IBE is simpler than the traditional PKI since certificates are not needed. An IBE scheme is usually based on pairing of discrete points on elliptic curves. An IBE scheme can also be based on quadratic residuosity. This paper presents an overview of these IBE schemes and surveys present IBE based security services. Private key management is described in detail with protocols to authenticate users of Private Key Generation Authorities (PKG), to protect submission of generated private keys, and to avoid the key escrow problem. In the security service survey IBE implementations for smartcards, for smart phones, for security services in mobile networking, for security services in health care information systems, for secure web services, and for grid network security are presented. Also the performance of IBE schemes is estimated

A Survey of Lightweight Cryptosystems for Smart Home Devices

A Smart Home uses interconnected network technology to monitor the environment, control the various physical appliances, and communicate with each other in a close environment. A typical smart home is made up of a security system, intercommunication system, lighting system, and ventilation system.  Data security schemes for smart homes are ineffective due to inefficiency cryptosystems, high energy consumption, and low exchange security. Traditional cryptosystems are less-applicable because of their large block size, large key size, and complex rounds. This paper conducts a review of smart homes, and adopts Ultra-Sooner Lightweight Cryptography to secure home door. It provides extensive background of cryptography, forms of cryptography as associated issues and strengths, current trends, smart home door system design, and future works suggestions. Specifically, there are prospects of utilizing XORed lightweight cryptosystem for developing encryption and decryption algorithms in smart home devices. The Substitution Permutation Network, and Feistel Network cryptographic primitives were most advanced forms of cipher operations with security guarantees. Therefore, better security, memory and energy efficiency can be obtained with lightweight ciphers in smart home devices when compared to existing solutions. In the subsequent studies, a blockchain-based lightweight cryptography can be the next springboard in attaining the most advanced security for smart home systems and their appliances.     &nbsp

A novel symmetric image cryptosystem resistant to noise perturbation based on S8 elliptic curve S-boxes and chaotic maps

The recent decade has seen a tremendous escalation of multimedia and its applications. These modern applications demand diverse security requirements and innovative security platforms. In this manuscript, we proposed an algorithm for image encryption applications. The core structure of this algorithm relies on confusion and diffusion operations. The confusion is mainly done through the application of the elliptic curve and S8 symmetric group. The proposed work incorporates three distinct chaotic maps. A detailed investigation is presented to analyze the behavior of chaos for secure communication. The chaotic sequences are then accordingly applied to the proposed algorithm. The modular approach followed in the design framework and integration of chaotic maps into the system makes the algorithm viable for a variety of image encryption applications. The resiliency of the algorithm can further be enhanced by increasing the number of rounds and S-boxes deployed. The statistical findings and simulation results imply that the algorithm is resistant to various attacks. Moreover, the algorithm satisfies all major performance and quality metrics. The encryption scheme can also resist channel noise as well as noise-induced by a malicious user. The decryption is successfully done for noisy data with minor distortions. The overall results determine that the proposed algorithm contains good cryptographic properties and low computational complexity makes it viable to low profile applications

Privacy-preserving biometric matching using homomorphic encryption

Biometric matching involves storing and processing sensitive user information. Maintaining the privacy of this data is thus a major challenge, and homomorphic encryption offers a possible solution. We propose a privacy-preserving biometrics-based authentication protocol based on fully homomorphic encryption, where the biometric sample for a user is gathered by a local device but matched against a biometric template by a remote server operating solely on encrypted data. The design ensures that 1) the user's sensitive biometric data remains private, and 2) the user and client device are securely authenticated to the server. A proof-of-concept implementation building on the TFHE library is also presented, which includes the underlying basic operations needed to execute the biometric matching. Performance results from the implementation show how complex it is to make FHE practical in this context, but it appears that, with implementation optimisations and improvements, the protocol could be used for real-world applications

Inapplicability of Differential Fault Attacks against Cellular Automata based Lightweight Authenticated Cipher

Authenticated encryption (AE) schemes are a necessity to secure the physical devices connected to the Internet. Two AE schemes, TinyJambu and Elephant, are finalists of NIST lightweight cryptography competition. Another AE scheme, ACORN v3, a CAESAR competition finalist, has been shown to be particularly vulnerable against Differential Fault Attack (DFA), even more than its previous version ACORN v2. TinyJambu is also susceptible to DFA. An optimized interpolation attack has been proposed against one instance of Elephant, Delirium, recently. We propose methods to strengthen these schemes using the Cellular Automata (CA) and increase their resistance to these attacks. The Programmable Cellular Automata (PCA) 90-150 is effectively deployed to make these ciphers robust against DFA. We also provide mathematical analysis of the invigorated schemes and show that significant improvement is achieved in all the three enhanced schemes

Post-Quantum Elliptic Curve Cryptography

We propose and develop new schemes for post-quantum cryptography based on isogenies over elliptic curves. First we show that ordinary elliptic curves are have less than exponential security against quantum computers. These results were used as the motivation for De Feo, Jao and Pl\^ut's construction of public key cryptosystems using supersingular elliptic curve isogenies. We extend their construction and show that isogenies between supersingular elliptic curves can be used as the underlying hard mathematical problem for other quantum-resistant schemes. For our second contribution, we propose is an undeniable signature scheme based on elliptic curve isogenies. We prove its security under certain reasonable number-theoretic computational assumptions for which no efficient quantum algorithms are known. This proposal represents only the second known quantum-resistant undeniable signature scheme, and the first such scheme secure under a number-theoretic complexity assumption. Finally, we also propose a security model for evaluating the security of authenticated encryption schemes in the post-quantum setting. Our model is based on a combination of the classical Bellare-Namprempre security model for authenticated encryption together with modifications from Boneh and Zhandry to handle message authentication against quantum adversaries. We give a generic construction based on Bellare-Namprempre for producing an authenticated encryption protocol from any quantum-resistant symmetric-key encryption scheme together with any digital signature scheme or MAC admitting any classical security reduction to a quantum-computationally hard problem. We apply the results and show how we can explicitly construct authenticated encryption schemes based on isogenies

Cloud-based Quadratic Optimization with Partially Homomorphic Encryption

The development of large-scale distributed control systems has led to the outsourcing of costly computations to cloud-computing platforms, as well as to concerns about privacy of the collected sensitive data. This paper develops a cloud-based protocol for a quadratic optimization problem involving multiple parties, each holding information it seeks to maintain private. The protocol is based on the projected gradient ascent on the Lagrange dual problem and exploits partially homomorphic encryption and secure multi-party computation techniques. Using formal cryptographic definitions of indistinguishability, the protocol is shown to achieve computational privacy, i.e., there is no computationally efficient algorithm that any involved party can employ to obtain private information beyond what can be inferred from the party's inputs and outputs only. In order to reduce the communication complexity of the proposed protocol, we introduced a variant that achieves this objective at the expense of weaker privacy guarantees. We discuss in detail the computational and communication complexity properties of both algorithms theoretically and also through implementations. We conclude the paper with a discussion on computational privacy and other notions of privacy such as the non-unique retrieval of the private information from the protocol outputs

Society-oriented cryptographic techniques for information protection

Groups play an important role in our modern world. They are more reliable and more trustworthy than individuals. This is the reason why, in an organisation, crucial decisions are left to a group of people rather than to an individual. Cryptography supports group activity by offering a wide range of cryptographic operations which can only be successfully executed if a well-defined group of people agrees to co-operate. This thesis looks at two fundamental cryptographic tools that are useful for the management of secret information. The first part looks in detail at secret sharing schemes. The second part focuses on society-oriented cryptographic systems, which are the application of secret sharing schemes in cryptography. The outline of thesis is as follows