The challeges in implementing security in spontaneous ad hoc networks

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETS) promise much in the ability to rapidly deploy a wireless network in a fashion where no prior planning is needed and the network can be running efficiently and with high security within minutes. Natural disaster response, military, education and business provide areas where MANETS can offer significant advantages in communication where infrastructure networks may take days to set up or may be impossible to implement. This research reviews a selection of MANET protocols to show the progression of the research and the issues that are yet to be addressed. It discusses the challenges to researchers in improving ad hoc schemes to the point where they work in theory and in practice. Areas are highlighted that pose the most significant challenges to developing new security protocols and some food-for-thought is given for those who wish to contribute to this growing area of importance for wireless communication

Flexible Framework for Secret Handshakes (Multi-Party Anonymous and Un-observable Authentication)

In the society increasingly concerned with the erosion of privacy, privacy-preserving techniques are becoming very important. This motivates research in cryptographic techniques offering built-in privacy. A secret handshake is a protocol whereby participants establish a secure, anonymous and unobservable communication channel only if they are members of the same group. This type of ``private authentication is a valuable tool in the arsenal of privacy-preserving cryptographic techniques. Prior research focused on 2-party secret handshakes with one-time credentials. This paper breaks new ground on two accounts: (1) it shows how to obtain secure and efficient secret handshakes with reusable credentials, and (2) it represents the first treatment of group (or {\em multi-party}) secret handshakes, thus providing a natural extension to the secret handshake technology. An interesting new issue encountered in multi-party secret handshakes is the need to ensure that all parties are indeed distinct. (This is a real challenge since the parties cannot expose their identities.) We tackle this and other challenging issues in constructing GCD -- a flexible framework for secret handshakes. The proposed framework lends itself to many practical instantiations and offers several novel and appealing features such as self-distinction and strong anonymity with reusable credentials. In addition to describing the motivation and step-by-step construction of the framework, this paper provides a thorough security analysis and illustrates two concrete framework instantiations

Layered identity infrastructure model for identity meta systems

There are several Identity Meta Systems emerging in the identity management field, such as CardSpace and Higgins Trust Framework. The goal of an Identity Meta System (IMetS) is to integrate existing or new Identity Management System (IMS) to provide users with seamless interoperability and a consistent user experience. IMetS is a complex system that tries to integrate the already complicated IMS services. With such a complex system, we need a way to assess IMetS in order to determine how well an IMetS integrates the various IMS services. However, as IMetS is a rela- tively new concept, there is no framework to identify the properties that an ideal IMetS should have. The contribution of this paper is to introduce the Layered Identity Infrastructure Model (LIIM) that can be used as a framework to assess IMetS. In addition, the LIIM framework can also be used to identify the missing components of an IMetS, to guide and improve the design of an existing IMetS, to serve as a design benchmark for a new IMetS, as well as to aid the understanding of a complicated IMetS

An embedded sensor node microcontroller with crypto-processors

Wireless sensor network applications range from industrial automation and control, agricultural and environmental protection, to surveillance and medicine. In most applications, data are highly sensitive and must be protected from any type of attack and abuse. Security challenges in wireless sensor networks are mainly defined by the power and computing resources of sensor devices, memory size, quality of radio channels and susceptibility to physical capture. In this article, an embedded sensor node microcontroller designed to support sensor network applications with severe security demands is presented. It features a low power 16-bitprocessor core supported by a number of hardware accelerators designed to perform complex operations required by advanced crypto algorithms. The microcontroller integrates an embedded Flash and an 8-channel 12-bit analog-to-digital converter making it a good solution for low-power sensor nodes. The article discusses the most important security topics in wireless sensor networks and presents the architecture of the proposed hardware solution. Furthermore, it gives details on the chip implementation, verification and hardware evaluation. Finally, the chip power dissipation and performance figures are estimated and analyzed

Toward Mending Two Nation-Scale Brokered Identification Systems.

Available online public/governmental services requiring authentication by citizens have considerably expanded in recent years. This has hindered the usability and security associated with credential management by users and service providers. To address the problem, some countries have proposed nation-scale identification/authentication systems that intend to greatly reduce the burden of credential management, while seemingly offering desirable privacy benefits. In this paper we analyze two such systems: the Federal Cloud Credential Exchange (FCCX) in the United States and GOV.UK Verify in the United Kingdom, which altogether aim at serving more than a hundred million citizens. Both systems propose a brokered identification architecture, where an online central hub mediates user authentications between identity providers and service providers. We show that both FCCX and GOV.UK Verify suffer from serious privacy and security shortcomings, fail to comply with privacy-preserving guidelines they are meant to follow, and may actually degrade user privacy. Notably, the hub can link interactions of the same user across different service providers and has visibility over private identifiable information of citizens. In case of malicious compromise it is also able to undetectably impersonate users. Within the structural design constraints placed on these nation-scale brokered identification systems, we propose feasible technical solutions to the privacy and security issues we identified. We conclude with a strong recommendation that FCCX and GOV.UK Verify be subject to a more in-depth technical and public review, based on a defined and comprehensive threat model, and adopt adequate structural adjustments

Securing clouds using cryptography and traffic classification

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. Over the last decade, cloud computing has gained popularity and wide acceptance, especially within the health sector where it offers several advantages such as low costs, flexible processes, and access from anywhere. Although cloud computing is widely used in the health sector, numerous issues remain unresolved. Several studies have attempted to review the state of the art in eHealth cloud privacy and security however, some of these studies are outdated or do not cover certain vital features of cloud security and privacy such as access control, revocation and data recovery plans. This study targets some of these problems and proposes protocols, algorithms and approaches to enhance the security and privacy of cloud computing with particular reference to eHealth clouds. Chapter 2 presents an overview and evaluation of the state of the art in eHealth security and privacy. Chapter 3 introduces different research methods and describes the research design methodology and processes used to carry out the research objectives. Of particular importance are authenticated key exchange and block cipher modes. In Chapter 4, a three-party password-based authenticated key exchange (TPAKE) protocol is presented and its security analysed. The proposed TPAKE protocol shares no plaintext data; all data shared between the parties are either hashed or encrypted. Using the random oracle model (ROM), the security of the proposed TPAKE protocol is formally proven based on the computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption. Furthermore, the analysis included in this chapter shows that the proposed protocol can ensure perfect forward secrecy and resist many kinds of common attacks such as man-in-the-middle attacks, online and offline dictionary attacks, replay attacks and known key attacks. Chapter 5 proposes a parallel block cipher (PBC) mode in which blocks of cipher are processed in parallel. The results of speed performance tests for this PBC mode in various settings are presented and compared with the standard CBC mode. Compared to the CBC mode, the PBC mode is shown to give execution time savings of 60%. Furthermore, in addition to encryption based on AES 128, the hash value of the data file can be utilised to provide an integrity check. As a result, the PBC mode has a better speed performance while retaining the confidentiality and security provided by the CBC mode. Chapter 6 applies TPAKE and PBC to eHealth clouds. Related work on security, privacy preservation and disaster recovery are reviewed. Next, two approaches focusing on security preservation and privacy preservation, and a disaster recovery plan are proposed. The security preservation approach is a robust means of ensuring the security and integrity of electronic health records and is based on the PBC mode, while the privacy preservation approach is an efficient authentication method which protects the privacy of personal health records and is based on the TPAKE protocol. A discussion about how these integrated approaches and the disaster recovery plan can ensure the reliability and security of cloud projects follows. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are the second most common cybercrime attacks after information theft. The timely detection and prevention of such attacks in cloud projects are therefore vital, especially for eHealth clouds. Chapter 7 presents a new classification system for detecting and preventing DDoS TCP flood attacks (CS_DDoS) for public clouds, particularly in an eHealth cloud environment. The proposed CS_DDoS system offers a solution for securing stored records by classifying incoming packets and making a decision based on these classification results. During the detection phase, CS_DDOS identifies and determines whether a packet is normal or from an attacker. During the prevention phase, packets classified as malicious are denied access to the cloud service, and the source IP is blacklisted. The performance of the CS_DDoS system is compared using four different classifiers: a least-squares support vector machine (LS-SVM), naïve Bayes, K-nearest-neighbour, and multilayer perceptron. The results show that CS_DDoS yields the best performance when the LS-SVM classifier is used. This combination can detect DDoS TCP flood attacks with an accuracy of approximately 97% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.89 when under attack from a single source, and 94% accuracy and a Kappa coefficient of 0.9 when under attack from multiple attackers. These results are then discussed in terms of the accuracy and time complexity, and are validated using a k-fold cross-validation model. Finally, a method to mitigate DoS attacks in the cloud and reduce excessive energy consumption through managing and limiting certain flows of packets is proposed. Instead of a system shutdown, the proposed method ensures the availability of service. The proposed method manages the incoming packets more effectively by dropping packets from the most frequent requesting sources. This method can process 98.4% of the accepted packets during an attack. Practicality and effectiveness are essential requirements of methods for preserving the privacy and security of data in clouds. The proposed methods successfully secure cloud projects and ensure the availability of services in an efficient way