2,532 research outputs found
FriendlyMail: Confidential and Verified Emails among Friends
Despite being one of the most basic and popular Internet applications, email still largely lacks user-to-user cryptographic protections. From a research perspective, designing privacy-preserving techniques for email services is complicated by the requirement of balancing security and ease-of-use needs of everyday users. For example, users cannot be expected to manage long-term keys (e.g., PGP key-pair), or understand crypto primitives. To enable intuitive email protections for a large number of users, we design FriendlyMail by leveraging existing relationships between a sender and receiver on an online social networking (OSN) site. FriendlyMail can pro- vide integrity, authentication and confidentiality guarantees for user-selected messages among OSN friends. A confidentiality-protected email is encrypted by a randomly-generated key, and the key and hash of the encrypted content are privately shared with the receiver via the OSN site. Our implementation consists of a Firefox addon and a Facebook app, and can secure the web-based Gmail service using Facebook as the OSN site; the addon is available at: https://madiba.encs.concordia.ca/software/friendlymail/. However, the design can be implemented for preferred email/OSN services as long as the email and OSN providers are non-colluding parties. FriendlyMail is a client-end solution and does not require changes to email or OSN servers. In contrast to most other solutions, we limit our target user base to existing OSN users, to facilitate ease of adoption. In this paper, the focus of our discussion includes: the design, implementation and security analysis of the proposed solution. We acknowledge that a user study will be required to validate usability-related features of FriendlyMail. We are currently considering a comprehensive user study as separate future work; cf. past such studies of PGP (Whitten and Tygar, USENIX Security 1999), S/MIME (Garfinkel and Miller, SOUPS 2005)
e-SAFE: Secure, Efficient and Forensics-Enabled Access to Implantable Medical Devices
To facilitate monitoring and management, modern Implantable Medical Devices
(IMDs) are often equipped with wireless capabilities, which raise the risk of
malicious access to IMDs. Although schemes are proposed to secure the IMD
access, some issues are still open. First, pre-sharing a long-term key between
a patient's IMD and a doctor's programmer is vulnerable since once the doctor's
programmer is compromised, all of her patients suffer; establishing a temporary
key by leveraging proximity gets rid of pre-shared keys, but as the approach
lacks real authentication, it can be exploited by nearby adversaries or through
man-in-the-middle attacks. Second, while prolonging the lifetime of IMDs is one
of the most important design goals, few schemes explore to lower the
communication and computation overhead all at once. Finally, how to safely
record the commands issued by doctors for the purpose of forensics, which can
be the last measure to protect the patients' rights, is commonly omitted in the
existing literature. Motivated by these important yet open problems, we propose
an innovative scheme e-SAFE, which significantly improves security and safety,
reduces the communication overhead and enables IMD-access forensics. We present
a novel lightweight compressive sensing based encryption algorithm to encrypt
and compress the IMD data simultaneously, reducing the data transmission
overhead by over 50% while ensuring high data confidentiality and usability.
Furthermore, we provide a suite of protocols regarding device pairing,
dual-factor authentication, and accountability-enabled access. The security
analysis and performance evaluation show the validity and efficiency of the
proposed scheme
Public Evidence from Secret Ballots
Elections seem simple---aren't they just counting? But they have a unique,
challenging combination of security and privacy requirements. The stakes are
high; the context is adversarial; the electorate needs to be convinced that the
results are correct; and the secrecy of the ballot must be ensured. And they
have practical constraints: time is of the essence, and voting systems need to
be affordable and maintainable, and usable by voters, election officials, and
pollworkers. It is thus not surprising that voting is a rich research area
spanning theory, applied cryptography, practical systems analysis, usable
security, and statistics. Election integrity involves two key concepts:
convincing evidence that outcomes are correct and privacy, which amounts to
convincing assurance that there is no evidence about how any given person
voted. These are obviously in tension. We examine how current systems walk this
tightrope.Comment: To appear in E-Vote-Id '1
SoK: Cryptographically Protected Database Search
Protected database search systems cryptographically isolate the roles of
reading from, writing to, and administering the database. This separation
limits unnecessary administrator access and protects data in the case of system
breaches. Since protected search was introduced in 2000, the area has grown
rapidly; systems are offered by academia, start-ups, and established companies.
However, there is no best protected search system or set of techniques.
Design of such systems is a balancing act between security, functionality,
performance, and usability. This challenge is made more difficult by ongoing
database specialization, as some users will want the functionality of SQL,
NoSQL, or NewSQL databases. This database evolution will continue, and the
protected search community should be able to quickly provide functionality
consistent with newly invented databases.
At the same time, the community must accurately and clearly characterize the
tradeoffs between different approaches. To address these challenges, we provide
the following contributions:
1) An identification of the important primitive operations across database
paradigms. We find there are a small number of base operations that can be used
and combined to support a large number of database paradigms.
2) An evaluation of the current state of protected search systems in
implementing these base operations. This evaluation describes the main
approaches and tradeoffs for each base operation. Furthermore, it puts
protected search in the context of unprotected search, identifying key gaps in
functionality.
3) An analysis of attacks against protected search for different base
queries.
4) A roadmap and tools for transforming a protected search system into a
protected database, including an open-source performance evaluation platform
and initial user opinions of protected search.Comment: 20 pages, to appear to IEEE Security and Privac
Usability and Trust in Information Systems
The need for people to protect themselves and their assets is as old as humankind. People's physical safety and their possessions have always been at risk from deliberate attack or accidental damage. The advance of information technology means that many individuals, as well as corporations, have an additional range of physical (equipment) and electronic (data) assets that are at risk. Furthermore, the increased number and types of interactions in cyberspace has enabled new forms of attack on people and their possessions. Consider grooming of minors in chat-rooms, or Nigerian email cons: minors were targeted by paedophiles before the creation of chat-rooms, and Nigerian criminals sent the same letters by physical mail or fax before there was email. But the technology has decreased the cost of many types of attacks, or the degree of risk for the attackers. At the same time, cyberspace is still new to many people, which means they do not understand risks, or recognise the signs of an attack, as readily as they might in the physical world. The IT industry has developed a plethora of security mechanisms, which could be used to mitigate risks or make attacks significantly more difficult. Currently, many people are either not aware of these mechanisms, or are unable or unwilling or to use them. Security experts have taken to portraying people as "the weakest link" in their efforts to deploy effective security [e.g. Schneier, 2000]. However, recent research has revealed at least some of the problem may be that security mechanisms are hard to use, or be ineffective. The review summarises current research on the usability of security mechanisms, and discusses options for increasing their usability and effectiveness
Smart cards: State-of-the-art to future directions
The evolution of smart card technology provides an interesting case study of the relationship and interactions between security and business requirements. This paper maps out the milestones for smart card technology, discussing at each step the opportunities and challenges. The paper reviews recently proposed innovative ownership/management models and the security challenges associated with them. The paper concludes with a discussion of possible future directions for the technology, and the challenges these present
Challenges in using cryptography - End-user and developer perspectives
"Encryption is hard for everyone" is a prominent result of the security and privacy research to date. Email users struggle to encrypt their email, and institutions fail to roll out secure communication via email. Messaging users fail to understand through which most secure channel to send their most sensitive messages, and developers struggle with implementing cryptography securely.
To better understand how to support actors along the pipeline of developing, implementing, deploying, and using cryptography effectively, I leverage the human factor to understand their challenges and needs, as well as opportunities for support.
To support research in better understanding developers, I created a tool to remotely conduct developer studies, specifically with the goal of better understanding the implementation of cryptography. The tool was successfully used for several published developers studies.
To understand the institutional rollout of cryptography, I analyzed the email history of the past 27 years at Leibniz University Hannover and measured the usage of email encryption, finding that email encryption and signing is hardly used even in an institution with its own certificate authority. Furthermore, the usage of multiple email clients posed a significant challenge for users when using S/MIME and PGP.
To better understand and support end users, I conducted several studies with different text disclosures, icons, and animations to find out if users can be convinced to communicate via their secure messengers instead of switching to insecure alternatives. I found that users notice texts and animations, but their security perception did not change much between texts and visuals, as long as any information about encryption is shown.
In this dissertation, I investigated how to support researchers in conducting research with developers; I established that usability is one of the major factors in allowing developers to implement the functions of cryptographic libraries securely; I conducted the first large scale analysis of encrypted email, finding that, again, usability challenges can hamper adoption; finally, I established that the encryption of a channel can be effectively communicated to end users.
In order to roll out secure use of cryptography to the masses, adoption needs to be usable on many levels. Developers need to be able to securely implement cryptography, and user communication needs to be either encrypted by default, and users need to be able to easily understand which communication' encryption protects them from whom. I hope that, with this dissertation, I show that, with supporting humans along the pipeline of cryptography, better security can be achieved for all
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