Computational and Energy Costs of Cryptographic Algorithms on Handheld Devices

Networks are evolving toward a ubiquitous model in which heterogeneous devices are interconnected. Cryptographic algorithms are required for developing security solutions that protect network activity. However, the computational and energy limitations of network devices jeopardize the actual implementation of such mechanisms. In this paper, we perform a wide analysis on the expenses of launching symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic algorithms, hash chain functions, elliptic curves cryptography and pairing based cryptography on personal agendas, and compare them with the costs of basic operating system functions. Results show that although cryptographic power costs are high and such operations shall be restricted in time, they are not the main limiting factor of the autonomy of a device

Privacy Preserving Cryptographic Protocols for Secure Heterogeneous Networks

Disertační práce se zabývá kryptografickými protokoly poskytující ochranu soukromí, které jsou určeny pro zabezpečení komunikačních a informačních systémů tvořících heterogenní sítě. Práce se zaměřuje především na možnosti využití nekonvenčních kryptografických prostředků, které poskytují rozšířené bezpečnostní požadavky, jako je například ochrana soukromí uživatelů komunikačního systému. V práci je stanovena výpočetní náročnost kryptografických a matematických primitiv na různých zařízeních, které se podílí na zabezpečení heterogenní sítě. Hlavní cíle práce se zaměřují na návrh pokročilých kryptografických protokolů poskytujících ochranu soukromí. V práci jsou navrženy celkově tři protokoly, které využívají skupinových podpisů založených na bilineárním párování pro zajištění ochrany soukromí uživatelů. Tyto navržené protokoly zajišťují ochranu soukromí a nepopiratelnost po celou dobu datové komunikace spolu s autentizací a integritou přenášených zpráv. Pro navýšení výkonnosti navržených protokolů je využito optimalizačních technik, např. dávkového ověřování, tak aby protokoly byly praktické i pro heterogenní sítě.The dissertation thesis deals with privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols for secure communication and information systems forming heterogeneous networks. The thesis focuses on the possibilities of using non-conventional cryptographic primitives that provide enhanced security features, such as the protection of user privacy in communication systems. In the dissertation, the performance of cryptographic and mathematic primitives on various devices that participate in the security of heterogeneous networks is evaluated. The main objectives of the thesis focus on the design of advanced privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols. There are three designed protocols which use pairing-based group signatures to ensure user privacy. These proposals ensure the protection of user privacy together with the authentication, integrity and non-repudiation of transmitted messages during communication. The protocols employ the optimization techniques such as batch verification to increase their performance and become more practical in heterogeneous networks.

CONSTRUCTION OF EFFICIENT AUTHENTICATION SCHEMES USING TRAPDOOR HASH FUNCTIONS

In large-scale distributed systems, where adversarial attacks can have widespread impact, authentication provides protection from threats involving impersonation of entities and tampering of data. Practical solutions to authentication problems in distributed systems must meet specific constraints of the target system, and provide a reasonable balance between security and cost. The goal of this dissertation is to address the problem of building practical and efficient authentication mechanisms to secure distributed applications. This dissertation presents techniques to construct efficient digital signature schemes using trapdoor hash functions for various distributed applications. Trapdoor hash functions are collision-resistant hash functions associated with a secret trapdoor key that allows the key-holder to find collisions between hashes of different messages. The main contributions of this dissertation are as follows: 1. A common problem with conventional trapdoor hash functions is that revealing a collision producing message pair allows an entity to compute additional collisions without knowledge of the trapdoor key. To overcome this problem, we design an efficient trapdoor hash function that prevents all entities except the trapdoor key-holder from computing collisions regardless of whether collision producing message pairs are revealed by the key-holder. 2. We design a technique to construct efficient proxy signatures using trapdoor hash functions to authenticate and authorize agents acting on behalf of users in agent-based computing systems. Our technique provides agent authentication, assurance of agreement between delegator and agent, security without relying on secure communication channels and control over an agent’s capabilities. 3. We develop a trapdoor hash-based signature amortization technique for authenticating real-time, delay-sensitive streams. Our technique provides independent verifiability of blocks comprising a stream, minimizes sender-side and receiver-side delays, minimizes communication overhead, and avoids transmission of redundant information. 4. We demonstrate the practical efficacy of our trapdoor hash-based techniques for signature amortization and proxy signature construction by presenting discrete log-based instantiations of the generic techniques that are efficient to compute, and produce short signatures. Our detailed performance analyses demonstrate that the proposed schemes outperform existing schemes in computation cost and signature size. We also present proofs for security of the proposed discrete-log based instantiations against forgery attacks under the discrete-log assumption

Secure Authentication and Privacy-Preserving Techniques in Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs)

In the last decade, there has been growing interest in Vehicular Ad Hoc NETworks (VANETs). Today car manufacturers have already started to equip vehicles with sophisticated sensors that can provide many assistive features such as front collision avoidance, automatic lane tracking, partial autonomous driving, suggestive lane changing, and so on. Such technological advancements are enabling the adoption of VANETs not only to provide safer and more comfortable driving experience but also provide many other useful services to the driver as well as passengers of a vehicle. However, privacy, authentication and secure message dissemination are some of the main issues that need to be thoroughly addressed and solved for the widespread adoption/deployment of VANETs. Given the importance of these issues, researchers have spent a lot of effort in these areas over the last decade. We present an overview of the following issues that arise in VANETs: privacy, authentication, and secure message dissemination. Then we present a comprehensive review of various solutions proposed in the last 10 years which address these issues. Our survey sheds light on some open issues that need to be addressed in the future

Personal Authentication System Based Iris Recognition with Digital Signature Technology

Authentication based on biometrics is being used to prevent physical access to high-security institutions. Recently, due to the rapid rise of information system technologies, Biometrics are now being used in applications for accessing databases and commercial workflow systems. These applications need to implement measures to counter security threats.  Many developers are exploring and developing novel authentication techniques to prevent these attacks. However, the most difficult problem is how to keep biometric data while maintaining the practical performance of identity verification systems. This paper presents a biometrics-based personal authentication system in which a smart card, a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), and iris verification technologies are combined. Raspberry Pi 4 Model B+ is used as the core of hardware components with an IR Camera. Following that idea, we designed an optimal image processing algorithm in OpenCV/ Python, Keras, and sci-kit learn libraries for feature extraction and recognition is chosen for application development in this project. The implemented system gives an accuracy of (97% and 100%) for the left and right (NTU) iris datasets respectively after training. Later, the person verification based on the iris feature is performed to verify the claimed identity and examine the system authentication. The time of key generation, Signature, and Verification is 5.17sec,0.288, and 0.056 respectively for the NTU iris dataset. This work offers the realistic architecture to implement identity-based cryptography with biometrics using the RSA algorithm

Enabling Machine-aided Cryptographic Design

The design of cryptographic primitives such as digital signatures and public-key encryption is very often a manual process conducted by expert cryptographers. This persists despite the fact that many new generic or semi-generic methods have been proposed to construct new primitives by transforming existing ones in interesting ways. However, manually applying transformations to existing primitives can be error-prone, ad-hoc and tedious. A natural question is whether automating the process of applying cryptographic transformations would yield competitive or better results? In this thesis, we explore a compiler-based approach for automatically performing certain cryptographic designs. Similar approaches have been applied to various types of cryptographic protocol design with compelling results. We extend this same approach and show that it also can be effective towards automatically applying cryptographic transformations. We first present our extensible architecture that automates a class of cryptographic transformations on primitives. We then propose several techniques that address the aforementioned question including the Charm cryptographic framework, which enables rapid prototyping of cryptographic primitives from abstract descriptions. We build on this work and show the extent to which transformations can be performed automatically given these descriptions. To illustrate this automation, we present a series of cryptographic tools that demonstrate the effectiveness of our automated approach. Our contributions are listed as follows: - AutoBatch: Batch verification is a transformation that improves signature verification time by efficiently processing many signatures at once. Historically, this manual process has been prone to error and tedious for practitioners. We describe the design of an automated tool that finds efficient batch verification algorithms from abstract descriptions of signature schemes. - AutoGroup: Cryptographers often prefer to describe their pairing-based constructions using symmetric group notation for simplicity, while they prefer asymmetric groups for implementation due to the efficiency gains. The symmetric- to-asymmetric translation is usually performed through manual analysis of a scheme and finding an efficient translation that suits applications can be quite challenging. We present an automated tool that uses SMT solvers to find efficient asymmetric translations from abstract descriptions of cryptographic schemes. - AutoStrong: Strongly unforgeable signatures are desired in practice for a variety of cryptographic protocols. Several transformations exist in the literature that show how to obtain strongly unforgeable signatures from existentially unforgeable ones. We focus on a particular highly-efficient transformation due to Boneh, Shen and Waters that is applicable if the signature satisfies a notion of partitioning. Checking for this property can be challenging and has been less explored in the literature. We present an automated tool that also utilizes SMT solvers to determine when this property is applicable for constructing efficient strongly unforgeable signatures from abstract descriptions. We anticipate that these proof-of-concept tools embody the notion that certain cryptographic transformations can be safely and effectively outsourced to machines

Performance Evaluation of Distributed Security Protocols Using Discrete Event Simulation

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that manages inter-domain routing on the Internet lacks security. Protective measures using public key cryptography introduce complexities and costs. To support authentication and other security functionality in large networks, we need public key infrastructures (PKIs). Protocols that distribute and validate certificates introduce additional complexities and costs. The certification path building algorithm that helps users establish trust on certificates in the distributed network environment is particularly complicated. Neither routing security nor PKI come for free. Prior to this work, the research study on performance issues of these large-scale distributed security systems was minimal. In this thesis, we evaluate the performance of BGP security protocols and PKI systems. We answer the questions about how the performance affects protocol behaviors and how we can improve the efficiency of these distributed protocols to bring them one step closer to reality. The complexity of the Internet makes an analytical approach difficult; and the scale of Internet makes empirical approaches also unworkable. Consequently, we take the approach of simulation. We have built the simulation frameworks to model a number of BGP security protocols and the PKI system. We have identified performance problems of Secure BGP (S-BGP), a primary BGP security protocol, and proposed and evaluated Signature Amortization (S-A) and Aggregated Path Authentication (APA) schemes that significantly improve efficiency of S-BGP without compromising security. We have also built a simulation framework for general PKI systems and evaluated certification path building algorithms, a critical part of establishing trust in Internet-scale PKI, and used this framework to improve algorithm performance

Authentication Protocols and Privacy Protection

Tato dizertační práce se zabývá kryptografickými prostředky pro autentizaci. Hlavním tématem však nejsou klasické autentizační protokoly, které nabízejí pouze ověření identity, ale tzv. atributové autentizační systémy, pomocí kterých mohou uživatelé prokazovat svoje osobní atributy. Tyto atributy pak mohou představovat jakékoliv osobní informace, např. věk, národnost či místo narození. Atributy mohou být prokazovány anonymně a s podporou mnoha funkcí na ochranu digitální identity. Mezi takové funkce patří např. nespojitelnost autentizačních relací, nesledovatelnost, možnost výběru prokazovaných atributů či efektivní revokace. Atributové autentizační systémy jsou již nyní považovány za nástupce současných systémů v oficiálních strategických plánech USA (NSTIC) či EU (ENISA). Část požadovaných funkcí je již podporována existujícími kryptografickými koncepty jako jsou U-Prove či idemix. V současné době však není známý systém, který by poskytoval všechny potřebné funkce na ochranu digitální identity a zároveň byl prakticky implementovatelný na zařízeních, jako jsou čipové karty. Mezi klíčové slabiny současných systémů patří především chybějící nespojitelnost relací a absence revokace. Není tak možné efektivně zneplatnit zaniklé uživatele, ztracené či ukradené autentizační karty či karty škodlivých uživatelů. Z těchto důvodů je v této práci navrženo kryptografické schéma, které řeší slabiny nalezené při analýze existujících řešení. Výsledné schéma, jehož návrh je založen na ověřených primitivech, jako jsou $\Sigma$-protokoly pro důkazy znalostí, kryptografické závazky či ověřitelné šifrování, pak podporuje všechny požadované vlastnosti pro ochranu soukromí a digitální identity. Zároveň je však návrh snadno implementovatelný v prostředí smart-karet. Tato práce obsahuje plný kryptografický návrh systému, formální ověření klíčových vlastností, matematický model schématu v programu Mathematica pro ověření funkčnosti a výsledky experimentální implementace v prostředí .NET smart-karet. I přesto, že navrhovaný systém obsahuje podporu všech funkcí na ochranu soukromí, včetně těch, které chybí u existujících systémů, jeho výpočetní složitost zůstává stejná či nižší, doba ověření uživatele je tedy kratší než u existujících systémů. Výsledkem je schéma, které může velmi znatelně zvýšit ochranu soukromí uživatelů při jejich ověřování, především při využití v elektronických dokladech, přístupových systémech či Internetových službách.This dissertation thesis deals with the cryptographic constructions for user authentication. Rather than classical authentication protocols which allow only the identity verification, the attribute authentication systems are the main topic of this thesis. The attribute authentication systems allow users to give proofs about the possession of personal attributes. These attributes can represent any personal information, for example age, nationality or birthplace. The attribute ownership can be proven anonymously and with the support of many features for digital identity protection. These features include, e.g., the unlinkability of verification sessions, untraceability, selective disclosure of attributes or efficient revocation. Currently, the attribute authentication systems are considered to be the successors of existing authentication systems by the official strategies of USA (NSTIC) and EU (ENISA). The necessary features are partially provided by existing cryptographic concepts like U-Prove and idemix. But at this moment, there is no system providing all privacy-enhancing features which is implementable on computationally restricted devices like smart-cards. Among all weaknesses of existing systems, the missing unlinkability of verification sessions and the absence of practical revocation are the most critical ones. Without these features, it is currently impossible to invalidate expired users, lost or stolen authentication cards and cards of malicious users. Therefore, a new cryptographic scheme is proposed in this thesis to fix the weaknesses of existing schemes. The resulting scheme, which is based on established primitives like $\Sigma$-protocols for proofs of knowledge, cryptographic commitments and verifiable encryption, supports all privacy-enhancing features. At the same time, the scheme is easily implementable on smart-cards. This thesis includes the full cryptographic specification, the formal verification of key properties, the mathematical model for functional verification in Mathematica software and the experimental implementation on .NET smart-cards. Although the scheme supports all privacy-enhancing features which are missing in related work, the computational complexity is the same or lower, thus the time of verification is shorter than in existing systems. With all these features and properties, the resulting scheme can significantly improve the privacy of users during their verification, especially when used in electronic ID systems, access systems or Internet services.