Still Wrong Use of Pairings in Cryptography

Several pairing-based cryptographic protocols are recently proposed with a wide variety of new novel applications including the ones in emerging technologies like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), e-health systems and wearable technologies. There have been however a wide range of incorrect use of these primitives. The paper of Galbraith, Paterson, and Smart (2006) pointed out most of the issues related to the incorrect use of pairing-based cryptography. However, we noticed that some recently proposed applications still do not use these primitives correctly. This leads to unrealizable, insecure or too inefficient designs of pairing-based protocols. We observed that one reason is not being aware of the recent advancements on solving the discrete logarithm problems in some groups. The main purpose of this article is to give an understandable, informative, and the most up-to-date criteria for the correct use of pairing-based cryptography. We thereby deliberately avoid most of the technical details and rather give special emphasis on the importance of the correct use of bilinear maps by realizing secure cryptographic protocols. We list a collection of some recent papers having wrong security assumptions or realizability/efficiency issues. Finally, we give a compact and an up-to-date recipe of the correct use of pairings.Comment: 25 page

Aggregatable Certificateless Designated Verifier Signature

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become increasingly deployed in many industries and generated a large amount of data that needs to be processed in a timely and efficient manner. Using aggregate signatures, it provides a secure and efficient way to handle large numbers of digital signatures with the same message. Recently, the privacy issue has been concerned about the topic of data sharing on the cloud. To provide the integrity, authenticity, authority, and privacy on the data sharing in the cloud storage, the notion of an aggregatable certificateless designated verifier signature scheme (ACLDVS) was proposed. ACLDVS also is a perfect tool to enable efficient privacy-preserving authentication systems for IoT and or the vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). Our concrete scheme was proved to be secured underling of the Computational Diffie-Hellman assumption. Compared to other related schemes, our scheme is efficient, and the signature size is considerably short

APEX2S: A Two-Layer Machine Learning Model for Discovery of host-pathogen protein-protein Interactions on Cloud-based Multiomics Data

Presented by the avalanche of biological interactions data, computational biology is now facing greater challenges on big data analysis and solicits more studies to mine and integrate cloud-based multiomics data, especially when the data are related to infectious diseases. Meanwhile, machine learning techniques have recently succeeded in different computational biology tasks. In this article, we have calibrated the focus for host-pathogen protein-protein interactions study, aiming to apply the machine learning techniques for learning the interactions data and making predictions. A comprehensive and practical workflow to harness different cloud-based multiomics data is discussed. In particular, a novel two-layer machine learning model, namely APEX2S, is proposed for discovery of the protein-protein interactions data. The results show that our model can better learn and predict from the accumulated host-pathogen protein-protein interactions

A supplement to Liu et al.\u27s certificateless signcryption scheme in the standard model

Recently, Liu et al. proposed the first certificateless signcryption scheme without random oracles and proved it was semantically secure in the standard model. However, Selvi et al. launched a fatal attack to its confidentiality by replacing users\u27 public keys, thus pointed out this scheme actually doesn\u27t reach the semantic security as claimed. In this paper, we come up with a rescue scheme based on Liu et al.\u27s original proposal. A Schnorr-based one-time signature is added to each user\u27s public key, which is used to resist Selvi et al.\u27s attack. In addition, according to the mistake made in Liu et al.\u27s security proof, we also show that our improvement is really secure in the standard model under the intractability of the decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption

An enhanced certificateless cryptosystem for mobile ad hoc networks

Due to the importance of security in many critical applications in MANETs and the limitation of the resources in mobile devices, it is important to have lightweight cryptosystems. Although some lightweight certificateless cryptosystems for MANETs have been proposed, it is possible to improve them in the term of reducing the complexity of the computations. In this paper, we have tried to propose a lightweight certificateless public key cryptographic scheme based on bilinear pairings. In addition, we compared our proposed scheme with other existing certificateless pairing based and result shows that the proposed scheme is more efficient based on computational cost and the rate of growth of computational expense viewpoints

Research on security and privacy in vehicular ad hoc networks

Los sistemas de redes ad hoc vehiculares (VANET) tienen como objetivo proporcionar una plataforma para diversas aplicaciones que pueden mejorar la seguridad vial, la eficiencia del tráfico, la asistencia a la conducción, la regulación del transporte, etc. o que pueden proveer de una mejor información y entretenimiento a los usuarios de los vehículos. Actualmente se está llevando a cabo un gran esfuerzo industrial y de investigación para desarrollar un mercado que se estima alcance en un futuro varios miles de millones de euros. Mientras que los enormes beneficios que se esperan de las comunicaciones vehiculares y el gran número de vehículos son los puntos fuertes de las VANET, su principal debilidad es la vulnerabilidad a los ataques contra la seguridad y la privacidad.En esta tesis proponemos cuatro protocolos para conseguir comunicaciones seguras entre vehículos. En nuestra primera propuesta empleamos a todas las unidades en carretera (RSU) para mantener y gestionar un grupo en tiempo real dentro de su rango de comunicación. Los vehículos que entren al grupo de forma anónima pueden emitir mensajes vehículo a vehículo (V2V) que inmediatamente pueden ser verificados por los vehículos del mismo grupo (y grupos de vecinos). Sin embargo, en la primera fase del despliegue de este sistema las RSU pueden no estar bien distribuídas. Consecuentemente, se propone un conjunto de mecanismos para hacer frente a la seguridad, privacidad y los requisitos de gestión de una VANET a gran escala sin la suposición de que las RSU estén densamente distribuidas. La tercera propuesta se centra principalmente en la compresión de las evidencias criptográficas que nos permitirán demostrar, por ejemplo, quien era el culpable en caso de accidente. Por último, investigamos los requisitos de seguridad de los sistemas basados en localización (LBS) sobre VANETs y proponemos un nuevo esquema para la preservación de la privacidad de la localización en estos sistemas sobre dichas redes.Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) systems aim at providing a platform for various applications that can improve traffic safety and efficiency, driver assistance, transportation regulation, infotainment, etc. There is substantial research and industrial effort to develop this market. It is estimated that the market for vehicular communications will reach several billion euros. While the tremendous benefits expected from vehicular communications and the huge number of vehicles are strong points of VANETs, their weakness is vulnerability to attacks against security and privacy.In this thesis, we propose four protocols for secure vehicle communications. In our first proposal, we employ each road-side unit (RSU) to maintain and manage an on-the-fly group within its communication range. Vehicles entering the group can anonymously broadcast vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) messages, which can be instantly verified by the vehicles in the same group (and neighbor groups). However, at the early stage of VANET deployment, the RSUs may not be well distributed. We then propose a set of mechanisms to address the security, privacy, and management requirements of a large-scale VANET without the assumption of densely distributed RSUs. The third proposal is mainly focused on compressing cryptographic witnesses in VANETs. Finally, we investigate the security requirements of LBS in VANETs and propose a new privacy-preserving LBS scheme for those networks