Survey on Lightweight Primitives and Protocols for RFID in Wireless Sensor Networks

The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies is becoming widespread in all kind of wireless network-based applications. As expected, applications based on sensor networks, ad-hoc or mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can be highly benefited from the adoption of RFID solutions. There is a strong need to employ lightweight cryptographic primitives for many security applications because of the tight cost and constrained resource requirement of sensor based networks. This paper mainly focuses on the security analysis of lightweight protocols and algorithms proposed for the security of RFID systems. A large number of research solutions have been proposed to implement lightweight cryptographic primitives and protocols in sensor and RFID integration based resource constraint networks. In this work, an overview of the currently discussed lightweight primitives and their attributes has been done. These primitives and protocols have been compared based on gate equivalents (GEs), power, technology, strengths, weaknesses and attacks. Further, an integration of primitives and protocols is compared with the possibilities of their applications in practical scenarios

Study of imperfect keys to characterise the security of optical encryption

In conventional symmetric encryption, it is common for the encryption/decryption key to be reused for multiple plaintexts. This gives rise to the concept of a known-plaintext attack. In optical image encryption systems, such as double random phase encoding (DRPE), this is also the case; if one knows a plaintext-ciphertext pair, one can carry out a known-plaintext attack more efficiently than a brute-force attack, using heuristics based on phase retrieval or simulated annealing. However, we demonstrate that it is likely that an attacker will find an imperfect decryption key using such heuristics. Such an imperfect key will work for the known plaintext-ciphertext pair, but not an arbitrary unseen plaintext-ciphertext pair encrypted using the original key. In this paper, we illustrate the problem and attempt to characterise the increase in security it affords optical encryption

Study of imperfect keys to characterise the security of optical encryption

In conventional symmetric encryption, it is common for the encryption/decryption key to be reused for multiple plaintexts. This gives rise to the concept of a known-plaintext attack. In optical image encryption systems, such as double random phase encoding (DRPE), this is also the case; if one knows a plaintext-ciphertext pair, one can carry out a known-plaintext attack more efficiently than a brute-force attack, using heuristics based on phase retrieval or simulated annealing. However, we demonstrate that it is likely that an attacker will find an imperfect decryption key using such heuristics. Such an imperfect key will work for the known plaintext-ciphertext pair, but not an arbitrary unseen plaintext-ciphertext pair encrypted using the original key. In this paper, we illustrate the problem and attempt to characterise the increase in security it affords optical encryption

Analysis and Design Security Primitives Based on Chaotic Systems for eCommerce

Security is considered the most important requirement for the success of electronic commerce, which is built based on the security of hash functions, encryption algorithms and pseudorandom number generators. Chaotic systems and security algorithms have similar properties including sensitivity to any change or changes in the initial parameters, unpredictability, deterministic nature and random-like behaviour. Several security algorithms based on chaotic systems have been proposed; unfortunately some of them were found to be insecure and/or slow. In view of this, designing new secure and fast security algorithms based on chaotic systems which guarantee integrity, authentication and confidentiality is essential for electronic commerce development. In this thesis, we comprehensively explore the analysis and design of security primitives based on chaotic systems for electronic commerce: hash functions, encryption algorithms and pseudorandom number generators. Novel hash functions, encryption algorithms and pseudorandom number generators based on chaotic systems for electronic commerce are proposed. The securities of the proposed algorithms are analyzed based on some well-know statistical tests in this filed. In addition, a new one-dimensional triangle-chaotic map (TCM) with perfect chaotic behaviour is presented. We have compared the proposed chaos-based hash functions, block cipher and pseudorandom number generator with well-know algorithms. The comparison results show that the proposed algorithms are better than some other existing algorithms. Several analyses and computer simulations are performed on the proposed algorithms to verify their characteristics, confirming that these proposed algorithms satisfy the characteristics and conditions of security algorithms. The proposed algorithms in this thesis are high-potential for adoption in e-commerce applications and protocols

Data Leak Detection As a Service: Challenges and Solutions

We describe a network-based data-leak detection (DLD) technique, the main feature of which is that the detection does not require the data owner to reveal the content of the sensitive data. Instead, only a small amount of specialized digests are needed. Our technique – referred to as the fuzzy fingerprint – can be used to detect accidental data leaks due to human errors or application flaws. The privacy-preserving feature of our algorithms minimizes the exposure of sensitive data and enables the data owner to safely delegate the detection to others.We describe how cloud providers can offer their customers data-leak detection as an add-on service with strong privacy guarantees. We perform extensive experimental evaluation on the privacy, efficiency, accuracy and noise tolerance of our techniques. Our evaluation results under various data-leak scenarios and setups show that our method can support accurate detection with very small number of false alarms, even when the presentation of the data has been transformed. It also indicates that the detection accuracy does not degrade when partial digests are used. We further provide a quantifiable method to measure the privacy guarantee offered by our fuzzy fingerprint framework

Efficient public-key cryptography with bounded leakage and tamper resilience

We revisit the question of constructing public-key encryption and signature schemes with security in the presence of bounded leakage and tampering memory attacks. For signatures we obtain the first construction in the standard model; for public-key encryption we obtain the first construction free of pairing (avoiding non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs). Our constructions are based on generic building blocks, and, as we show, also admit efficient instantiations under fairly standard number-theoretic assumptions. The model of bounded tamper resistance was recently put forward by Damgård et al. (Asiacrypt 2013) as an attractive path to achieve security against arbitrary memory tampering attacks without making hardware assumptions (such as the existence of a protected self-destruct or key-update mechanism), the only restriction being on the number of allowed tampering attempts (which is a parameter of the scheme). This allows to circumvent known impossibility results for unrestricted tampering (Gennaro et al., TCC 2010), while still being able to capture realistic tampering attack