Optimizing Key Management within a Crypto-System using Aggregate Keys

Sharing data with peers is an important functionality in cloud storage. This is a study and analysis of secure, efficient, and flexible sharing of data with other users in cloud storage. The new public key encryptions which produce constant-size ciphertexts in such a way that effective delegation of decryption rights given to any set of ciphertexts are described in this paper. The novelty of the mechanism is that someone can aggregate any number of secret keys and turn them into a small single key, but combine the power of all the keys being grouped. To describe, in other words, the secret key holder could release a constant-size aggregate key for more flexible choices of ciphertext set in cloud storage, but different encrypted files outside of the set remain confidential. The aggregate compact key can be sent to others with ease or saved in a smart card with very less secure storage. In this paper, we discuss various such mechanisms and demonstrate the topic with a project. Some of the papers written by other authors in the area are analyzed in this paper. The project in this paper is a partial implementation of the proposed Crypto System

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

Exclusion-intersection encryption

Identity-based encryption (IBE) has shown to be a useful cryptographic scheme enabling secure yet flexible role-based access control. We propose a new variant of IBE named as exclusion-intersection encryption: during encryption, the sender can specify the targeted groups that are legitimate and interested in reading the documents; there exists a trusted key generation centre generating the intersection private decryption keys on request. This special private key can only be used to decrypt the ciphertext which is of all the specified groups' interests, its holders are excluded from decrypting when the documents are not targeted to all these groups (e.g., the ciphertext of only a single group's interest). While recent advances in cryptographic techniques (e.g., attribute-based encryption or wicked IBE) can support a more general access control policy, the private key size may be as long as the number of attributes or identifiers that can be specified in a ciphertext, which is undesirable, especially when each user may receive a number of such keys for different decryption power. One of the applications of our notion is to support an ad-hoc joint project of two or more groups which needs extra helpers that are not from any particular group. © 2011 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 1st IEEE International Workshop on Security in Computers, Networking and Communications (SCNC 2011) in conjuntion with IEEE INFOCOM 2011, Shanghai, China, 10-15 April 2011. In Conference Proceedings of INFOCOM WKSHPS, 2011, p. 1048-1053The 1st IEEE International Workshop on Security in Computers, Networking and Communications (SCNC 2011) in conjuntion with IEEE INFOCOM 2011, Shanghai, China, 10-15 April 2011. In Conference Proceedings of INFOCOM WKSHPS, 2011, p. 1048-105

An Identity-Based Group Signature with Membership Revocation in the Standard Model

Group signatures allow group members to sign an arbitrary number\ud of messages on behalf of the group without revealing their\ud identity. Under certain circumstances the group manager holding a\ud tracing key can reveal the identity of the signer from the\ud signature. Practical group signature schemes should support\ud membership revocation where the revoked member loses the\ud capability to sign a message on behalf of the group without\ud influencing the other non-revoked members. A model known as\ud \emph{verifier-local revocation} supports membership revocation.\ud In this model the trusted revocation authority sends revocation\ud messages to the verifiers and there is no need for the trusted\ud revocation authority to contact non-revoked members to update\ud their secret keys. Previous constructions of verifier-local\ud revocation group signature schemes either have a security proof in the\ud random oracle model or are non-identity based. A security proof\ud in the random oracle model is only a heuristic proof and\ud non-identity-based group signature suffer from standard Public Key\ud Infrastructure (PKI) problems, i.e. the group public key is not\ud derived from the group identity and therefore has to be certified.\ud \ud \ud In this work we construct the first verifier-local revocation group\ud signature scheme which is identity-based and which has a security proof in the standard model. In\ud particular, we give a formal security model for the proposed\ud scheme and prove that the scheme has the\ud property of selfless-anonymity under the decision Linear (DLIN)\ud assumption and it is fully-traceable under the\ud Computation Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption. The proposed scheme is based on prime order bilinear\ud groups

Theory and Applications of Outsider Anonymity in Broadcast Encryption

Broadcast Encryption (BE) allows efficient one-to-many secret communication of data over a broadcast channel. In the standard setting of BE, information about receivers is transmitted in the clear together with ciphertexts. This could be a serious violation of recipient privacy since the identities of the users authorized to access the secret content in certain broadcast scenarios are as sensitive as the content itself. Anonymous Broadcast Encryption (AnoBe) prevents this leakage of recipient identities from ciphertexts but at a cost of a linear lower bound (in the number of receivers) on the length of ciphertexts. A linear ciphertext length is a highly undesirable bottleneck in any large-scale broadcast application. In this thesis, we propose a less stringent yet very meaningful notion of anonymity for anonymous broadcast encryption called Outsider-Anonymous Broadcast Encryption (oABE) that allows the creation of ciphertexts that are sublinear in the number of receivers. We construct several oABE schemes with varying security guarantees and levels of efficiency. We also present two very interesting cryptographic applications afforded by the efficiency of our oABE schemes. The first is Broadcast Steganography (BS), the extension of the state of the art setting of point-to-point steganography to the multi-recipient setting. The second is Oblivious Group Storage (OGS), the introduction of fine-grained data access control policies to the setting of multi-client oblivious cloud storage protocols

KeyForge: Mitigating Email Breaches with Forward-Forgeable Signatures

Email breaches are commonplace, and they expose a wealth of personal, business, and political data that may have devastating consequences. The current email system allows any attacker who gains access to your email to prove the authenticity of the stolen messages to third parties -- a property arising from a necessary anti-spam / anti-spoofing protocol called DKIM. This exacerbates the problem of email breaches by greatly increasing the potential for attackers to damage the users' reputation, blackmail them, or sell the stolen information to third parties. In this paper, we introduce "non-attributable email", which guarantees that a wide class of adversaries are unable to convince any third party of the authenticity of stolen emails. We formally define non-attributability, and present two practical system proposals -- KeyForge and TimeForge -- that provably achieve non-attributability while maintaining the important protection against spam and spoofing that is currently provided by DKIM. Moreover, we implement KeyForge and demonstrate that that scheme is practical, achieving competitive verification and signing speed while also requiring 42% less bandwidth per email than RSA2048

Short Group Signatures via Structure-Preserving Signatures: Standard Model Security from Simple Assumptions

International audienceGroup signatures are a central cryptographic primitive which allows users to sign messages while hiding their identity within a crowd of group members. In the standard model (without the random oracle idealization), the most efficient constructions rely on the Groth-Sahai proof systems (Euro-crypt'08). The structure-preserving signatures of Abe et al. (Asiacrypt'12) make it possible to design group signatures based on well-established, constant-size number theoretic assumptions (a.k.a. " simple assumptions ") like the Symmetric eXternal Diffie-Hellman or Decision Linear assumptions. While much more efficient than group signatures built on general assumptions, these constructions incur a significant overhead w.r.t. constructions secure in the idealized random oracle model. Indeed, the best known solution based on simple assumptions requires 2.8 kB per signature for currently recommended parameters. Reducing this size and presenting techniques for shorter signatures are thus natural questions. In this paper, our first contribution is to significantly reduce this overhead. Namely, we obtain the first fully anonymous group signatures based on simple assumptions with signatures shorter than 2 kB at the 128-bit security level. In dynamic (resp. static) groups, our signature length drops to 1.8 kB (resp. 1 kB). This improvement is enabled by two technical tools. As a result of independent interest, we first construct a new structure-preserving signature based on simple assumptions which shortens the best previous scheme by 25%. Our second tool is a new method for attaining anonymity in the strongest sense using a new CCA2-secure encryption scheme which is simultaneously a Groth-Sahai commitment