Key Substitution in the Symbolic Analysis of Cryptographic Protocols (extended version)

Key substitution vulnerable signature schemes are signature schemes that permit an intruder, given a public verification key and a signed message, to compute a pair of signature and verification keys such that the message appears to be signed with the new signature key. A digital signature scheme is said to be vulnerable to destructive exclusive ownership property (DEO) If it is computationaly feasible for an intruder, given a public verification key and a pair of message and its valid signature relatively to the given public key, to compute a pair of signature and verification keys and a new message such that the given signature appears to be valid for the new message relatively to the new verification key. In this paper, we prove decidability of the insecurity problem of cryptographic protocols where the signature schemes employed in the concrete realisation have this two properties

Multiplexing scheme for simplified entanglement-based large-alphabet quantum key distribution

We propose a practical quantum cryptographic scheme which combines high information capacity, such as provided by high-dimensional quantum entanglement, with the simplicity of a two-dimensional Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) Bell test for security verification. By applying a state combining entanglement in a two-dimensional degree of freedom, such as photon polarization, with high-dimensional correlations in another degree of freedom, such as photon orbital angular momentum (OAM) or path, the scheme provides a considerably simplified route towards security verification in quantum key distribution (QKD) aimed at exploiting high-dimensional quantum systems for increased secure key rates. It also benefits from security against collective attacks and is feasible using currently available technologies.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

Extending and Applying a Framework for the Cryptographic Verification of Java Programs

Abstract. In our previous work, we have proposed a framework which allows tools that can check standard noninterference properties but a priori cannot deal with cryptography to establish cryptographic indistinguishability properties, such as privacy properties, for Java programs. We refer to this framework as the CVJ framework (Cryptographic Verification of Java Programs) in this paper. While so far the CVJ framework directly supports public-key encryption (without corruption and without a public-key infrastructure) only, in this work we further instantiate the framework to support, among others, public-key encryption and digital signatures, both with corruption and a public-key infrastructure, as well as (private) symmetric encryption. Since these cryptographic primitives are very common in security-critical applications, our extensions make the framework much more widely applicable. To illustrate the usefulness and applicability of the extensions proposed in this paper, we apply the framework along with the tool Joana, which allows for the fully automatic verification of noninterference properties of Java programs, to establish cryptographic privacy properties of a (non-trivial) cloud storage application, where clients can store private information on a remote server.

High-level Cryptographic Abstractions

The interfaces exposed by commonly used cryptographic libraries are clumsy, complicated, and assume an understanding of cryptographic algorithms. The challenge is to design high-level abstractions that require minimum knowledge and effort to use while also allowing maximum control when needed. This paper proposes such high-level abstractions consisting of simple cryptographic primitives and full declarative configuration. These abstractions can be implemented on top of any cryptographic library in any language. We have implemented these abstractions in Python, and used them to write a wide variety of well-known security protocols, including Signal, Kerberos, and TLS. We show that programs using our abstractions are much smaller and easier to write than using low-level libraries, where size of security protocols implemented is reduced by about a third on average. We show our implementation incurs a small overhead, less than 5 microseconds for shared key operations and less than 341 microseconds (< 1%) for public key operations. We also show our abstractions are safe against main types of cryptographic misuse reported in the literature

Low dimensional bound entanglement with one-way distillable cryptographic key

We provide a class of bound entangled states that have positive distillable secure key rate. The smallest state of this kind is $4 \otimes 4$, which shows that peculiar security contained in bound entangled states does not need high dimensional systems. We show, that for these states a positive key rate can be obtained by {\it one-way} Devetak-Winter protocol. Subsequently the volume of bound entangled key-distillable states in arbitrary dimension is shown to be nonzero. We provide a scheme of verification of cryptographic quality of experimentally prepared state in terms of local observables. Proposed set of 7 collective settings is proven to be optimal in number of settings.Comment: 5 pages, ReVTex