LPKI - A Lightweight Public Key Infrastructure for the Mobile Environments

The non-repudiation as an essential requirement of many applications can be provided by the asymmetric key model. With the evolution of new applications such as mobile commerce, it is essential to provide secure and efficient solutions for the mobile environments. The traditional public key cryptography involves huge computational costs and is not so suitable for the resource-constrained platforms. The elliptic curve-based approaches as the newer solutions require certain considerations that are not taken into account in the traditional public key infrastructures. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce a Lightweight Public Key Infrastructure (LPKI) for the constrained platforms such as mobile phones. It takes advantages of elliptic curve cryptography and signcryption to decrease the computational costs and communication overheads, and adapting to the constraints. All the computational costs of required validations can be eliminated from end-entities by introduction of a validation authority to the introduced infrastructure and delegating validations to such a component. LPKI is so suitable for mobile environments and for applications such as mobile commerce where the security is the great concern.Comment: 6 Pages, 6 Figure

An Elliptic Curve-based Signcryption Scheme with Forward Secrecy

An elliptic curve-based signcryption scheme is introduced in this paper that effectively combines the functionalities of digital signature and encryption, and decreases the computational costs and communication overheads in comparison with the traditional signature-then-encryption schemes. It simultaneously provides the attributes of message confidentiality, authentication, integrity, unforgeability, non-repudiation, public verifiability, and forward secrecy of message confidentiality. Since it is based on elliptic curves and can use any fast and secure symmetric algorithm for encrypting messages, it has great advantages to be used for security establishments in store-and-forward applications and when dealing with resource-constrained devices.Comment: 13 Pages, 5 Figures, 2 Table

Design and Experimental Evaluation of a Route Optimisation Solution for NEMO

An important requirement for Internet protocol (IP) networks to achieve the aim of ubiquitous connectivity is network mobility (NEMO). With NEMO support we can provide Internet access from mobile platforms, such as public transportation vehicles, to normal nodes that do not need to implement any special mobility protocol. The NEMO basic support protocol has been proposed in the IETF as a first solution to this problem, but this solution has severe performance limitations. This paper presents MIRON: Mobile IPv6 route optimization for NEMO, an approach to the problem of NEMO support that overcomes the limitations of the basic solution by combining two different modes of operation: a Proxy-MR and an address delegation with built-in routing mechanisms. This paper describes the design and rationale of the solution, with an experimental validation and performance evaluation based on an implementation.Publicad

SSMS - A Secure SMS Messaging Protocol for the M-payment Systems

The GSM network with the greatest worldwide number of users, succumbs to several security vulnerabilities. The short message service (SMS) is one of its superior and well-tried services with a global availability in the GSM networks. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce a new secure application layer protocol, called SSMS, to efficiently embed the desired security attributes in the SMS messages to be used as a secure bearer in the m-payment systems. SSMS efficiently embeds the confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation in the SMS messages. It provides an elliptic curve-based public key solution that uses public keys for the secret key establishment of a symmetric encryption. It also provides the attributes of public verification and forward secrecy. It efficiently makes the SMS messaging suitable for the m-payment applications where the security is the great concern.Comment: 6 Pages, 5 Figure

Assured information sharing for ad-hoc collaboration

Collaborative information sharing tends to be highly dynamic and often ad hoc among organizations. The dynamic natures and sharing patterns in ad-hoc collaboration impose a need for a comprehensive and flexible approach to reflecting and coping with the unique access control requirements associated with the environment. This dissertation outlines a Role-based Access Management for Ad-hoc Resource Shar- ing framework (RAMARS) to enable secure and selective information sharing in the het- erogeneous ad-hoc collaborative environment. Our framework incorporates a role-based approach to addressing originator control, delegation and dissemination control. A special trust-aware feature is incorporated to deal with dynamic user and trust management, and a novel resource modeling scheme is proposed to support fine-grained selective sharing of composite data. As a policy-driven approach, we formally specify the necessary pol- icy components in our framework and develop access control policies using standardized eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML). The feasibility of our approach is evaluated in two emerging collaborative information sharing infrastructures: peer-to- peer networking (P2P) and Grid computing. As a potential application domain, RAMARS framework is further extended and adopted in secure healthcare services, with a unified patient-centric access control scheme being proposed to enable selective and authorized sharing of Electronic Health Records (EHRs), accommodating various privacy protection requirements at different levels of granularity

Certificate Path Verification in Hierarchical and Peer-to-Peer Public Key Infrastructures

“Authentication of users in an automated business transaction is commonly realized by means of a Public Key Infrastructure(PKI). A PKI is a framework on which the security services are built. Each user or end entity is given a digitally signed data structure called digital certificate. In Hierarchical PKI, certificate path is unidirectional, so certificate path development and validation is simple and straight forward. Peer-to-Peer(also called Mesh PKI) architecture is one of the most popular PKI trust models that is widely used in automated business transactions, but certificate path verification is very complex since there are multiple paths between users and the certification path is bidirectional. In this paper, we demonstrate the advantage of certificate path verification in Hierarchical PKI based on forward path construction method over reverse path construction method with respect to the time requirement. We also propose a novel method to convert a peer-to-peer PKI to a Depth First Search(DFS) spanning tree to simplify the certificate path verification by avoiding multiple paths between users, since the DFS spanning tree equivalent of peer-to-peer PKI contains only one path between any two Certification Authorities