Encryption – use and control in E-commerce

The author describes how cryptography can be used to address modern business requirements such as identity protection, secure web access and digital signatures. Article by Robert Bond (Head of Innovation & Technology Group, Hobson Audley and Fellow of SALS). Published in Amicus Curiae - Journal of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and its Society for Advanced Legal Studies. The Journal is produced by the Society for Advanced Legal Studies at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London

Secret Sharing for Cloud Data Security

Cloud computing helps reduce costs, increase business agility and deploy solutions with a high return on investment for many types of applications. However, data security is of premium importance to many users and often restrains their adoption of cloud technologies. Various approaches, i.e., data encryption, anonymization, replication and verification, help enforce different facets of data security. Secret sharing is a particularly interesting cryptographic technique. Its most advanced variants indeed simultaneously enforce data privacy, availability and integrity, while allowing computation on encrypted data. The aim of this paper is thus to wholly survey secret sharing schemes with respect to data security, data access and costs in the pay-as-you-go paradigm

Using quantum key distribution for cryptographic purposes: a survey

The appealing feature of quantum key distribution (QKD), from a cryptographic viewpoint, is the ability to prove the information-theoretic security (ITS) of the established keys. As a key establishment primitive, QKD however does not provide a standalone security service in its own: the secret keys established by QKD are in general then used by a subsequent cryptographic applications for which the requirements, the context of use and the security properties can vary. It is therefore important, in the perspective of integrating QKD in security infrastructures, to analyze how QKD can be combined with other cryptographic primitives. The purpose of this survey article, which is mostly centered on European research results, is to contribute to such an analysis. We first review and compare the properties of the existing key establishment techniques, QKD being one of them. We then study more specifically two generic scenarios related to the practical use of QKD in cryptographic infrastructures: 1) using QKD as a key renewal technique for a symmetric cipher over a point-to-point link; 2) using QKD in a network containing many users with the objective of offering any-to-any key establishment service. We discuss the constraints as well as the potential interest of using QKD in these contexts. We finally give an overview of challenges relative to the development of QKD technology that also constitute potential avenues for cryptographic research.Comment: Revised version of the SECOQC White Paper. Published in the special issue on QKD of TCS, Theoretical Computer Science (2014), pp. 62-8

Composability in quantum cryptography

In this article, we review several aspects of composability in the context of quantum cryptography. The first part is devoted to key distribution. We discuss the security criteria that a quantum key distribution protocol must fulfill to allow its safe use within a larger security application (e.g., for secure message transmission). To illustrate the practical use of composability, we show how to generate a continuous key stream by sequentially composing rounds of a quantum key distribution protocol. In a second part, we take a more general point of view, which is necessary for the study of cryptographic situations involving, for example, mutually distrustful parties. We explain the universal composability framework and state the composition theorem which guarantees that secure protocols can securely be composed to larger applicationsComment: 18 pages, 2 figure

Cryptanalysis of two mutual authentication protocols for low-cost RFID

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is appearing as a favorite technology for automated identification, which can be widely applied to many applications such as e-passport, supply chain management and ticketing. However, researchers have found many security and privacy problems along RFID technology. In recent years, many researchers are interested in RFID authentication protocols and their security flaws. In this paper, we analyze two of the newest RFID authentication protocols which proposed by Fu et al. and Li et al. from several security viewpoints. We present different attacks such as desynchronization attack and privacy analysis over these protocols.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, International Journal of Distributed and Parallel system