An ICMetrics Based Lightweight Security Architecture Using Lattice Signcryption

The advent of embedded systems has completely transformed the information landscape. With the explosive growth in the use of interactive real-time technologies, this internet landscape aims to support an even broader range of application domains. The large amount of data that is exchanged by these applications has made them an attractive target for attacks. Thus it is important to employ security mechanisms to protect these systems from attackers. A major challenge facing researchers is the resource constrained nature of these systems, which renders most of the traditional security mechanisms almost useless. In this paper we propose a lightweight ICmetrics based security architecture using lattices. The features of the proposed architecture fulfill both the requirements of security as well as energy efficiency. The proposed architecture provides authentication, confidentiality, non-repudiation and integrity of data. Using the identity information derived from ICmetrics of the device, we further construct a sign cryption scheme based on lattices that makes use of certificate less PKC to achieve the security requirements of the design. This scheme is targeted on resource constrained environments, and can be used widely in applications that require sufficient levels of security with limited resources

Certificateless Public Auditing Protocol with Constant

To provide the integrity of outsourced data in the cloud storage services, many public auditing schemes which allow a user to check the integrity of the outsourced data have been proposed. Since most of the schemes are constructed on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), they suffer from several concerns like management of certificates. To resolve the problems, certificateless public auditing schemes also have been studied in recent years. In this paper, we propose a certificateless public auditing scheme which has the constant-time verification algorithm. Therefore, our scheme is more efficient than previous certificateless public auditing schemes. To prove the security of our certificateless public auditing scheme, we first define three formal security models and prove the security of our scheme under the three security models

Key management for beyond 5G mobile small cells: a survey

The highly anticipated 5G network is projected to be introduced in 2020. 5G stakeholders are unanimous that densification of mobile networks is the way forward. The densification will be realized by means of small cell technology, and it is capable of providing coverage with a high data capacity. The EU-funded H2020-MSCA project “SECRET” introduced covering the urban landscape with mobile small cells, since these take advantages of the dynamic network topology and optimizes network services in a cost-effective fashion. By taking advantage of the device-to-device communications technology, large amounts of data can be transmitted over multiple hops and, therefore, offload the general network. However, this introduction of mobile small cells presents various security and privacy challenges. Cryptographic security solutions are capable of solving these as long as they are supported by a key management scheme. It is assumed that the network infrastructure and mobile devices from network users are unable to act as a centralized trust anchor since these are vulnerable targets to malicious attacks. Security must, therefore, be guaranteed by means of a key management scheme that decentralizes trust. Therefore, this paper surveys the state-of-the-art key management schemes proposed for similar network architectures (e.g., mobile ad hoc networks and ad hoc device-to-device networks) that decentralize trust. Furthermore, these key management schemes are evaluated for adaptability in a network of mobile small cells

Footsteps in the fog: Certificateless fog-based access control

The proliferating adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has fuelled the need for more efficient and resilient access control solutions that aim to prevent unauthorized resource access. The majority of existing works in this field follow either a centralized approach (i.e. cloud-based) or an architecture where the IoT devices are responsible for all decision-making functions. Furthermore, the resource-constrained nature of most IoT devices make securing the communication between these devices and the cloud using standard cryptographic solutions difficult. In this paper, we propose a distributed access control architecture where the core components are distributed between fog nodes and the cloud. To facilitate secure communication, our architecture utilizes a Certificateless Hybrid Signcryption scheme without pairing. We prove the effectiveness of our approach by providing a comparative analysis of its performance in comparison to the commonly used cloud-based centralized architectures. Our implementation uses Azure – an existing commercial platform, and Keycloak – an open-source platform, to demonstrate the real-world applicability. Additionally, we measure the performance of the adopted encryption scheme on two types of resource-constrained devices to further emphasize the applicability of the proposed architecture. Finally, the experimental results are coupled with a theoretical analysis that proves the security of our approach

A revocable certificateless signature scheme

Certificateless public key cryptography (CLPKC), with properties of no key escrow and no certificate, has received a lot of attention since its invention. However, membership revocation in certificateless cryptosystem still remains a non-trivial problem: the existing solutions are not practical for use due to either a costly mediator or enormous computation (secret channel). In this paper, we present a new approach to revocation in CLPKC with a concrete construction of a revocable certificateless signature (RCLS) scheme. In our scheme, a user\u27s private key is composed of three parts: an initial partial private key, a time key and a secret value. The transmission of updated-key requires only a public channel, which makes our RCLS scheme more efficient than other methods. We first provide formal definition and security model for a RCLS scheme. The new scheme is proved secure in the random oracle model, based on the Computational Diffie-Hellman problem

A Certificateless One-Way Group Key Agreement Protocol for End-to-End Email Encryption

Over the years, email has evolved into one of the most widely used communication channels for both individuals and organizations. However, despite near ubiquitous use in much of the world, current information technology standards do not place emphasis on email security. Not until recently, webmail services such as Yahoo\u27s mail and Google\u27s gmail started to encrypt emails for privacy protection. However, the encrypted emails will be decrypted and stored in the service provider\u27s servers. If the servers are malicious or compromised, all the stored emails can be read, copied and altered. Thus, there is a strong need for end-to-end (E2E) email encryption to protect email user\u27s privacy. In this paper, we present a certificateless one-way group key agreement protocol with the following features, which are suitable to implement E2E email encryption: (1) certificateless and thus there is no key escrow problem and no public key certificate infrastructure is required; (2) one-way group key agreement and thus no back-and-forth message exchange is required; and (3) n-party group key agreement (not just 2- or 3-party). This paper also provides a security proof for the proposed protocol using proof by simulation . Finally, efficiency analysis of the protocol is presented at the end of the paper

Further Observations on Certificate-Base Encryption and its Generic Construction from Certificateless Public Key Encryption

Certificate-based encryption (CBE) is a new asymmetric encryption paradigm which was introduced to solve the certificate management problem in traditional public key encryption (PKI). It combines PKE and identity-based encryption (IBE) while preserving some of their most attractive features. CBE provides an efficient implicit certificate mechanism which eliminates the third-party queries and simplifies the certificate revocation problem in the traditional PKI. It also solves the key escrow problem and key distribution problem inherent in IBE. In this paper, we introduce the key replacement attack and the malicious-but-passive certifier attack into CBE, and define a class of new security models for CBE under different security levels according to the power of the adversaries against CBE. Our new security models are more elaborated and stronger compared with other existing ones. Then, we propose a generic construction of CBE from certificateless public key encryption and prove its security under the proposed security models in the standard model. We also show a concrete conversion using the proposed generic construction