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

Confidentiality-Preserving Publish/Subscribe: A Survey

Publish/subscribe (pub/sub) is an attractive communication paradigm for large-scale distributed applications running across multiple administrative domains. Pub/sub allows event-based information dissemination based on constraints on the nature of the data rather than on pre-established communication channels. It is a natural fit for deployment in untrusted environments such as public clouds linking applications across multiple sites. However, pub/sub in untrusted environments lead to major confidentiality concerns stemming from the content-centric nature of the communications. This survey classifies and analyzes different approaches to confidentiality preservation for pub/sub, from applications of trust and access control models to novel encryption techniques. It provides an overview of the current challenges posed by confidentiality concerns and points to future research directions in this promising field

Equivalence-based Security for Querying Encrypted Databases: Theory and Application to Privacy Policy Audits

Motivated by the problem of simultaneously preserving confidentiality and usability of data outsourced to third-party clouds, we present two different database encryption schemes that largely hide data but reveal enough information to support a wide-range of relational queries. We provide a security definition for database encryption that captures confidentiality based on a notion of equivalence of databases from the adversary's perspective. As a specific application, we adapt an existing algorithm for finding violations of privacy policies to run on logs encrypted under our schemes and observe low to moderate overheads.Comment: CCS 2015 paper technical report, in progres

A Heterogeneous Systems Public Key Encryption with Equality Test in Smart City

Smart cities have been identified as areas which are urbanized and utilize diverse types of electronic data collection sensors that are used to oversee resources and assets efficiently. Smart meters are a unit of smart cities and they collect information about users and their consumption patterns. Consequently, the Internet of Things (IoT) being at a steady evolution has prompted multiple users into having their data collected from smart meters, stored on cloud servers. This is a way of saving costs and time involved in accessing the data. In spite of that, the cloud-assisted IoT faces privacy and security issues. This is as a result of the cloud servers possessing an untrusted nature. Due to this, it is essential for the data accumulated from the smart meters be encrypted hitherto outsourcing it to the cloud server. However, having encrypted data in the cloud server leads to a complication when it comes to accessing the data. For users who are on a different public key system, it becomes illogical for the users to first download the entire data on the cloud in order to access the required data. Therefore to resolve this issue, a heterogeneous systems public key encryption with equality test (HS-PKE-ET) scheme was proposed. The HS-PKE-ET scheme integrates certificateless public cryptography with equality test (CLC-ET) with the public key encryption with equality test (PKI-ET). This scheme allows an authorized cloud server to determine if two encryptions encrypted within heterogeneous systems possess equivalent messages. Basing on the random oracle model, the proposed scheme’s security is stated under the bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption together with the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption. Ultimately the size of storage, computation complexities and properties with other related works are focused on and illustrations indicate our proposed scheme reflects a good performance

Secure server-aided data sharing clique with attestation

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapor

A Novel Pseudonym Assignment and Encryption Scheme for Preserving the Privacy of Military Vehicles

In this digital era, security has become one of the important topics of concern, and things become more critical for military vehicles where safety plays a vital role. In this paper, we have discussed a pseudonym-based approach that preserves the real identity of military vehicles. This paper also focuses on military vehicles’ location privacy by deploying a novel pseudonym assignment and encryption schemes. The proposed security scheme is based on a hybrid approach of matrix array symmetric key and the intelligent water drop scheme. After implementing the proposed security scheme, each military vehicle will obtain its pseudonym for hiding their original identities. The proposed algorithm effectively manages pseudonym generation and change requests for the local region and inter-region environment. The proposed security scheme not only provides secure communication and preservation of location privacy of military vehicles but also ensures their security against various attacks. Finally, the time efficiency of proposed algorithms is obtained for both local and inter-region requests. Comparative analysis shows that the proposed scheme is more efficient than other existing techniques