EFFICIENT AND SCALABLE NETWORK SECURITY PROTOCOLS BASED ON LFSR SEQUENCES

The gap between abstract, mathematics-oriented research in cryptography and the engineering approach of designing practical, network security protocols is widening. Network researchers experiment with well-known cryptographic protocols suitable for different network models. On the other hand, researchers inclined toward theory often design cryptographic schemes without considering the practical network constraints. The goal of this dissertation is to address problems in these two challenging areas: building bridges between practical network security protocols and theoretical cryptography. This dissertation presents techniques for building performance sensitive security protocols, using primitives from linear feedback register sequences (LFSR) sequences, for a variety of challenging networking applications. The significant contributions of this thesis are: 1. A common problem faced by large-scale multicast applications, like real-time news feeds, is collecting authenticated feedback from the intended recipients. We design an efficient, scalable, and fault-tolerant technique for combining multiple signed acknowledgments into a single compact one and observe that most signatures (based on the discrete logarithm problem) used in previous protocols do not result in a scalable solution to the problem. 2. We propose a technique to authenticate on-demand source routing protocols in resource-constrained wireless mobile ad-hoc networks. We develop a single-round multisignature that requires no prior cooperation among nodes to construct the multisignature and supports authentication of cached routes. 3. We propose an efficient and scalable aggregate signature, tailored for applications like building efficient certificate chains, authenticating distributed and adaptive content management systems and securing path-vector routing protocols. 4. We observe that blind signatures could form critical building blocks of privacypreserving accountability systems, where an authority needs to vouch for the legitimacy of a message but the ownership of the message should be kept secret from the authority. We propose an efficient blind signature that can serve as a protocol building block for performance sensitive, accountability systems. All special forms digital signatures—aggregate, multi-, and blind signatures—proposed in this dissertation are the first to be constructed using LFSR sequences. Our detailed cost analysis shows that for a desired level of security, the proposed signatures outperformed existing protocols in computation cost, number of communication rounds and storage overhead

Secure Authentication and Privacy-Preserving Techniques in Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs)

In the last decade, there has been growing interest in Vehicular Ad Hoc NETworks (VANETs). Today car manufacturers have already started to equip vehicles with sophisticated sensors that can provide many assistive features such as front collision avoidance, automatic lane tracking, partial autonomous driving, suggestive lane changing, and so on. Such technological advancements are enabling the adoption of VANETs not only to provide safer and more comfortable driving experience but also provide many other useful services to the driver as well as passengers of a vehicle. However, privacy, authentication and secure message dissemination are some of the main issues that need to be thoroughly addressed and solved for the widespread adoption/deployment of VANETs. Given the importance of these issues, researchers have spent a lot of effort in these areas over the last decade. We present an overview of the following issues that arise in VANETs: privacy, authentication, and secure message dissemination. Then we present a comprehensive review of various solutions proposed in the last 10 years which address these issues. Our survey sheds light on some open issues that need to be addressed in the future

Authentic-caller : self-enforcing authentication in a next generation network

The Internet of Things (IoT) or the Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is the network of connected devices, things and people which collect and exchange information using the emerging telecommunication networks (4G, 5G IP-based LTE). These emerging telecommunication networks can also be used to transfer critical information between the source and destination, informing the control system about the outage in the electrical grid, or providing information about the emergency at the national express highway. This sensitive information requires authorization and authentication of source and destination involved in the communication. To protect the network from unauthorized access and to provide authentication, the telecommunication operators have to adopt the mechanism for seamless verification and authorization of parties involved in the communication. Currently, the next-generation telecommunication networks use a digest-based authentication mechanism, where the call-processing engine of the telecommunication operator initiates the challenge to the request-initiating client or caller, which is being solved by the client to prove his credentials. However, the digest-based authentication mechanisms are vulnerable to many forms of known attacks e.g., the Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attack and the password guessing attack. Furthermore, the digest-based systems require extensive processing overheads. Several Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) based and identity-based schemes have been proposed for the authentication and key agreements. However, these schemes generally require smart-card to hold long-term private keys and authentication credentials. In this paper, we propose a novel self-enforcing authentication protocol for the SIPbased next-generation network based on a low-entropy shared password without relying on any PKI or trusted third party system. The proposed system shows effective resistance against various attacks e.g., MITM, replay attack, password guessing attack, etc. We a..

Cryptographic Key Management in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs): A survey

Since their appearance at the dawn of the second millennium, Delay or Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have gradually evolved, spurring the development of a variety of methods and protocols for making them more secure and resilient. In this context, perhaps, the most challenging problem to deal with is that of cryptographic key management. To the best of our knowledge, the work at hand is the first to survey the relevant literature and classify the various so far proposed key management approaches in such a restricted and harsh environment. Towards this goal, we have grouped the surveyed key management methods into three major categories depending on whether the particular method copes with a) security initialization, b) key establishment, and c) key revocation. We have attempted to provide a concise but fairly complete evaluation of the proposed up-to-date methods in a generalized way with the aim of offering a central reference point for future research

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio