14,950 research outputs found
Experiments and proofs in web-service security
Many web services have a subsystem for allowing users to register, authenticate, reset their password, and change personal details. It is important that such subsystems cannot be abused by attackers to gain access to the accounts of other users. We study a system which was initially prone to such attacks. Specific attacks are demonstrated and the system is then modified to prevent such attacks in future. The design achieved in this way is then analysed to show that it can't be broken in future unless users allow their email to he intercepted. This is achieved by formulating the requirement as a statement of the user's expectations of the system and then analysing the source code of the system to prove that it meets these requirements. The process of attack, correction, and formulation of security rules, and proof that rules hold, is proposed as a methodical security design philosophy
HOL(y)Hammer: Online ATP Service for HOL Light
HOL(y)Hammer is an online AI/ATP service for formal (computer-understandable)
mathematics encoded in the HOL Light system. The service allows its users to
upload and automatically process an arbitrary formal development (project)
based on HOL Light, and to attack arbitrary conjectures that use the concepts
defined in some of the uploaded projects. For that, the service uses several
automated reasoning systems combined with several premise selection methods
trained on all the project proofs. The projects that are readily available on
the server for such query answering include the recent versions of the
Flyspeck, Multivariate Analysis and Complex Analysis libraries. The service
runs on a 48-CPU server, currently employing in parallel for each task 7 AI/ATP
combinations and 4 decision procedures that contribute to its overall
performance. The system is also available for local installation by interested
users, who can customize it for their own proof development. An Emacs interface
allowing parallel asynchronous queries to the service is also provided. The
overall structure of the service is outlined, problems that arise and their
solutions are discussed, and an initial account of using the system is given
Keeping Authorities "Honest or Bust" with Decentralized Witness Cosigning
The secret keys of critical network authorities - such as time, name,
certificate, and software update services - represent high-value targets for
hackers, criminals, and spy agencies wishing to use these keys secretly to
compromise other hosts. To protect authorities and their clients proactively
from undetected exploits and misuse, we introduce CoSi, a scalable witness
cosigning protocol ensuring that every authoritative statement is validated and
publicly logged by a diverse group of witnesses before any client will accept
it. A statement S collectively signed by W witnesses assures clients that S has
been seen, and not immediately found erroneous, by those W observers. Even if S
is compromised in a fashion not readily detectable by the witnesses, CoSi still
guarantees S's exposure to public scrutiny, forcing secrecy-minded attackers to
risk that the compromise will soon be detected by one of the W witnesses.
Because clients can verify collective signatures efficiently without
communication, CoSi protects clients' privacy, and offers the first
transparency mechanism effective against persistent man-in-the-middle attackers
who control a victim's Internet access, the authority's secret key, and several
witnesses' secret keys. CoSi builds on existing cryptographic multisignature
methods, scaling them to support thousands of witnesses via signature
aggregation over efficient communication trees. A working prototype
demonstrates CoSi in the context of timestamping and logging authorities,
enabling groups of over 8,000 distributed witnesses to cosign authoritative
statements in under two seconds.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure
ClaimChain: Improving the Security and Privacy of In-band Key Distribution for Messaging
The social demand for email end-to-end encryption is barely supported by
mainstream service providers. Autocrypt is a new community-driven open
specification for e-mail encryption that attempts to respond to this demand. In
Autocrypt the encryption keys are attached directly to messages, and thus the
encryption can be implemented by email clients without any collaboration of the
providers. The decentralized nature of this in-band key distribution, however,
makes it prone to man-in-the-middle attacks and can leak the social graph of
users. To address this problem we introduce ClaimChain, a cryptographic
construction for privacy-preserving authentication of public keys. Users store
claims about their identities and keys, as well as their beliefs about others,
in ClaimChains. These chains form authenticated decentralized repositories that
enable users to prove the authenticity of both their keys and the keys of their
contacts. ClaimChains are encrypted, and therefore protect the stored
information, such as keys and contact identities, from prying eyes. At the same
time, ClaimChain implements mechanisms to provide strong non-equivocation
properties, discouraging malicious actors from distributing conflicting or
inauthentic claims. We implemented ClaimChain and we show that it offers
reasonable performance, low overhead, and authenticity guarantees.Comment: Appears in 2018 Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society
(WPES'18
FAIR: Forwarding Accountability for Internet Reputability
This paper presents FAIR, a forwarding accountability mechanism that
incentivizes ISPs to apply stricter security policies to their customers. The
Autonomous System (AS) of the receiver specifies a traffic profile that the
sender AS must adhere to. Transit ASes on the path mark packets. In case of
traffic profile violations, the marked packets are used as a proof of
misbehavior.
FAIR introduces low bandwidth overhead and requires no per-packet and no
per-flow state for forwarding. We describe integration with IP and demonstrate
a software switch running on commodity hardware that can switch packets at a
line rate of 120 Gbps, and can forward 140M minimum-sized packets per second,
limited by the hardware I/O subsystem.
Moreover, this paper proposes a "suspicious bit" for packet headers - an
application that builds on top of FAIR's proofs of misbehavior and flags
packets to warn other entities in the network.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figure
Towards trusted volunteer grid environments
Intensive experiences show and confirm that grid environments can be
considered as the most promising way to solve several kinds of problems
relating either to cooperative work especially where involved collaborators are
dispersed geographically or to some very greedy applications which require
enough power of computing or/and storage. Such environments can be classified
into two categories; first, dedicated grids where the federated computers are
solely devoted to a specific work through its end. Second, Volunteer grids
where federated computers are not completely devoted to a specific work but
instead they can be randomly and intermittently used, at the same time, for any
other purpose or they can be connected or disconnected at will by their owners
without any prior notification. Each category of grids includes surely several
advantages and disadvantages; nevertheless, we think that volunteer grids are
very promising and more convenient especially to build a general multipurpose
distributed scalable environment. Unfortunately, the big challenge of such
environments is, however, security and trust. Indeed, owing to the fact that
every federated computer in such an environment can randomly be used at the
same time by several users or can be disconnected suddenly, several security
problems will automatically arise. In this paper, we propose a novel solution
based on identity federation, agent technology and the dynamic enforcement of
access control policies that lead to the design and implementation of trusted
volunteer grid environments.Comment: 9 Pages, IJCNC Journal 201
UniquID: A Quest to Reconcile Identity Access Management and the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) has caused a revolutionary paradigm shift in
computer networking. After decades of human-centered routines, where devices
were merely tools that enabled human beings to authenticate themselves and
perform activities, we are now dealing with a device-centered paradigm: the
devices themselves are actors, not just tools for people. Conventional identity
access management (IAM) frameworks were not designed to handle the challenges
of IoT. Trying to use traditional IAM systems to reconcile heterogeneous
devices and complex federations of online services (e.g., IoT sensors and cloud
computing solutions) adds a cumbersome architectural layer that can become hard
to maintain and act as a single point of failure. In this paper, we propose
UniquID, a blockchain-based solution that overcomes the need for centralized
IAM architectures while providing scalability and robustness. We also present
the experimental results of a proof-of-concept UniquID enrolment network, and
we discuss two different use-cases that show the considerable value of a
blockchain-based IAM.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figure
PDFS: Practical Data Feed Service for Smart Contracts
Smart contracts are a new paradigm that emerged with the rise of the
blockchain technology. They allow untrusting parties to arrange agreements.
These agreements are encoded as a programming language code and deployed on a
blockchain platform, where all participants execute them and maintain their
state. Smart contracts are promising since they are automated and
decentralized, thus limiting the involvement of third trusted parties, and can
contain monetary transfers. Due to these features, many people believe that
smart contracts will revolutionize the way we think of distributed
applications, information sharing, financial services, and infrastructures.
To release the potential of smart contracts, it is necessary to connect the
contracts with the outside world, such that they can understand and use
information from other infrastructures. For instance, smart contracts would
greatly benefit when they have access to web content. However, there are many
challenges associated with realizing such a system, and despite the existence
of many proposals, no solution is secure, provides easily-parsable data,
introduces small overheads, and is easy to deploy.
In this paper we propose PDFS, a practical system for data feeds that
combines the advantages of the previous schemes and introduces new
functionalities. PDFS extends content providers by including new features for
data transparency and consistency validations. This combination provides
multiple benefits like content which is easy to parse and efficient
authenticity verification without breaking natural trust chains. PDFS keeps
content providers auditable, mitigates their malicious activities (like data
modification or censorship), and allows them to create a new business model. We
show how PDFS is integrated with existing web services, report on a PDFS
implementation and present results from conducted case studies and experiments.Comment: Blockchain; Smart Contracts; Data Authentication; Ethereu
- …