Anonymity Protection and Access Control in Mobile Network Environment

abstract: Wireless communication technologies have been playing an important role in modern society. Due to its inherent mobility property, wireless networks are more vulnerable to passive attacks than traditional wired networks. Anonymity, as an important issue in mobile network environment, serves as the first topic that leads to all the research work presented in this manuscript. Specifically, anonymity issue in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) is discussed with details as the first section of research. To thoroughly study on this topic, the presented work approaches it from an attacker's perspective. Under a perfect scenario, all the traffic in a targeted MANET exhibits the communication relations to a passive attacker. However, localization errors pose a significant influence on the accuracy of the derived communication patterns. To handle such issue, a new scheme is proposed to generate super nodes, which represent the activities of user groups in the target MANET. This scheme also helps reduce the scale of monitoring work by grouping users based on their behaviors. The first part of work on anonymity in MANET leads to the thought on its major cause. The link-based communication pattern is a key contributor to the success of the traffic analysis attack. A natural way to circumvent such issue is to use link-less approaches. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a typical instance of such kind. Its communication pattern is able to overcome the anonymity issue with MANET. However, it also comes with its own shortcomings. One of them is access control enforcement. To tackle this issue, a new naming scheme for contents transmitted in ICN networks is presented. This scheme is based on a new Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) algorithm. It enforces access control in ICN with minimum requirements on additional network components. Following the research work on ABE, an important function, delegation, exhibits a potential security issue. In traditional ABE schemes, Ciphertext-Policy ABE (CP-ABE), a user is able to generate a subset of authentic attribute key components for other users using delegation function. This capability is not monitored or controlled by the trusted third party (TTP) in the cryptosystem. A direct threat caused from this issue is that any user may intentionally or unintentionally lower the standards for attribute assignments. Unauthorized users/attackers may be able to obtain their desired attributes through a delegation party instead of directly from the TTP. As the third part of work presented in this manuscript, a three-level delegation restriction architecture is proposed. Furthermore, a delegation restriction scheme following this architecture is also presented. This scheme allows the TTP to have full control on the delegation function of all its direct users.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

On the Privacy of Two Tag Ownership Transfer Protocols for RFIDs

In this paper, the privacy of two recent RFID tag ownership transfer protocols are investigated against the tag owners as adversaries. The first protocol called ROTIV is a scheme which provides a privacy-preserving ownership transfer by using an HMAC-based authentication with public key encryption. However, our passive attack on this protocol shows that any legitimate owner which has been the owner of a specific tag is able to trace it either in the past or in the future. Tracing the tag is also possible via an active attack for any adversary who is able to tamper the tag and extract its information. The second protocol called, Chen et al.'s protocol, is an ownership transfer protocol for passive RFID tags which conforms EPC Class1 Generation2 standard. Our attack on this protocol shows that the previous owners of a particular tag are able to trace it in future. Furthermore, they are able even to obtain the tag's secret information at any time in the future which makes them capable of impersonating the tag

Generic Continuity of Operations/Continuity of Government Plan for State-Level Transportation Agencies, Research Report 11-01

The Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (HSPD-20) requires all local, state, tribal and territorial government agencies, and private sector owners of critical infrastructure and key resources (CI/KR) to create a Continuity of Operations/Continuity of Government Plan (COOP/COG). There is planning and training guidance for generic transportation agency COOP/COG work, and the Transportation Research Board has offered guidance for transportation organizations. However, the special concerns of the state-level transportation agency’s (State DOT’s) plan development are not included, notably the responsibilities for the entire State Highway System and the responsibility to support specific essential functions related to the State DOT Director’s role in the Governor’s cabinet. There is also no guidance on where the COOP/COG planning and organizing fits into the National Incident Management System (NIMS) at the local or state-level department or agency. This report covers the research conducted to determine how to integrate COOP/COG into the overall NIMS approach to emergency management, including a connection between the emergency operations center (EOC) and the COOP/COG activity. The first section is a presentation of the research and its findings and analysis. The second section provides training for the EOC staff of a state-level transportation agency, using a hybrid model of FEMA’s ICS and ESF approaches, including a complete set of EOC position checklists, and other training support material. The third section provides training for the COOP/COG Branch staff of a state-level transportation agency, including a set of personnel position descriptions for the COOP/COG Branch members

Hierarchical Functional Encryption

Functional encryption provides fine-grained access control for encrypted data, allowing each user to learn only specific functions of the encrypted data. We study the notion of hierarchical functional encryption, which augments functional encryption with delegation capabilities, offering significantly more expressive access control. We present a generic transformation that converts any general-purpose public-key functional encryption scheme into a hierarchical one without relying on any additional assumptions. This significantly refines our understanding of the power of functional encryption, showing that the existence of functional encryption is equivalent to that of its hierarchical generalization. Instantiating our transformation with the existing functional encryption schemes yields a variety of hierarchical schemes offering various trade-offs between their delegation capabilities (i.e., the depth and width of their hierarchical structures) and underlying assumptions. When starting with a scheme secure against an unbounded number of collusions, we can support arbitrary hierarchical structures. In addition, even when starting with schemes that are secure against a bounded number of collusions (which are known to exist under rather minimal assumptions such as the existence of public-key encryption and shallow pseudorandom generators), we can support hierarchical structures of bounded depth and width

Patterns in SNMP-Based Management

A lot of activity is currently going on to replace the SNMP management architecture with a solution better suited to managing modern IP networks and systems. New candidates include Management by Delegation, active networks, and Web-based management. In this exercise, the management community runs the risk of throwing the baby out with the bath water by focusing too much on a few well-known problems exhibited by SNMP (e.g., its poor scalability) and neglecting most of its other characteristics, including those that contributed to its success (e.g., the reasons why it is simple). One way to avoid this is to explicitly capture the experience gained in the management of IP networks and systems with SNMP. In this paper, we make one step in this direction by studying the SNMP management architecture through a software engineers eyes: we identify in SNMP some of the fundamental architectural and design patterns defined in the literature. Patterns are schematic, proven solutions to recurring problems. By characterizing the current management architecture in terms of patterns, we help retain the strengths of SNMP-based management in future management architectures. We also make it easier for new software engineers to move to network and systems management by characterizing this application domain in standard pattern terms, as opposed to using the jargon understood solely by the SNMP community