KeyForge: Mitigating Email Breaches with Forward-Forgeable Signatures

Email breaches are commonplace, and they expose a wealth of personal, business, and political data that may have devastating consequences. The current email system allows any attacker who gains access to your email to prove the authenticity of the stolen messages to third parties -- a property arising from a necessary anti-spam / anti-spoofing protocol called DKIM. This exacerbates the problem of email breaches by greatly increasing the potential for attackers to damage the users' reputation, blackmail them, or sell the stolen information to third parties. In this paper, we introduce "non-attributable email", which guarantees that a wide class of adversaries are unable to convince any third party of the authenticity of stolen emails. We formally define non-attributability, and present two practical system proposals -- KeyForge and TimeForge -- that provably achieve non-attributability while maintaining the important protection against spam and spoofing that is currently provided by DKIM. Moreover, we implement KeyForge and demonstrate that that scheme is practical, achieving competitive verification and signing speed while also requiring 42% less bandwidth per email than RSA2048

Decentralized provenance-aware publishing with nanopublications

Publication and archival of scientific results is still commonly considered the responsability of classical publishing companies. Classical forms of publishing, however, which center around printed narrative articles, no longer seem well-suited in the digital age. In particular, there exist currently no efficient, reliable, and agreed-upon methods for publishing scientific datasets, which have become increasingly important for science. In this article, we propose to design scientific data publishing as a web-based bottom-up process, without top-down control of central authorities such as publishing companies. Based on a novel combination of existing concepts and technologies, we present a server network to decentrally store and archive data in the form of nanopublications, an RDF-based format to represent scientific data. We show how this approach allows researchers to publish, retrieve, verify, and recombine datasets of nanopublications in a reliable and trustworthy manner, and we argue that this architecture could be used as a low-level data publication layer to serve the Semantic Web in general. Our evaluation of the current network shows that this system is efficient and reliable

New Conditional Privacy-preserving Encryption Schemes in Communication Network

Nowadays the communication networks have acted as nearly the most important fundamental infrastructure in our human society. The basic service provided by the communication networks are like that provided by the ubiquitous public utilities. For example, the cable television network provides the distribution of information to its subscribers, which is much like the water or gas supply systems which distribute the commodities to citizens. The communication network also facilitates the development of many network-based applications such as industrial pipeline controlling in the industrial network, voice over long-term evolution (VoLTE) in the mobile network and mixture reality (MR) in the computer network, etc. Since the communication network plays such a vital role in almost every aspect of our life, undoubtedly, the information transmitted over it should be guarded properly. Roughly, such information can be categorized into either the communicated message or the sensitive information related to the users. Since we already got cryptographical tools, such as encryption schemes, to ensure the confidentiality of communicated messages, it is the sensitive personal information which should be paid special attentions to. Moreover, for the benefit of reducing the network burden in some instances, it may require that only communication information among legitimated users, such as streaming media service subscribers, can be stored and then relayed in the network. In this case, the network should be empowered with the capability to verify whether the transmitted message is exchanged between legitimated users without leaking the privacy of those users. Meanwhile, the intended receiver of a transmitted message should be able to identify the exact message sender for future communication. In order to cater to those requirements, we re-define a notion named conditional user privacy preservation. In this thesis, we investigate the problem how to preserve user conditional privacy in pubic key encryption schemes, which are used to secure the transmitted information in the communication networks. In fact, even the term conditional privacy preservation has appeared in existing works before, there still have great differences between our conditional privacy preservation definition and the one proposed before. For example, in our definition, we do not need a trusted third party (TTP) to help tracing the sender of a message. Besides, the verification of a given encrypted message can be done without any secret. In this thesis, we also introduce more desirable features to our redefined notion user conditional privacy preservation. In our second work, we consider not only the conditional privacy of the message sender but also that of the intended message receiver. This work presents a new encryption scheme which can be implemented in communication networks where there exists a blacklist containing a list of blocked communication channels, and each of them is established by a pair of sender and receiver. With this encryption scheme, a verifier can confirm whether one ciphertext is belonging to a legitimated communication channel without knowing the exact sender and receiver of that ciphertext. With our two previous works, for a given ciphertext, we ensure that no one except its intended receiver can identify the sender. However, the receiver of one message may behave dishonest when it tries to retrieve the real message sender, which incurs the problem that the receiver of a message might manipulate the origin of the message successfully for its own benefit. To tackle this problem, we present a novel encryption scheme in our third work. Apart from preserving user conditional privacy, this work also enforces the receiver to give a publicly verifiable proof so as to convince others that it is honest during the process of identifying the actual message sender. In our forth work, we show our special interest in the access control encryption, or ACE for short, and find this primitive can inherently achieve user conditional privacy preservation to some extent. we present a newly constructed ACE scheme in this work, and our scheme has advantages over existing ACE schemes in two aspects. Firstly, our ACE scheme is more reliable than existing ones since we utilize a distributed sanitizing algorithm and thus avoid the so called single point failure happened in ACE systems with only one sanitizer. Then, since the ciphertext and key size of our scheme is more compact than that of the existing ACE schemes, our scheme enjoys better scalability