5,237 research outputs found
Cooperative Authentication in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks
With the growing use of underwater acoustic communications (UWAC) for both
industrial and military operations, there is a need to ensure communication
security. A particular challenge is represented by underwater acoustic networks
(UWANs), which are often left unattended over long periods of time. Currently,
due to physical and performance limitations, UWAC packets rarely include
encryption, leaving the UWAN exposed to external attacks faking legitimate
messages. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for message authentication
in a UWAN setting. We begin by observing that, due to the strong spatial
dependency of the underwater acoustic channel, an attacker can attempt to mimic
the channel associated with the legitimate transmitter only for a small set of
receivers, typically just for a single one. Taking this into account, our
scheme relies on trusted nodes that independently help a sink node in the
authentication process. For each incoming packet, the sink fuses beliefs
evaluated by the trusted nodes to reach an authentication decision. These
beliefs are based on estimated statistical channel parameters, chosen to be the
most sensitive to the transmitter-receiver displacement. Our simulation results
show accurate identification of an attacker's packet. We also report results
from a sea experiment demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: Author version of paper accepted for publication in the IEEE
Transactions on Wireless Communication
A Formal Study of the Privacy Concerns in Biometric-Based Remote Authentication Schemes
With their increasing popularity in cryptosystems, biometrics have attracted more and more attention from the information security community. However, how to handle the relevant privacy concerns remains to be troublesome. In this paper, we propose a novel security model to formalize the privacy concerns in biometric-based remote authentication schemes. Our security model covers a number of practical privacy concerns such as identity privacy and transaction anonymity, which have not been formally considered in the literature. In addition, we propose a general biometric-based remote authentication scheme and prove its security in our security model
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
Exploratory study to explore the role of ICT in the process of knowledge management in an Indian business environment
In the 21st century and the emergence of a digital economy, knowledge and the knowledge base economy are rapidly growing. To effectively be able to understand the processes involved in the creating, managing and sharing of knowledge management in the business environment is critical to the success of an organization. This study builds on the previous research of the authors on the enablers of knowledge management by identifying the relationship between the enablers of knowledge management and the role played by information communication technologies (ICT) and ICT infrastructure in a business setting. This paper provides the findings of a survey collected from the four major Indian cities (Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai and Villupuram) regarding their views and opinions about the enablers of knowledge management in business setting. A total of 80 organizations participated in the study with 100 participants in each city. The results show that ICT and ICT infrastructure can play a critical role in the creating, managing and sharing of knowledge in an Indian business environment
ARPA Whitepaper
We propose a secure computation solution for blockchain networks. The
correctness of computation is verifiable even under malicious majority
condition using information-theoretic Message Authentication Code (MAC), and
the privacy is preserved using Secret-Sharing. With state-of-the-art multiparty
computation protocol and a layer2 solution, our privacy-preserving computation
guarantees data security on blockchain, cryptographically, while reducing the
heavy-lifting computation job to a few nodes. This breakthrough has several
implications on the future of decentralized networks. First, secure computation
can be used to support Private Smart Contracts, where consensus is reached
without exposing the information in the public contract. Second, it enables
data to be shared and used in trustless network, without disclosing the raw
data during data-at-use, where data ownership and data usage is safely
separated. Last but not least, computation and verification processes are
separated, which can be perceived as computational sharding, this effectively
makes the transaction processing speed linear to the number of participating
nodes. Our objective is to deploy our secure computation network as an layer2
solution to any blockchain system. Smart Contracts\cite{smartcontract} will be
used as bridge to link the blockchain and computation networks. Additionally,
they will be used as verifier to ensure that outsourced computation is
completed correctly. In order to achieve this, we first develop a general MPC
network with advanced features, such as: 1) Secure Computation, 2) Off-chain
Computation, 3) Verifiable Computation, and 4)Support dApps' needs like
privacy-preserving data exchange
Cast-as-Intended Mechanism with Return Codes Based on PETs
We propose a method providing cast-as-intended verifiability for remote
electronic voting. The method is based on plaintext equivalence tests (PETs),
used to match the cast ballots against the pre-generated encrypted code tables.
Our solution provides an attractive balance of security and functional
properties. It is based on well-known cryptographic building blocks and relies
on standard cryptographic assumptions, which allows for relatively simple
security analysis. Our scheme is designed with a built-in fine-grained
distributed trust mechanism based on threshold decryption. It, finally, imposes
only very little additional computational burden on the voting platform, which
is especially important when voters use devices of restricted computational
power such as mobile phones. At the same time, the computational cost on the
server side is very reasonable and scales well with the increasing ballot size
Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey
This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer
security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of
physical-layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over
a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers without relying
on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without
the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding
strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop
secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the
foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on
information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure
transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna
systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access,
interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment
protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered.
Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along
with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and
stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical-layer message
authentication is also introduced briefly. The survey concludes with
observations on potential research directions in this area.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, 303 refs. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1303.1609 by other authors. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials,
201
Introducing Accountability to Anonymity Networks
Many anonymous communication (AC) networks rely on routing traffic through
proxy nodes to obfuscate the originator of the traffic. Without an
accountability mechanism, exit proxy nodes risk sanctions by law enforcement if
users commit illegal actions through the AC network. We present BackRef, a
generic mechanism for AC networks that provides practical repudiation for the
proxy nodes by tracing back the selected outbound traffic to the predecessor
node (but not in the forward direction) through a cryptographically verifiable
chain. It also provides an option for full (or partial) traceability back to
the entry node or even to the corresponding user when all intermediate nodes
are cooperating. Moreover, to maintain a good balance between anonymity and
accountability, the protocol incorporates whitelist directories at exit proxy
nodes. BackRef offers improved deployability over the related work, and
introduces a novel concept of pseudonymous signatures that may be of
independent interest.
We exemplify the utility of BackRef by integrating it into the onion routing
(OR) protocol, and examine its deployability by considering several
system-level aspects. We also present the security definitions for the BackRef
system (namely, anonymity, backward traceability, no forward traceability, and
no false accusation) and conduct a formal security analysis of the OR protocol
with BackRef using ProVerif, an automated cryptographic protocol verifier,
establishing the aforementioned security properties against a strong
adversarial model
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