2,300 research outputs found
Identity based cryptography from bilinear pairings
This report contains an overview of two related areas of research in cryptography
which have been prolific in significant advances in recent years. The first of
these areas is pairing based cryptography. Bilinear pairings over elliptic curves
were initially used as formal mathematical tools and later as cryptanalysis tools
that rendered supersingular curves insecure. In recent years, bilinear pairings
have been used to construct many cryptographic schemes. The second area
covered by this report is identity based cryptography. Digital certificates are
a fundamental part of public key cryptography, as one needs a secure way of
associating an agent’s identity with a random (meaningless) public key. In
identity based cryptography, public keys can be arbitrary bit strings, including
readable representations of one’s identity.Fundação para a Ci~Encia e Tecnologia - SFRH/BPD/20528/2004
Novel Techniques for Secure Use of Public Cloud Computing Resources
The federal government has an expressed interest in moving data and services to third party service providers in order to take advantage of the flexibility, scalability, and potential cost savings. This approach is called cloud computing. The thesis for this research is that efficient techniques exist to support the secure use of public cloud computing resources by a large, federated enterprise. The primary contributions of this research are the novel cryptographic system MA-AHASBE (Multi-Authority Anonymous Hierarchical Attribute-Set Based Encryption), and the techniques used to incorporate MA-AHASBE in a real world application. Performance results indicate that while there is a cost associated with enforcing the suggested security model, the cost is not unreasonable and the benefits in security can be significant. The contributions of this research give the DoD additional tools for supporting the mission while taking advantage of the cost efficient public cloud computing resources that are becoming widely available
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
Pairings in Cryptology: efficiency, security and applications
Abstract
The study of pairings can be considered in so many di�erent ways that it
may not be useless to state in a few words the plan which has been adopted,
and the chief objects at which it has aimed. This is not an attempt to write
the whole history of the pairings in cryptology, or to detail every discovery,
but rather a general presentation motivated by the two main requirements
in cryptology; e�ciency and security.
Starting from the basic underlying mathematics, pairing maps are con-
structed and a major security issue related to the question of the minimal
embedding �eld [12]1 is resolved. This is followed by an exposition on how
to compute e�ciently the �nal exponentiation occurring in the calculation
of a pairing [124]2 and a thorough survey on the security of the discrete log-
arithm problem from both theoretical and implementational perspectives.
These two crucial cryptologic requirements being ful�lled an identity based
encryption scheme taking advantage of pairings [24]3 is introduced. Then,
perceiving the need to hash identities to points on a pairing-friendly elliptic
curve in the more general context of identity based cryptography, a new
technique to efficiently solve this practical issue is exhibited.
Unveiling pairings in cryptology involves a good understanding of both
mathematical and cryptologic principles. Therefore, although �rst pre-
sented from an abstract mathematical viewpoint, pairings are then studied
from a more practical perspective, slowly drifting away toward cryptologic
applications
Key management for wireless sensor network security
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have attracted great attention not only in industry but also in academia due to their enormous application potential and unique security challenges. A typical sensor network can be seen as a combination of a number of low-cost sensor nodes which have very limited computation and communication capability, memory space, and energy supply. The nodes are self-organized into a network to sense or monitor surrounding information in an unattended environment, while the self-organization property makes the networks vulnerable to various attacks.Many cryptographic mechanisms that solve network security problems rely directly on secure and efficient key management making key management a fundamental research topic in the field of WSNs security. Although key management for WSNs has been studied over the last years, the majority of the literature has focused on some assumed vulnerabilities along with corresponding countermeasures. Specific application, which is an important factor in determining the feasibility of the scheme, has been overlooked to a large extent in the existing literature.This thesis is an effort to develop a key management framework and specific schemes for WSNs by which different types of keys can be established and also can be distributed in a self-healing manner; explicit/ implicit authentication can be integrated according to the security requirements of expected applications. The proposed solutions would provide reliable and robust security infrastructure for facilitating secure communications in WSNs.There are five main parts in the thesis. In Part I, we begin with an introduction to the research background, problems definition and overview of existing solutions. From Part II to Part IV, we propose specific solutions, including purely Symmetric Key Cryptography based solutions, purely Public Key Cryptography based solutions, and a hybrid solution. While there is always a trade-off between security and performance, analysis and experimental results prove that each proposed solution can achieve the expected security aims with acceptable overheads for some specific applications. Finally, we recapitulate the main contribution of our work and identify future research directions in Part V
Enabling Machine-aided Cryptographic Design
The design of cryptographic primitives such as digital signatures and public-key encryption is very often a manual process conducted by expert cryptographers. This persists despite the fact that many new generic or semi-generic methods have been proposed to construct new primitives by transforming existing ones in interesting ways. However, manually applying transformations to existing primitives can be error-prone, ad-hoc and tedious. A natural question is whether automating the process of applying cryptographic transformations would yield competitive or better results?
In this thesis, we explore a compiler-based approach for automatically performing certain cryptographic designs. Similar approaches have been applied to various types of cryptographic protocol design with compelling results. We extend this same approach and show that it also can be effective towards automatically applying cryptographic transformations.
We first present our extensible architecture that automates a class of cryptographic transformations on primitives. We then propose several techniques that address the aforementioned question including the Charm cryptographic framework, which enables rapid prototyping of cryptographic primitives from abstract descriptions. We build on this work and show the extent to which transformations can be performed automatically given these descriptions. To illustrate this automation, we present a series of cryptographic tools that demonstrate the effectiveness of our automated approach. Our contributions are listed as follows:
- AutoBatch: Batch verification is a transformation that improves signature verification time by efficiently processing many signatures at once. Historically, this manual process has been prone to error and tedious for practitioners. We describe the design of an automated tool that finds efficient batch verification algorithms from abstract descriptions of signature schemes.
- AutoGroup: Cryptographers often prefer to describe their pairing-based constructions using symmetric group notation for simplicity, while they prefer asymmetric groups for implementation due to the efficiency gains. The symmetric- to-asymmetric translation is usually performed through manual analysis of a scheme and finding an efficient translation that suits applications can be quite challenging. We present an automated tool that uses SMT solvers to find efficient asymmetric translations from abstract descriptions of cryptographic schemes.
- AutoStrong: Strongly unforgeable signatures are desired in practice for a variety of cryptographic protocols. Several transformations exist in the literature that show how to obtain strongly unforgeable signatures from existentially unforgeable ones. We focus on a particular highly-efficient transformation due to Boneh, Shen and Waters that is applicable if the signature satisfies a notion of partitioning. Checking for this property can be challenging and has been less explored in the literature. We present an automated tool that also utilizes SMT solvers to determine when this property is applicable for constructing efficient strongly unforgeable signatures from abstract descriptions.
We anticipate that these proof-of-concept tools embody the notion that certain cryptographic transformations can be safely and effectively outsourced to machines
- …