614 research outputs found
Verification of Information Flow Properties under Rational Observation
Information flow properties express the capability for an agent to infer
information about secret behaviours of a partially observable system. In a
language-theoretic setting, where the system behaviour is described by a
language, we define the class of rational information flow properties (RIFP),
where observers are modeled by finite transducers, acting on languages in a
given family . This leads to a general decidability criterion for
the verification problem of RIFPs on , implying
PSPACE-completeness for this problem on regular languages. We show that most
trace-based information flow properties studied up to now are RIFPs, including
those related to selective declassification and conditional anonymity. As a
consequence, we retrieve several existing decidability results that were
obtained by ad-hoc proofs.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, version extended from AVOCS'201
Interest-Based Access Control for Content Centric Networks (extended version)
Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is an emerging network architecture designed
to overcome limitations of the current IP-based Internet. One of the
fundamental tenets of CCN is that data, or content, is a named and addressable
entity in the network. Consumers request content by issuing interest messages
with the desired content name. These interests are forwarded by routers to
producers, and the resulting content object is returned and optionally cached
at each router along the path. In-network caching makes it difficult to enforce
access control policies on sensitive content outside of the producer since
routers only use interest information for forwarding decisions. To that end, we
propose an Interest-Based Access Control (IBAC) scheme that enables access
control enforcement using only information contained in interest messages,
i.e., by making sensitive content names unpredictable to unauthorized parties.
Our IBAC scheme supports both hash- and encryption-based name obfuscation. We
address the problem of interest replay attacks by formulating a mutual trust
framework between producers and consumers that enables routers to perform
authorization checks when satisfying interests from their cache. We assess the
computational, storage, and bandwidth overhead of each IBAC variant. Our design
is flexible and allows producers to arbitrarily specify and enforce any type of
access control on content, without having to deal with the problems of content
encryption and key distribution. This is the first comprehensive design for CCN
access control using only information contained in interest messages.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure
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
Cryptographic Key Management in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs): A survey
Since their appearance at the dawn of the second millennium, Delay or Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have gradually evolved, spurring the development of a variety of methods and protocols for making them more secure and resilient. In this context, perhaps, the most challenging problem to deal with is that of cryptographic key management. To the best of our knowledge, the work at hand is the first to survey the relevant literature and classify the various so far proposed key management approaches in such a restricted and harsh environment. Towards this goal, we have grouped the surveyed key management methods into three major categories depending on whether the particular method copes with a) security initialization, b) key establishment, and c) key revocation. We have attempted to provide a concise but fairly complete evaluation of the proposed up-to-date methods in a generalized way with the aim of offering a central reference point for future research
Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from 15 Years of Research and Deployments
Decentralized systems are a subset of distributed systems where multiple
authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by
all. This implies that any component in a decentralized system is potentially
adversarial. We revise fifteen years of research on decentralization and
privacy, and provide an overview of key systems, as well as key insights for
designers of future systems. We show that decentralized designs can enhance
privacy, integrity, and availability but also require careful trade-offs in
terms of system complexity, properties provided, and degree of
decentralization. These trade-offs need to be understood and navigated by
designers. We argue that a combination of insights from cryptography,
distributed systems, and mechanism design, aligned with the development of
adequate incentives, are necessary to build scalable and successful
privacy-preserving decentralized systems
Cryptographic Key Management in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs): A survey
Since their appearance at the dawn of the second millennium, Delay or Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have gradually evolved, spurring the development of a variety of methods and protocols for making them more secure and resilient. In this context, perhaps, the most challenging problem to deal with is that of cryptographic key management. To the best of our knowledge, the work at hand is the first to survey the relevant literature and classify the various so far proposed key management approaches in such a restricted and harsh environment. Towards this goal, we have grouped the surveyed key management methods into three major categories depending on whether the particular method copes with a) security initialization, b) key establishment, and c) key revocation. We have attempted to provide a concise but fairly complete evaluation of the proposed up-to-date methods in a generalized way with the aim of offering a central reference point for future research
Lightweight Three-Factor Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Internet-Integrated Wireless Sensor Networks
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will be integrated into the future Internet as one of the components of the Internet of Things, and will become globally addressable by any entity connected to the Internet. Despite the great potential of this integration, it also brings new threats, such as the exposure of sensor nodes to attacks originating from the Internet. In this context, lightweight authentication and key agreement protocols must be in place to enable end-to-end secure communication. Recently, Amin et al. proposed a three-factor mutual authentication protocol for WSNs. However, we identified several flaws in their protocol. We found that their protocol suffers from smart card loss attack where the user identity and password can be guessed using offline brute force techniques. Moreover, the protocol suffers from known session-specific temporary information attack, which leads to the disclosure of session keys in other sessions. Furthermore, the protocol is vulnerable to tracking attack and fails to fulfill user untraceability. To address these deficiencies, we present a lightweight and secure user authentication protocol based on the Rabin cryptosystem, which has the characteristic of computational asymmetry. We conduct a formal verification of our proposed protocol using ProVerif in order to demonstrate that our scheme fulfills the required security properties. We also present a comprehensive heuristic security analysis to show that our protocol is secure against all the possible attacks and provides the desired security features. The results we obtained show that our new protocol is a secure and lightweight solution for authentication and key agreement for Internet-integrated WSNs
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