TumbleBit: an untrusted Bitcoin-compatible anonymous payment hub

This paper presents TumbleBit, a new unidirectional unlinkable payment hub that is fully compatible with today s Bitcoin protocol. TumbleBit allows parties to make fast, anonymous, off-blockchain payments through an untrusted intermediary called the Tumbler. TumbleBits anonymity properties are similar to classic Chaumian eCash: no one, not even the Tumbler, can link a payment from its payer to its payee. Every payment made via TumbleBit is backed by bitcoins, and comes with a guarantee that Tumbler can neither violate anonymity, nor steal bitcoins, nor print money by issuing payments to itself. We prove the security of TumbleBit using the real/ideal world paradigm and the random oracle model. Security follows from the standard RSA assumption and ECDSA unforgeability. We implement TumbleBit, mix payments from 800 users and show that TumbleBits offblockchain payments can complete in seconds.https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/575.pdfPublished versio

Biometric identity-based cryptography for e-Government environment

Government information is a vital asset that must be kept in a trusted environment and efficiently managed by authorised parties. Even though e-Government provides a number of advantages, it also introduces a range of new security risks. Sharing confidential and top-secret information in a secure manner among government sectors tend to be the main element that government agencies look for. Thus, developing an effective methodology is essential and it is a key factor for e-Government success. The proposed e-Government scheme in this paper is a combination of identity-based encryption and biometric technology. This new scheme can effectively improve the security in authentication systems, which provides a reliable identity with a high degree of assurance. In addition, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of using Finite-state machines as a formal method to analyse the proposed protocols

Modelling and simulation of a biometric identity-based cryptography

Government information is a vital asset that must be kept in a trusted environment and efficiently managed by authorised parties. Even though e-Government provides a number of advantages, it also introduces a range of new security risks. Sharing confidential and top-secret information in a secure manner among government sectors tend to be the main element that government agencies look for. Thus, developing an effective methodology is essential and it is a key factor for e-Government success. The proposed e-Government scheme in this paper is a combination of identity-based encryption and biometric technology. This new scheme can effectively improve the security in authentication systems, which provides a reliable identity with a high degree of assurance. In addition, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of using Finite-state machines as a formal method to analyse the proposed protocols

A Certificateless One-Way Group Key Agreement Protocol for Point-to-Point Email Encryption

Over the years, email has evolved and grown to one of the most widely used form of communication between individuals and organizations. Nonetheless, the current information technology standards do not value the significance of email security in today\u27s technologically advanced world. Not until recently, email services such as Yahoo and Google started to encrypt emails for privacy protection. Despite that, the encrypted emails will be decrypted and stored in the email service provider\u27s servers as backup. If the server is hacked or compromised, it can lead to leakage and modification of one\u27s email. Therefore, there is a strong need for point-to-point (P2P) email encryption to protect email user\u27s privacy. P2P email encryption schemes strongly rely on the underlying Public Key Cryptosystems (PKC). The evolution of the public key cryptography from the traditional PKC to the Identity-based PKC (ID-PKC) and then to the Certificateless PKC (CL-PKC) provides a better and more suitable cryptosystem to implement P2P email encryption. Many current public-key based cryptographic protocols either suffer from the expensive public-key certificate infrastructure (in traditional PKC) or the key escrow problem (in ID-PKC). CL-PKC is a relatively new cryptosystem that was designed to overcome both problems. In this thesis, we present a CL-PKC group key agreement protocol, which is, as the author\u27s knowledge, the first one with all the following features in one protocol: (1) certificateless and thus there is no key escrow problem and no public key certificate infrastructure is required. (2) one-way group key agreement and thus no back-and-forth message exchange is required; (3) n-party group key agreement (not just 2- or 3-party); and (4) no secret channel is required for key distribution. With the above features, P2P email encryption can be implemented securely and efficiently. This thesis provides a security proof for the proposed protocol using ``proof by simulation\u27\u27. Efficiency analysis of the protocol is also presented in this thesis. In addition, we have implemented the prototypes (email encryption systems) in two different scenarios in this thesis