Efficient biometric and password based mutual authentication for consumer USB mass storage devices

A Universal Serial Bus (USB) Mass Storage Device (MSD), often termed a USB flash drive, is ubiquitously used to store important information in unencrypted binary format. This low cost consumer device is incredibly popular due to its size, large storage capacity and relatively high transfer speed. However, if the device is lost or stolen an unauthorized person can easily retrieve all the information. Therefore, it is advantageous in many applications to provide security protection so that only authorized users can access the stored information. In order to provide security protection for a USB MSD, this paper proposes a session key agreement protocol after secure user authentication. The main aim of this protocol is to establish session key negotiation through which all the information retrieved, stored and transferred to the USB MSD is encrypted. This paper not only contributes an efficient protocol, but also does not suffer from the forgery attack and the password guessing attack as compared to other protocols in the literature. This paper analyses the security of the proposed protocol through a formal analysis which proves that the information is stored confidentially and is protected offering strong resilience to relevant security attacks. The computational cost and communication cost of the proposed scheme is analyzed and compared to related work to show that the proposed scheme has an improved tradeoff for computational cost, communication cost and security

Security Analysis and Modification of ID-Based Encryption with Equality Test from ACISP 2017

At ACISP 2017, Wu et al. presented an identity-based encryption with equality test (IBEET) that considers to prevent insider attacks. To analyze its security, they proposed a new security notion for IBEET, which is slightly weaker than the indistinguishability under adaptive identity and chosen ciphertext attacks (IND-ID-CCA2) for traditional identity-based encryption. Then, they claimed that their proposed scheme achieves this new security notion under the Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (BDH) assumption in the random oracle model. In this paper, we demonstrate that their scheme does not achieve the claimed security requirement by presenting an attack. Our attack algorithm is very simple: It requires only a pair of message and ciphertext, and takes one exponentiation and two bilinear map evaluations. Subsequently, we present a modification of their IBEET construction and show that it satisfies their security notion under the BDH assumption and the existence of strong pseudorandom permutation and existentially unforgeable message authentication code in the random oracle model. We remark that our modification has better efficiency than the original construction

Chaotic Compilation for Encrypted Computing: Obfuscation but Not in Name

An `obfuscation' for encrypted computing is quantified exactly here, leading to an argument that security against polynomial-time attacks has been achieved for user data via the deliberately `chaotic' compilation required for security properties in that environment. Encrypted computing is the emerging science and technology of processors that take encrypted inputs to encrypted outputs via encrypted intermediate values (at nearly conventional speeds). The aim is to make user data in general-purpose computing secure against the operator and operating system as potential adversaries. A stumbling block has always been that memory addresses are data and good encryption means the encrypted value varies randomly, and that makes hitting any target in memory problematic without address decryption, yet decryption anywhere on the memory path would open up many easily exploitable vulnerabilities. This paper `solves (chaotic) compilation' for processors without address decryption, covering all of ANSI C while satisfying the required security properties and opening up the field for the standard software tool-chain and infrastructure. That produces the argument referred to above, which may also hold without encryption.Comment: 31 pages. Version update adds "Chaotic" in title and throughout paper, and recasts abstract and Intro and other sections of the text for better access by cryptologists. To the same end it introduces the polynomial time defense argument explicitly in the final section, having now set that denouement out in the abstract and intr

Can you sign a quantum state?

Cryptography with quantum states exhibits a number of surprising and counterintuitive features. In a 2002 work, Barnum et al. argued informally that these strange features should imply that digital signatures for quantum states are impossible (Barnum et al., FOCS 2002). In this work, we perform the first rigorous study of the problem of signing quantum states. We first show that the intuition of Barnum et al. was correct, by proving an impossibility result which rules out even very weak forms of signing quantum states. Essentially, we show that any non-trivial combination of correctness and security requirements results in negligible security. This rules out all quantum signature schemes except those which simply measure the state and then sign the outcome using a classical scheme. In other words, only classical signature schemes exist. We then show a positive result: it is possible to sign quantum states, provided that they are also encrypted with the public key of the intended recipient. Following classical nomenclature, we call this notion quantum signcryption. Classically, signcryption is only interesting if it provides superior efficiency to simultaneous encryption and signing. Our results imply that, quantumly, it is far more interesting: by the laws of quantum mechanics, it is the only signing method available. We develop security definitions for quantum signcryption, ranging from a simple one-time two-user setting, to a chosen-ciphertext-secure many-time multi-user setting. We also give secure constructions based on post-quantum public-key primitives. Along the way, we show that a natural hybrid method of combining classical and quantum schemes can be used to "upgrade" a secure classical scheme to the fully-quantum setting, in a wide range of cryptographic settings including signcryption, authenticated encryption, and chosen-ciphertext security

A novel and efficient session spanning biometric and password based three-factor authentication protocol for consumer USB mass storage devices

This paper proposes a key agreement scheme after secure authentication to prevent the unauthorized access of the data stored in a Universal Serial Bus (USB) Mass Storage Device (MSD). Due to the system architecture of this proposed scheme, authorized users can store their data in a secure encrypted form after performing authentication. The novelty of this work is that users can retrieve the encrypted data in not only the current session but also across different sessions, thus reducing the required communications overhead. This paper then analyses the security of the proposed protocol through a formal analysis to demonstrate that the information has been stored securely and is also protected offering strong resilience to relevant security attacks. The computational and communication costs of the proposed scheme is analyzed and compared to related works to show that the proposed scheme has an improved tradeoff for computational cost, communication cost and security

On the Feasibility of Identity-based Encryption with Equality Test against Insider Attacks

As a generalization of public key encryption with keyword search, public key encryption with equality test was proposed, and identity-based encryption with equality test (IBEET) is its identity-based variant. In IBEET, anyone can check whether two ciphertexts of distinct identities are encryptions of the same plaintext or not using trapdoors. Due to its functionality, IBEET cannot provide any indistinguishability-based security for trapdoor holders. As a variant of IBEET, IBEET against insider attacks (IBEETIA) was proposed, where a token is defined for each identity and is used for encryption, and anyone can check whether two ciphertexts of distinct identities are encryptions of the same plaintext or not without using trapdoors, and an indistinguishability security of IBEETIA was defined. Lee et al. (ACISP 2018) and Duong et al. (ProvSec 2019) proposed a paring-based and a lattice-based constructions, respectively. That is, current concrete IBEETIA schemes are constructed by identity-based encryption (IBE) related complexity assumptions. According to the implication result shown by Boneh et al. (FOCS 2008), IBE is recognized as a strong cryptographic primitive because no black-box construction of IBE from trapdoor permutations exist. However, Emura and Takayasu (IEICE Transactions 2023) demonstrated that symmetric key encryption and pseudo-random permutations are sufficient to construct IBEETIA which is secure in the previous security definition. These results suggest us to explore a condition of IBEETIA that requires to employ IBE-related complexity assumptions. In this paper, we demonstrate a sufficient condition that IBEETIA implies IBE. We define one-wayness against chosen-plaintext/ciphertext attacks for the token generator (OW-TG-CPA/CCA) and for token holders (OW-TH-CPA/CCA), which were not considered in the previous security definition. We show that OW-TG-CPA secure IBEETIA with additional conditions implies OW-CPA secure IBE, and show that Lee et al. and Duong et al. schemes provide the OW-TG-CPA security. On the other hand, we propose a generic construction of OW-TH-CCA secure IBEETIA from public key encryption. Our results suggest a design principle to efficiently construct IBEETIA without employing IBE-related complexity assumptions

Deduction with XOR Constraints in Security API Modelling

We introduce XOR constraints, and show how they enable a theorem prover to reason effectively about security critical subsystems which employ bitwise XOR. Our primary case study is the API of the IBM 4758 hardware security module. We also show how our technique can be applied to standard security protocols