3,553 research outputs found
Security and Efficiency Analysis of the Hamming Distance Computation Protocol Based on Oblivious Transfer
open access articleBringer et al. proposed two cryptographic protocols for the computation of Hamming distance. Their first scheme uses Oblivious Transfer and provides security in the semi-honest model. The other scheme uses Committed Oblivious Transfer and is claimed to provide full security in the malicious case. The proposed protocols have direct implications to biometric authentication schemes between a prover and a verifier where the verifier has biometric data of the users in plain form.
In this paper, we show that their protocol is not actually fully secure against malicious adversaries. More precisely, our attack breaks the soundness property of their protocol where a malicious user can compute a Hamming distance which is different from the actual value. For biometric authentication systems, this attack allows a malicious adversary to pass the authentication without knowledge of the honest user's input with at most complexity instead of , where is the input length. We propose an enhanced version of their protocol where this attack is eliminated. The security of our modified protocol is proven using the simulation-based paradigm. Furthermore, as for efficiency concerns, the modified protocol utilizes Verifiable Oblivious Transfer which does not require the commitments to outputs which improves its efficiency significantly
Still Wrong Use of Pairings in Cryptography
Several pairing-based cryptographic protocols are recently proposed with a
wide variety of new novel applications including the ones in emerging
technologies like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), e-health systems
and wearable technologies. There have been however a wide range of incorrect
use of these primitives. The paper of Galbraith, Paterson, and Smart (2006)
pointed out most of the issues related to the incorrect use of pairing-based
cryptography. However, we noticed that some recently proposed applications
still do not use these primitives correctly. This leads to unrealizable,
insecure or too inefficient designs of pairing-based protocols. We observed
that one reason is not being aware of the recent advancements on solving the
discrete logarithm problems in some groups. The main purpose of this article is
to give an understandable, informative, and the most up-to-date criteria for
the correct use of pairing-based cryptography. We thereby deliberately avoid
most of the technical details and rather give special emphasis on the
importance of the correct use of bilinear maps by realizing secure
cryptographic protocols. We list a collection of some recent papers having
wrong security assumptions or realizability/efficiency issues. Finally, we give
a compact and an up-to-date recipe of the correct use of pairings.Comment: 25 page
A Survey on Homomorphic Encryption Schemes: Theory and Implementation
Legacy encryption systems depend on sharing a key (public or private) among
the peers involved in exchanging an encrypted message. However, this approach
poses privacy concerns. Especially with popular cloud services, the control
over the privacy of the sensitive data is lost. Even when the keys are not
shared, the encrypted material is shared with a third party that does not
necessarily need to access the content. Moreover, untrusted servers, providers,
and cloud operators can keep identifying elements of users long after users end
the relationship with the services. Indeed, Homomorphic Encryption (HE), a
special kind of encryption scheme, can address these concerns as it allows any
third party to operate on the encrypted data without decrypting it in advance.
Although this extremely useful feature of the HE scheme has been known for over
30 years, the first plausible and achievable Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)
scheme, which allows any computable function to perform on the encrypted data,
was introduced by Craig Gentry in 2009. Even though this was a major
achievement, different implementations so far demonstrated that FHE still needs
to be improved significantly to be practical on every platform. First, we
present the basics of HE and the details of the well-known Partially
Homomorphic Encryption (PHE) and Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption (SWHE), which
are important pillars of achieving FHE. Then, the main FHE families, which have
become the base for the other follow-up FHE schemes are presented. Furthermore,
the implementations and recent improvements in Gentry-type FHE schemes are also
surveyed. Finally, further research directions are discussed. This survey is
intended to give a clear knowledge and foundation to researchers and
practitioners interested in knowing, applying, as well as extending the state
of the art HE, PHE, SWHE, and FHE systems.Comment: - Updated. (October 6, 2017) - This paper is an early draft of the
survey that is being submitted to ACM CSUR and has been uploaded to arXiv for
feedback from stakeholder
A comprehensive meta-analysis of cryptographic security mechanisms for cloud computing
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The concept of cloud computing offers measurable computational or information resources as a service over the Internet. The major motivation behind the cloud setup is economic benefits, because it assures the reduction in expenditure for operational and infrastructural purposes. To transform it into a reality there are some impediments and hurdles which are required to be tackled, most profound of which are security, privacy and reliability issues. As the user data is revealed to the cloud, it departs the protection-sphere of the data owner. However, this brings partly new security and privacy concerns. This work focuses on these issues related to various cloud services and deployment models by spotlighting their major challenges. While the classical cryptography is an ancient discipline, modern cryptography, which has been mostly developed in the last few decades, is the subject of study which needs to be implemented so as to ensure strong security and privacy mechanisms in todayâs real-world scenarios. The technological solutions, short and long term research goals of the cloud security will be described and addressed using various classical cryptographic mechanisms as well as modern ones. This work explores the new directions in cloud computing security, while highlighting the correct selection of these fundamental technologies from cryptographic point of view
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
A Practical Set-Membership Proof for Privacy-Preserving NFC Mobile Ticketing
To ensure the privacy of users in transport systems, researchers are working
on new protocols providing the best security guarantees while respecting
functional requirements of transport operators. In this paper, we design a
secure NFC m-ticketing protocol for public transport that preserves users'
anonymity and prevents transport operators from tracing their customers' trips.
To this end, we introduce a new practical set-membership proof that does not
require provers nor verifiers (but in a specific scenario for verifiers) to
perform pairing computations. It is therefore particularly suitable for our
(ticketing) setting where provers hold SIM/UICC cards that do not support such
costly computations. We also propose several optimizations of Boneh-Boyen type
signature schemes, which are of independent interest, increasing their
performance and efficiency during NFC transactions. Our m-ticketing protocol
offers greater flexibility compared to previous solutions as it enables the
post-payment and the off-line validation of m-tickets. By implementing a
prototype using a standard NFC SIM card, we show that it fulfils the stringent
functional requirement imposed by transport operators whilst using strong
security parameters. In particular, a validation can be completed in 184.25 ms
when the mobile is switched on, and in 266.52 ms when the mobile is switched
off or its battery is flat
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