Secure Equality Test Technique Using Identity-Based Signcryption for Telemedicine Systems

For telemedicine, wireless body area network (WBAN) offers enormous benefits where a patient can be remotely monitored without compromising the mobility of remote treatments. With the advent of high capacity and reliable wireless networks, WBANs are used in several remote monitoring systems, limiting the COVID-19 spread. The sensitivity of telemedicine applications mandates confidentiality and privacy requirements. In this article, we propose a secure WBAN-19 telemedicine system to overcome the pervasiveness of contagious deceases utilizing a novel aggregate identity-based signcryption scheme with an equality test feature. We demonstrate a security analysis regarding indistinguishable adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack (IND-CCA2), one-way security against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack (OW-CCA2), and unforgeability against adaptive chosen-message attack (EUF-CMA) under the random oracle model. The security analysis of the scheme is followed by complexity evaluations where the computation cost and communication overhead are measured. The evaluation demonstrates that the proposed model is efficient and applicable in telemedicine systems with high-performance capacities

Contributions to Lattice–based Cryptography

Post–quantum cryptography (PQC) is a new and fast–growing part of Cryptography. It focuses on developing cryptographic algorithms and protocols that resist quantum adversaries (i.e., the adversaries who have access to quantum computers). To construct a new PQC primitive, a designer must use a mathematical problem intractable for the quantum adversary. Many intractability assumptions are being used in PQC. There seems to be a consensus in the research community that the most promising are intractable/hard problems in lattices. However, lattice–based cryptography still needs more research to make it more efficient and practical. The thesis contributes toward achieving either the novelty or the practicality of lattice– based cryptographic systems

Security protocols for mobile ubiquitous e-health systems

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorWearable and implantable medical devices constitute an already established industry nowadays. According to a recent research [113], North America is currently the most important market followed by Europe, Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world. Additionally, the same document remarks the importance of the Asia-Pacific region due to the rising ageing population and the overpopulation in that area. The most common implantable medical devices include pacemakers, defibrillators, cochlear implants, insulin pumps, and neurostimulators among others. In recent years, the proliferation of smartphones and other mobile “smart” devices with substantial computational and communication capabilities have reshaped the way wireless body area network may be implemented. In their current generation (or in a near future), all of them share a common feature: wireless communication capabilities [127]. Moreover, implantable medical devices have the ability to support and store telemetry data facilitating the remote monitoring of the patient. Medical devices can be part of a wireless body area network, operating both as sensors and as actuators and making decisions in real time. On the other hand, a new kind of devices called wearables such as smart bracelets or smart watches have been equipped with several sensors like Photoplethysmogram (PPG) to record the heart beats, accelerometers to count the steps or Global Positioning System (GPS) to geopositioning users and were originally conceived as cheap solutions to help people to improve their workout. However these devices have demonstrated to be quite useful in many healthcare environments due to a huge variety of different and low-cost medical sensors. Thus, patients can be monitored for long periods of time without interfering in their daily life and taking their vital signs constantly under control. Security and privacy issues have been described as two of the most challenging problems of implantable medical devices and, more generally, wireless body area networks [6, 47, 84, 103]. As an example, it has been demonstrated that somebody equipped with a low cost device can eavesdrop on the data exchanged between a reader and a peacemaker and may even induce a cardiac arrest [71]. Health-related data have been the focus of several attacks almost since the adoption of computers in the healthcare domain. As a recent example, in 2010 personal data from more than 26 million of veterans were stolen from the Department of Veterans Affairs’ database in the US by an employee who had access to the database [104]. The Ponemon Institute pointed out that Germany and the US spent in 2013 more than $7.56 and$11 millions, respectively, to protect personal health records from attacks. This PhD dissertation explores the security and privacy of data in healthcare environments where confidential information is measured in real time by some sensors placed in, on, or around the human body. Security and privacy in medical conditions have been widely studied by the research community, nonetheless with the recent boom of wearable devices, new security issues have arisen. The first part of this dissertation is dedicated to the introduction and to expose both the main motivation and objectives of this PhD Thesis. Additionally the contributions and the organization of this document are also presented. In the second part a recent proposal has been analysed from the security and privacy points of view. From this study, vulnerabilities concerning to full disclosure, impersonation, traceability, de-synchronization, and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks have been found. These attacks make the protocol infeasible to be introduced with an adequate security and sufficient privacy protection level. Finally, a new protocol named Fingerprint⁺ protocol for Internet of Thing (IoT) is presented, which is based on ISO/IEC 9798-2 and ISO/IEC 18000-6C and whose security is formally verified using BAN logic. In the third part of this dissertation, a new system based on International Standard Organization (ISO) standards and security National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommendations have been proposed. First, we present a mutual entity authentication protocol inspired on ISO/IEC 9798 Part 2. This system could be deployed in a hospital where Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology may be used to prune blood-handling errors, i.e., the identities of the patients and blood bags are confirmed (authentication protocol) and after that the matching between both entities is checked (verification step). Second, a secure messaging protocol inspired on ISO/IEC 11770 Part 2 and similar to that used in electronic passports is presented. Nowadays the new generation of medical implants possess wireless connectivity. Imagine a doctor equipped with a reader aims to access the records of vital signals stored on the memory of an implant. In this scenario, the doctor (reader) and the patient (implant) are first mutually authenticated and then a secure exchange of data can be performed. The fourth part of this Thesis provides an architecture based on two cryptographic protocols, the first one is for publishing personal data in a body area network composed of different sensors whereas the second one is designed for sending commands to those sensors by guaranteeing the confidentiality and fine-grained access control to the private data. Both protocols are based on a recently proposed public cryptography paradigm named ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption scheme which is lightweight enough to be embedded into wearable devices and sensors. Contrarily to other proposals made on this field, this architecture allows sensors not only to encrypt data but also to decrypt messages generated by other devices. The fifth part presents a new decentralized attribute based encryption scheme named Decentralized Ciphertext-Policy Attribute Based Searchable Encryption that incorporates ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption with keyword search over encrypted data. This scheme allows users to (a) encrypt their personal data collected by a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) according to a policy of attributes; (b) define a set of keywords to enable other users (e.g., hospital stuff) to perform encrypted search over their personal (encrypted) data; (c) securely store the encrypted data on a semi-honest server and let the semi-honest server run the (encrypted) keyword search. Note that any user can perform a keyword query on the encrypted data, however the decryption of the resulting ciphertexts is possible only for users whose attribute satisfy the policy with which the data had been encrypted. We state and prove the security of our scheme against an honest-but-curious server and a passive adversary. Finally, we implement our system on heterogeneous devices and demonstrate its efficiency and scalability. Finally, this document ends with a conclusions achieved during this PhD and a summary of the main published contributions.Los dispositivos médicos implantables como los marcapasos o las bombas de insulina fueron concebidas originalmente para controlar automáticamente ciertos parámetros biológicos y, llegado el caso, poder actuar ante comportamientos anómalos como ataques cardíacos o episodios de hipoglucemia. Recientemente, han surgido uno dispositivos llamados wearables como las pulseras cuantificadoras, los relojes inteligentes o las bandas pectorales. Estos dispositivos han sido equipados con un número de sensores con capacidad de monitorizar señales vitales como el ritmo cardíaco, los movimientos (acelerómetros) o sistemas de posicionamiento (GPS) entre otros muchas opciones, siendo además una solución asequible y accesible para todo el mundo. A pesar de que el propósito original fue la mejora del rendimiento en actividades deportivas, estos dispositivos han resultado ser de gran utilidad en entornos médicos debido a su amplia variedad de sensores. Esta tecnología puede ayudar al personal médico a realizar seguimientos personalizados, constantes y en tiempo real del comportamiento de los pacientes, sin necesidad de interferir en sus vidas cotidianas. Esta Tesis doctoral está centrada en la seguridad y privacidad en entornos médicos, donde la información es recogida en tiempo real a través de una serie de sensores que pueden estar implantados o equipados en el propio paciente. La seguridad y la privacidad en entornos médicos ha sido el foco de muchos investigadores, no obstante con el reciente auge de los wearables se han generado nuevos retos debido a que son dispositivos con fuertes restricciones de cómputo, de memoria, de tamaño o de autonomía. En la primera parte de este documento, se introduce el problema de la seguridad y la privacidad en el paradigma de Internet de las cosas y haciendo especial hincapié en los entornos médicos. La motivación así como los principales objetivos y contribuciones también forman parte de este primer capítulo introductorio. La segunda parte de esta Tesis presenta un nuevo protocolo de autenticación basado en RFID para IoT. Este capítulo analiza previamente, desde el punto de vista de la seguridad y la privacidad un protocolo publicado recientemente y, tras demostrar que carece de las medidas de seguridad suficientes, un nuevo protocolo llamado Fingerprint⁺ compatible con los estándares de seguridad definidos en el estándar ISO/IEC 9798-2 y EPC-C1G2 (equivalente al estándard ISO/IEC 18000-6C) ha sido propuesto. Un nuevo sistema basado en estándares ISO y en recomendaciones realizadas por el NIST ha sido propuesto en la tercera parte de esta Tesis. En este capítulo se presentan dos protocolos bien diferenciados, el primero de ellos consiste en un protocolo de autenticación basado en el estándar ISO/IEC 9798 Part 2. A modo de ejemplo, este protocolo puede evitar problemas de compatibilidad sanguínea, es decir, primero se confirma que el paciente es quien dice ser y que la bolsa de sangre realmente contiene sangre (proceso de autenticación). Posteriormente se comprueba que esa bolsa de sangre va a ser compatible con el paciente (proceso de verificación). El segundo de los protocolos propuestos consiste en un protocolo seguro para el intercambio de información basado en el estándar ISO/IEC 11770 Part 2 (el mismo que los pasaportes electrónicos). Siguiendo con el ejemplo médico, imaginemos que un doctor equipado con un lector de radiofrecuencia desea acceder a los datos que un dispositivo implantado en el paciente está recopilando. En este escenario tanto el lector como el implante, se deben autenticar mutuamente para poder realizar el intercambio de información de manera segura. En el cuarto capítulo, una nueva arquitectura basada en el modelo de Publish/Subscribe ha sido propuesto. Esta solución está compuesta de dos protocolos, uno para el intercambio de información en una red de área personal y otro para poder reconfigurar el comportamiento de los sensores. Ambos protocolos están diseñados para garantizar tanto la seguridad como la privacidad de todos los datos que se envían en la red. Para ello, el sistema está basado en un sistema de criptografía de clave pública llamado Attribute Based Encryption que es suficientemente ligero y versátil como para ser implementado en dispositivos con altas restricciones de cómputo y de memoria. A continuación, en el quinto capítulo se propone una solución completamente orientada a entornos médicos donde la información que los sensores obtienen de los pacientes es cifrada y almacenada en servidores públicos. Una vez en estos servidores, cualquier usuario con privilegios suficientes puede realizar búsquedas sobre datos cifrados, obtener la información y descifrarla. De manera adicional, antes de que los datos cifrados se manden a la nube, el paciente puede definir una serie de palabras claves que se enlazarán a los datos para permitir posteriormente búsquedas y así obtener la información relacionada a un tema en concreto de manera fácil y eficiente. El último capítulo de esta Tesis se muestran las principales conclusiones obtenidas así como un resumen de las contribuciones científicas publicadas durante el período doctoral.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ciencia y Tecnología InformáticaPresidente: Arturo Ribagorda Garnacho.- Secretario: Jorge Blasco Alís.- Vocal: Jesús Garicia López de Lacall

Secure and practical computation on encrypted data

Because of the importance of computing on data with privacy protections, the cryptographic community has developed both theoretical and practical solutions to compute on encrypted data. On the one hand, theoretical schemes, such as fully homomorphic encryption and functional encryption, are secure but extremely inefficient. On the other hand, practical schemes, such as property-preserving encryption, gain efficiency by accepting significant reductions in security. In this thesis, we first study the security of popular property-preserving encryption schemes that are being used by companies such as Microsoft and Google. We show that such schemes are unacceptably insecure for key target applications such as electronic medical records. Second, we propose new models to compute on encrypted data and develop efficient constructions and systems. We propose a new cryptographic primitive called Blind Storage and show how it can be used to realize symmetric searchable encryption, which is much more secure than property-preserving encryption. Finally, we propose a new cryptographic model called Controlled Functional Encryption and develop two efficient schemes in this model

Economic drivers in security decisions in public Wi-Fi context

This thesis investigates economic drivers in security decisions in the context of public Wi-Fi. Four sets of studies took place. The first set examined the risks of public Wi-Fi today. An experimental rogue public Wi-Fi was set up for 150 hours first in London, UK, in 2016, and then in Nara, Japan, in 2017. Sensitive data such as emails and login credentials were found to have been transmitted insecurely. The second set of studies examined decision-making and drivers influencing users to use public Wi-Fi. Participants (106 - UK, 103 - Japan) took part in scenario-based questionnaires. Findings showed that the desire to save mobile data allowance, a form of resource preservation heuristic tendency (RPHT), significantly prompted participants who regularly face mobile data constraints to use public Wi-Fi. The next study examined evidence in the wild. Participants (71 - UK only) were recruited for three months to run My Wi-Fi Choices, an Android app developed to capture factors driving the decisions to use public Wi-Fi. The results emphasised the importance of RPHT in driving users to use public Wi-Fi. Therefore, advising an individual trapped in mobile data RPHT to stop using public Wi-Fi entirely is futile. Alternative security advice is needed. This led to the last set of studies examining user decision to adopt a Virtual Private Network (VPN) app which can help to mitigate public Wi-Fi risks. Discrete choice experiments were run with 243 participants (154 - UK, 94 - Japan) to examine attributes of a VPN app affecting user decision. Various attributes of a VPN app were identified as drivers for the download and installation and the actual use of the app. Combining the knowledge gained from all studies, this thesis proposes a RPHT-decision model explaining the effects of RPHT on security decisions

Efficient Techniques for Privacy-Preserving Sharing of Sensitive Information

The need for privacy-preserving sharing of sensitive information occurs in many different and realistic everyday scenarios, ranging from national security to social networking. A typical setting involves two parties: one seeks information from the other without revealing the interest while the latter is either willing, or compelled, to share only the requested information. This poses two challenges: (1) how to enable sharing such that parties learn no information beyond what they are entitled to, and (2) how to do so efficiently, in real-world practical terms. This paper explores the notion of Privacy-Preserving Sharing of Sensitive Information (PPSSI), and provides a concrete and efficient instantiation, modeled in the context of simple database querying. Proposed approach functions as a privacy shield to protect parties from disclosing more than the required minimum of their respective sensitive information. PPSSI deployment prompts several challenges, which are addressed in this paper. Extensive experimental results attest to the practicality of attained privacy features and show that our approach incurs quite low overhead (e.g., 10% slower than standard MySQL). © 2011 Springer-Verlag

Encrypted Databases:New Volume Attacks against Range Queries

We present a range of novel attacks which exploit information about the volume of answers to range queries in encrypted database. Our attacks rely on a strategy which is simple yet robust and effective. We illustrate the robustness of our strategy in a number of ways. We show how i) to adapt the attack for several variations of a basic usage scenario ii) to defeat countermeasures intended to thwart the premise of our basic attack and iii) to perform partial reconstruction of secret data when unique reconstruction is information theoretically impossible. Furthermore, over the state of the art, our attacks require one order of magnitude fewer queries. We show how to improve the attacks even further, under the assumption that some partial information is known to the adversary. We validate experimentally all of our attacks through extensive experiments on real-world medical data and justify theoretically the effectiveness of our strategy for the basic attack scenario. Our new attacks further underscore the difficulty of striking an appropriate functionality-security trade-off for encrypted databases

Challenges in Cybersecurity and Privacy - the European Research Landscape

Cybersecurity and Privacy issues are becoming an important barrier for a trusted and dependable global digital society development. Cyber-criminals are continuously shifting their cyber-attacks specially against cyber-physical systems and IoT, since they present additional vulnerabilities due to their constrained capabilities, their unattended nature and the usage of potential untrustworthiness components. Likewise, identity-theft, fraud, personal data leakages, and other related cyber-crimes are continuously evolving, causing important damages and privacy problems for European citizens in both virtual and physical scenarios. In this context, new holistic approaches, methodologies, techniques and tools are needed to cope with those issues, and mitigate cyberattacks, by employing novel cyber-situational awareness frameworks, risk analysis and modeling, threat intelligent systems, cyber-threat information sharing methods, advanced big-data analysis techniques as well as exploiting the benefits from latest technologies such as SDN/NFV and Cloud systems. In addition, novel privacy-preserving techniques, and crypto-privacy mechanisms, identity and eID management systems, trust services, and recommendations are needed to protect citizens’ privacy while keeping usability levels. The European Commission is addressing the challenge through different means, including the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program, thereby financing innovative projects that can cope with the increasing cyberthreat landscape. This book introduces several cybersecurity and privacy research challenges and how they are being addressed in the scope of 15 European research projects. Each chapter is dedicated to a different funded European Research project, which aims to cope with digital security and privacy aspects, risks, threats and cybersecurity issues from a different perspective. Each chapter includes the project’s overviews and objectives, the particular challenges they are covering, research achievements on security and privacy, as well as the techniques, outcomes, and evaluations accomplished in the scope of the EU project. The book is the result of a collaborative effort among relative ongoing European Research projects in the field of privacy and security as well as related cybersecurity fields, and it is intended to explain how these projects meet the main cybersecurity and privacy challenges faced in Europe. Namely, the EU projects analyzed in the book are: ANASTACIA, SAINT, YAKSHA, FORTIKA, CYBECO, SISSDEN, CIPSEC, CS-AWARE. RED-Alert, Truessec.eu. ARIES, LIGHTest, CREDENTIAL, FutureTrust, LEPS. Challenges in Cybersecurity and Privacy - the European Research Landscape is ideal for personnel in computer/communication industries as well as academic staff and master/research students in computer science and communications networks interested in learning about cyber-security and privacy aspects

An Approach to Guide Users Towards Less Revealing Internet Browsers

When browsing the Internet, HTTP headers enable both clients and servers send extra data in their requests or responses such as the User-Agent string. This string contains information related to the sender’s device, browser, and operating system. Previous research has shown that there are numerous privacy and security risks result from exposing sensitive information in the User-Agent string. For example, it enables device and browser fingerprinting and user tracking and identification. Our large analysis of thousands of User-Agent strings shows that browsers differ tremendously in the amount of information they include in their User-Agent strings. As such, our work aims at guiding users towards using less exposing browsers. In doing so, we propose to assign an exposure score to browsers based on the information they expose and vulnerability records. Thus, our contribution in this work is as follows: first, provide a full implementation that is ready to be deployed and used by users. Second, conduct a user study to identify the effectiveness and limitations of our proposed approach. Our implementation is based on using more than 52 thousand unique browsers. Our performance and validation analysis show that our solution is accurate and efficient. The source code and data set are publicly available and the solution has been deployed