Integrating security solutions to support nanoCMOS electronics research

The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded Meeting the Design Challenges of nanoCMOS Electronics (nanoCMOS) is developing a research infrastructure for collaborative electronics research across multiple institutions in the UK with especially strong industrial and commercial involvement. Unlike other domains, the electronics industry is driven by the necessity of protecting the intellectual property of the data, designs and software associated with next generation electronics devices and therefore requires fine-grained security. Similarly, the project also demands seamless access to large scale high performance compute resources for atomic scale device simulations and the capability to manage the hundreds of thousands of files and the metadata associated with these simulations. Within this context, the project has explored a wide range of authentication and authorization infrastructures facilitating compute resource access and providing fine-grained security over numerous distributed file stores and files. We conclude that no single security solution meets the needs of the project. This paper describes the experiences of applying X.509-based certificates and public key infrastructures, VOMS, PERMIS, Kerberos and the Internet2 Shibboleth technologies for nanoCMOS security. We outline how we are integrating these solutions to provide a complete end-end security framework meeting the demands of the nanoCMOS electronics domain

Authenticated tree parity machine key exchange

The synchronisation of Tree Parity Machines (TPMs), has proven to provide a valuable alternative concept for secure symmetric key exchange. Yet, from a cryptographer's point of view, authentication is at least as important as a secure exchange of keys. Adding an authentication via hashing e.g. is straightforward but with no relation to Neural Cryptography. We consequently formulate an authenticated key exchange within this concept. Another alternative, integrating a Zero-Knowledge protocol into the synchronisation, is also presented. A Man-In-The-Middle attack and even all currently known attacks, that are based on using identically structured TPMs and synchronisation as well, can so be averted. This in turn has practical consequences on using the trajectory in weight space. Both suggestions have the advantage of not affecting the previously observed physics of this interacting system at all.Comment: This work directly relates to cond-mat/0202112 (see also http://arxiv.org/find/cond-mat/1/au:+Kinzel/0/1/0/all/0/1

A survey on cyber security for smart grid communications

A smart grid is a new form of electricity network with high fidelity power-flow control, self-healing, and energy reliability and energy security using digital communications and control technology. To upgrade an existing power grid into a smart grid, it requires significant dependence on intelligent and secure communication infrastructures. It requires security frameworks for distributed communications, pervasive computing and sensing technologies in smart grid. However, as many of the communication technologies currently recommended to use by a smart grid is vulnerable in cyber security, it could lead to unreliable system operations, causing unnecessary expenditure, even consequential disaster to both utilities and consumers. In this paper, we summarize the cyber security requirements and the possible vulnerabilities in smart grid communications and survey the current solutions on cyber security for smart grid communications. © 2012 IEEE

Integrating identity-based cryptography in IMS service authentication

Nowadays, the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a promising research field. Many ongoing works related to the security and the performances of its employment are presented to the research community. Although, the security and data privacy aspects are very important in the IMS global objectives, they observe little attention so far. Secure access to multimedia services is based on SIP and HTTP digest on top of IMS architecture. The standard deploys AKA-MD5 for the terminal authentication. The third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) provided Generic Bootstrapping Architecture (GBA) to authenticate the subscriber before accessing multimedia services over HTTP. In this paper, we propose a new IMS Service Authentication scheme using Identity Based cryptography (IBC). This new scheme will lead to better performances when there are simultaneous authentication requests using Identity-based Batch Verification. We analyzed the security of our new protocol and we presented a performance evaluation of its cryptographic operationsComment: 13Page

The Serums Tool-Chain:Ensuring Security and Privacy of Medical Data in Smart Patient-Centric Healthcare Systems

Digital technology is permeating all aspects of human society and life. This leads to humans becoming highly dependent on digital devices, including upon digital: assistance, intelligence, and decisions. A major concern of this digital dependence is the lack of human oversight or intervention in many of the ways humans use this technology. This dependence and reliance on digital technology raises concerns in how humans trust such systems, and how to ensure digital technology behaves appropriately. This works considers recent developments and projects that combine digital technology and artificial intelligence with human society. The focus is on critical scenarios where failure of digital technology can lead to significant harm or even death. We explore how to build trust for users of digital technology in such scenarios and considering many different challenges for digital technology. The approaches applied and proposed here address user trust along many dimensions and aim to build collaborative and empowering use of digital technologies in critical aspects of human society

Using quantum key distribution for cryptographic purposes: a survey

The appealing feature of quantum key distribution (QKD), from a cryptographic viewpoint, is the ability to prove the information-theoretic security (ITS) of the established keys. As a key establishment primitive, QKD however does not provide a standalone security service in its own: the secret keys established by QKD are in general then used by a subsequent cryptographic applications for which the requirements, the context of use and the security properties can vary. It is therefore important, in the perspective of integrating QKD in security infrastructures, to analyze how QKD can be combined with other cryptographic primitives. The purpose of this survey article, which is mostly centered on European research results, is to contribute to such an analysis. We first review and compare the properties of the existing key establishment techniques, QKD being one of them. We then study more specifically two generic scenarios related to the practical use of QKD in cryptographic infrastructures: 1) using QKD as a key renewal technique for a symmetric cipher over a point-to-point link; 2) using QKD in a network containing many users with the objective of offering any-to-any key establishment service. We discuss the constraints as well as the potential interest of using QKD in these contexts. We finally give an overview of challenges relative to the development of QKD technology that also constitute potential avenues for cryptographic research.Comment: Revised version of the SECOQC White Paper. Published in the special issue on QKD of TCS, Theoretical Computer Science (2014), pp. 62-8