Survey on Lightweight Primitives and Protocols for RFID in Wireless Sensor Networks

The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies is becoming widespread in all kind of wireless network-based applications. As expected, applications based on sensor networks, ad-hoc or mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can be highly benefited from the adoption of RFID solutions. There is a strong need to employ lightweight cryptographic primitives for many security applications because of the tight cost and constrained resource requirement of sensor based networks. This paper mainly focuses on the security analysis of lightweight protocols and algorithms proposed for the security of RFID systems. A large number of research solutions have been proposed to implement lightweight cryptographic primitives and protocols in sensor and RFID integration based resource constraint networks. In this work, an overview of the currently discussed lightweight primitives and their attributes has been done. These primitives and protocols have been compared based on gate equivalents (GEs), power, technology, strengths, weaknesses and attacks. Further, an integration of primitives and protocols is compared with the possibilities of their applications in practical scenarios

AKCN-E8: Compact and Flexible KEM from Ideal Lattice

A remarkable breakthrough in mathematics in recent years is the proof of the long-standing conjecture: sphere packing (i.e., packing unit balls) in the $E_8$ lattice is optimal in the sense of the best density \cite{V17} for sphere packing in $\mathbb{R}^8$. In this work, based on the $E_8$ lattice code, we design a mechanism for asymmetric key consensus from noise (AKCN), referred to as AKCN-E8, for error correction and key consensus. As a direct application of the AKCN-E8 code, we present highly practical key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) from the ideal lattice based on the ring learning with errors (RLWE) problem. Compared to the RLWE-based NewHope-KEM \cite{newhope-NIST}, which is a variant of NewHope-Usenix \cite{newhope15} and is now a promising candidate in the second round of NIST post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standardization competition, our AKCN-E8-KEM has the following advantages: * The size of shared-key is doubled.. * More compact ciphertexts, at the same or even higher security level. * More flexible parameter selection for tradeoffs among security, ciphertext size and error probability

Blockchain-based auditing of legal decisions supported by explainable AI and generative AI tools

Generative AI tools powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated advanced capabilities in understanding and articulating legal facts closer to the level of legal practitioners. However, scholars hold contrasting views on the reliability of the reasoning behind a decision derived from LLMs due to its black-box nature. Law firms are vigilant in recognizing the potential risks of violating confidentiality and inappropriate exposure of sensitive legal data through the prompt sent to Generative AI. This research attempts to find an equilibrium between responsible usage and control of human legal professionals over content produced by Generative AI through regular audits. It investigates the potential of Generative AI in drafting correspondence for pre-litigation decisions derived from an eXplainable AI (XAI) algorithm. This research presents an end-to-end process of designing the architecture and methodology for a blockchain-based auditing system. It detects unauthorized alterations of data repositories containing the decisions by an XAI model and automated textual explanation by Generative AI. The automated auditing by blockchain facilitates responsible usage of AI technologies and reduces discrepancies in tracing the accountability of adversarial decisions. It conceptualizes the two algorithms. First, strategic on-chain (within blockchain) and off-chain (outside blockchain) data storage in compliance with the data protection laws and critical requirements of stakeholders in a legal firm. Second, auditing by comparison of the unique signature as Merkle roots of files stored off-chain with their immutable blockchain counterpart. A case study on liability cases under tort law demonstrates the system implementation results

Optimal Key Consensus in Presence of Noise

In this work, we abstract some key ingredients in previous key exchange protocols based on LWE and its variants, by introducing and formalizing the building tool, referred to as key consensus (KC) and its asymmetric variant AKC. KC and AKC allow two communicating parties to reach consensus from close values obtained by some secure information exchange. We then discover upper bounds on parameters for any KC and AKC. KC and AKC are fundamental to lattice based cryptography, in the sense that a list of cryptographic primitives based on LWE and its variants (including key exchange, public-key encryption, and more) can be modularly constructed from them. As a conceptual contribution, this much simplifies the design and analysis of these cryptosystems in the future. We then design and analyze both general and highly practical KC and AKC schemes, which are referred to as OKCN and AKCN respectively for presentation simplicity. Based on KC and AKC, we present generic constructions of key exchange (KE) from LWR, LWE, RLWE and MLWE. The generic construction allows versatile instantiations with our OKCN and AKCN schemes, for which we elaborate on evaluating and choosing the concrete parameters in order to achieve a well-balanced performance among security, computational cost, bandwidth efficiency, error rate, and operation simplicity