Trapdoor commitment schemes and their applications

Informally, commitment schemes can be described by lockable steely boxes. In the commitment phase, the sender puts a message into the box, locks the box and hands it over to the receiver. On one hand, the receiver does not learn anything about the message. On the other hand, the sender cannot change the message in the box anymore. In the decommitment phase the sender gives the receiver the key, and the receiver then opens the box and retrieves the message. One application of such schemes are digital auctions where each participant places his secret bid into a box and submits it to the auctioneer. In this thesis we investigate trapdoor commitment schemes. Following the abstract viewpoint of lockable boxes, a trapdoor commitment is a box with a tiny secret door. If someone knows the secret door, then this person is still able to change the committed message in the box, even after the commitment phase. Such trapdoors turn out to be very useful for the design of secure cryptographic protocols involving commitment schemes. In the first part of the thesis, we formally introduce trapdoor commitments and extend the notion to identity-based trapdoors, where trapdoors can only be used in connection with certain identities. We then recall the most popular constructions of ordinary trapdoor protocols and present new solutions for identity-based trapdoors. In the second part of the thesis, we show the usefulness of trapdoors in commitment schemes. Deploying trapdoors we construct efficient non-malleable commitment schemes which basically guarantee indepency of commitments. Furthermore, applying (identity-based) trapdoor commitments we secure well-known identification protocols against a new kind of attack. And finally, by means of trapdoors, we show how to construct composable commitment schemes that can be securely executed as subprotocols within complex protocols

Post-Westgate SWAT : C4ISTAR Architectural Framework for Autonomous Network Integrated Multifaceted Warfighting Solutions Version 1.0 : A Peer-Reviewed Monograph

Police SWAT teams and Military Special Forces face mounting pressure and challenges from adversaries that can only be resolved by way of ever more sophisticated inputs into tactical operations. Lethal Autonomy provides constrained military/security forces with a viable option, but only if implementation has got proper empirically supported foundations. Autonomous weapon systems can be designed and developed to conduct ground, air and naval operations. This monograph offers some insights into the challenges of developing legal, reliable and ethical forms of autonomous weapons, that address the gap between Police or Law Enforcement and Military operations that is growing exponentially small. National adversaries are today in many instances hybrid threats, that manifest criminal and military traits, these often require deployment of hybrid-capability autonomous weapons imbued with the capability to taken on both Military and/or Security objectives. The Westgate Terrorist Attack of 21st September 2013 in the Westlands suburb of Nairobi, Kenya is a very clear manifestation of the hybrid combat scenario that required military response and police investigations against a fighting cell of the Somalia based globally networked Al Shabaab terrorist group.Comment: 52 pages, 6 Figures, over 40 references, reviewed by a reade

Security Enhancement by Identifying Attacks Using Machine Learning for 5G Network

Need of security enhancement for 5G network has been increased in last decade. Data transmitted over network need to be secure from external attacks. Thus there is need to enhance the security during data transmission over 5G network. There remains different security system that focus on identification of attacks. In order to identify attack different machine learning mechanism are considered. But the issue with existing research work is limited security and performance issue. There remains need to enhance security of 5G network. To achieve this objective hybrid mechanism are introduced. Different treats such as Denial-of-Service, Denial-of-Detection, Unfair use or resources are classified using enhanced machine learning approach. Proposed work has make use of LSTM model to improve accuracy during decision making and classification of attack of 5G network. Research work is considering accuracy parameters such as Recall, precision and F-Score to assure the reliability of proposed model. Simulation results conclude that proposed model is providing better accuracy as compared to conventional model

Proactive secret sharing and public key cryptosystems

Thesis (S.B. and S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (p. 79-80).by Stanislaw Jarecki.S.B.and S.M

Encryption on the air : non-Invasive security for implantable medical devices

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-78).Modern implantable medical devices (IMDs) including pacemakers, cardiac defibrillators and nerve stimulators feature wireless connectivity that enables remote monitoring and post-implantation adjustment. However, recent work has demonstrated that flawed security tempers these medical benefits. In particular, an understandable lack of cryptographic mechanisms results in the IMD disclosing private data and being unable to distinguish authorized from unauthorized commands. In this thesis, we present IMD-Shield; a prototype defenses against a previously proposed suite of attacks on IMDs. IMD-Shield is an external entity that uses a new full dulpex radio design to secure transmissions to and from the IMD on the air wihtout incorporating the IMD itself. Because replacing the install base of wireless-enabled IMDs is infeasible, our system non-invasively enhances the security of unmodified IMDs. We implement and evaluate our mechanism against modern IMDs in a variety of attack scenarios and find that it effectively provides confidentiality for private data and shields the IMD from unauthorized commands.by Haitham Al-Hassanieh.S.M

Public Talk and Civic Action: Education for Participation in a Strong Democracy

Civic education programs have always played a distinctive role in the American education curriculum. For the most part, however, civic education has been associated with civic knowledge and the cultivation of a cognitive faculty thought to be identical with political judgement (private judgment on public issues). Perhaps this has been appropriate to a society which understood democracy primarily as a system of accountability in which elected representatives do most of the actual governing and citizens limit themselves to the passive roles of voter and watchdog

Infrasense Introduction and Outline

Proposal of Infrasense, including introduction, outline, technical specs, website information, funders, and research. Collected material for Infrasense by Robert Saucier and KIT artist collective