Constant Size Traceable Ring Signature Scheme without Random Oracles

Currently several traceable (or linkable) identity-based ring signature schemes have been proposed. However, most of them are constructed in the random oracle model. In this paper, we present a fully traceable ring signature (TRS) scheme without random oracles, which has the constant size signature and a security reduction to the computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption. Also, we give a formal security model for traceable ring signature and prove that the proposed scheme has the properties of traceability and anonymity

PRSONA: Private Reputation Supporting Ongoing Network Avatars

Trust and user-generated feedback have become increasingly vital to the normal functioning of the modern internet. However, deployed systems that currently incorporate such feedback do not guarantee users much in the way of privacy, despite a wide swath of research on how to do so spanning over 15 years. Meanwhile, research on systems that maintain user privacy while helping them to track and update each others' reputations has failed to standardize terminology, or converge on what privacy guarantees should be important. Too often, this leads to misunderstandings of the tradeoffs underpinning design decisions. Further, key insights made in some approaches to designing such systems have not circulated to other approaches, leaving open significant opportunity for new research directions. Acknowledging this situation, online communities in particular face a difficult dilemma. Communities generally want to provide opportunities for their members to interact and communicate with one another in ways that advance their mutual interests. At times, communities may identify opportunities where providing their members specific privacy guarantees would particularly aid those opportunities, giving members assurances that their participation would not have negative consequences for themselves. However, communities also face the threat of bad actors, who may wish to disrupt their activities or bring harm to members for their status as members of such groups. The privacy that the community wishes to extend to members must be carefully approached so that bad actors can still be held accountable. This thesis proceeds in two parts. First, this thesis investigates 47 systems describing privacy-preserving reputation systems from 2003--2021 in order to organize previous work and suggest directions for future work. The three key contributions in this portion of the thesis are the systematization of this body of research, the detailing of the tradeoffs implied by overarching design choices, and the identification of underresearched areas that provide promising opportunities for future work. Second, this thesis explores one particular opportunity for new research identified in the first section of the thesis. Whereas previous work has overlooked the needs of certain kinds of small, tight-knit communities, this work features a novel design for a privacy-preserving reputation system that is targeted to fill that gap. The nature of its design is discussed particularly in contrast to the identified patterns of design present in previous works. Further, this thesis implements and benchmarks said system to determine its viability in real-world deployment. This novel construction addresses shortcomings with previous approaches and provides new opportunities for its intended audiences

Blockchain Governance via Sharp Anonymous Multisignatures

Electronic voting has occupied a large part of the cryptographic protocols literature. The recent reality of blockchains---in particular their need for online governance mechanisms---has put new parameters and requirements to the problem. We identify the key requirements of a blockchain governance mechanism, namely correctness (including eliminative double votes), voter anonymity, and traceability, and investigate mechanisms that can achieve them with minimal interaction and under assumptions that fit the blockchain setting. First, we define a signature-like primitive, which we term sharp anonymous multisignatures (in short, #AMS) that tightly meets the needs of blockchain governance. In a nutshell, #AMSs allow any set of parties to generate a signature, e.g., on a proposal to be voted-upon, which if posted on the blockchain hides the identities of the signers/voters, but reveals their number. This can be seen as a (strict) generalization of threshold ring signatures (TRS). We next turn to constructing such #AMSs and using them in various governance scenarios---e.g., single vs. multiple vote per voter. To this direction, we observe that although the definition of TRS does not imply #AMS, one can compile some of the existing TRS constructions into #AMS. This raises the question: What is the TRS structure that allows such a compilation? To answer the above, we devise templates for TRSs. Our templates encapsulate and abstract the structure that allows for the above compilation---most of the TRS schemes that can be compiled into #AMS are, in fact, instantiations of our template. This abstraction makes our template generic for instantiating TRSs and #AMSs from different cryptographic assumptions (e.g., DDH, LWE, etc). One of our templates is based on chameleon hashing and we explore a framework of lossy chameleon hashes to fully understand its nature. Finally, we turn to how #AMS schemes can be used in our applications. We provide fast (in some cases non-interactive) #AMS-based blockchain governance mechanisms for a wide spectrum of assumptions on the honesty (semi-honest vs malicious) and availability of voters and proposers

Crowdsourcing atop blockchains

Traditional crowdsourcing systems, such as Amazon\u27s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), though once acquiring great economic successes, have to fully rely on third-party platforms to serve between the requesters and the workers for basic utilities. These third-parties have to be fully trusted to assist payments, resolve disputes, protect data privacy, manage user authentications, maintain service online, etc. Nevertheless, tremendous real-world incidents indicate how elusive it is to completely trust these platforms in reality, and the reduction of such over-reliance becomes desirable. In contrast to the arguably vulnerable centralized approaches, a public blockchain is a distributed and transparent global consensus computer that is highly robust. The blockchain is usually managed and replicated by a large-scale peer-to-peer network collectively, thus being much more robust to be fully trusted for correctness and availability. It, therefore, becomes enticing to build novel crowdsourcing applications atop blockchains to reduce the over-trust on third-party platforms. However, this new fascinating technology also brings about new challenges, which were never that severe in the conventional centralized setting. The most serious issue is that the blockchain is usually maintained in the public Internet environment with a broader attack surface open to anyone. This not only causes serious privacy and security issues, but also allows the adversaries to exploit the attack surface to hamper more basic utilities. Worse still, most existing blockchains support only light on-chain computations, and the smart contract executed atop the decentralized consensus computer must be simple, which incurs serious feasibility problems. In reality, the privacy/security issue and the feasibility problem even restrain each other and create serious tensions to hinder the broader adoption of blockchain. The dissertation goes through the non-trivial challenges to realize secure yet still practical decentralization (for urgent crowdsourcing use-cases), and lay down the foundation for this line of research. In sum, it makes the next major contributions. First, it identifies the needed security requirements in decentralized knowledge crowdsourcing (e.g., data privacy), and initiates the research of private decentralized crowdsourcing. In particular, the confidentiality of solicited data is indispensable to prevent free-riders from pirating the others\u27 submissions, thus ensuring the quality of solicited knowledge. To this end, a generic private decentralized crowdsourcing framework is dedicatedly designed, analyzed, and implemented. Furthermore, this dissertation leverages concretely efficient cryptographic design to reduce the cost of the above generic framework. It focuses on decentralizing the special use-case of Amazon MTurk, and conducts multiple specific-purpose optimizations to remove needless generality to squeeze performance. The implementation atop Ethereum demonstrates a handling cost even lower than MTurk. In addition, it focuses on decentralized crowdsourcing of computing power for specific machine learning tasks. It lets a requester place deposits in the blockchain to recruit some workers for a designated (randomized) programs. If and only if these workers contribute their resources to compute correctly, they would earn well-deserved payments. For these goals, a simple yet still useful incentive mechanism is developed atop the blockchain to deter rational workers from cheating. Finally, the research initiates the first systematic study on crowdsourcing blockchains\u27 full nodes to assist superlight clients (e.g., mobile phones and IoT devices) to read the blockchain\u27s records. This dissertation presents a novel generic solution through the powerful lens of game-theoretic treatments, which solves the long-standing open problem of designing generic superlight clients for all blockchains

Elliptic Curve Cryptography on Modern Processor Architectures

Abstract Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) has been adopted by the US National Security Agency (NSA) in Suite "B" as part of its "Cryptographic Modernisation Program ". Additionally, it has been favoured by an entire host of mobile devices due to its superior performance characteristics. ECC is also the building block on which the exciting field of pairing/identity based cryptography is based. This widespread use means that there is potentially a lot to be gained by researching efficient implementations on modern processors such as IBM's Cell Broadband Engine and Philip's next generation smart card cores. ECC operations can be thought of as a pyramid of building blocks, from instructions on a core, modular operations on a finite field, point addition & doubling, elliptic curve scalar multiplication to application level protocols. In this thesis we examine an implementation of these components for ECC focusing on a range of optimising techniques for the Cell's SPU and the MIPS smart card. We show significant performance improvements that can be achieved through of adoption of EC

Reconfiguration of legacy software artifacts in resource constraint embedded systems

Hochgradig ressourcenbeschränkte eingebettete Systeme befinden sich überall. Einige dieser Systeme befinden sich in Smart-Phones oder elektronischen Kontroll-Einheiten, andere in Sensor-Netzwerken oder auch Smart-Cards. Gerade die zuletzt genannten gehören zu den in Bezug auf Prozessorleistung und Speicherplatz am meist beschränkten Systemen. Um bei gleicher Ressourcenauslastung mehr Funktionalität bereitzustellen führt diese Arbeit ein Verfahren ein, welche es erlaubt durch Rekonfigurationstechniken dieses Problem zu lösen. Im Gegensatz zu traditionellen Verwendungszwecken von Rekonfigurationstechniken wird in dieser Arbeit Rekonfiguration zur Reduktion der Anwendungsgröße verwendet. Heutige Architekturen, welche Rekonfiguration ermöglichen, basieren auf der Unterstützung dieser Mechanismen auf Entwurfs- bzw. Source-Code Ebene. Software Lösungen basieren jedoch zum großen Teil auf wiederverwertbaren Bibliotheken oder Drittanbieter-Komponenten, welche keine Unterstützung von Rekonfiguration mit sich bringen und zumeist im Binärformat vorliegen. Diese Arbeit stellt eine Methode vor, um ein existierendes System unter Verwendung von Binärcode automatisch in ein rekonfigurierbares System umzuwandeln, mit dem Ziel die Anwendungsgröße zuverringern und dabei weiterhin harten Echtzeitbedingungen zu genügen. Das Verfahren basiert auf der Verwendung von Binärcode-Analyse Techniken zur Rekonstruktion der Anwendungssemantik, welche es erlauben dem Benutzer durch Bedingungen in einer Hochsprache Komponenten aus der Anwendungen zu extrahieren. Diese Komponenten werden anschließend optimiert. Mit dem Verfahren ist es möglich nicht rekonfigurierbare binäre Softwaresysteme in rekonfigurierbare Systeme umzuwandeln, welche die Anwendungsgröße reduzieren und dabei harte Echtzeit-Bedingungen erfüllen.Highly resource-constrained embedded systems are everywhere. Some of them can be found inside smartphones, electronic control units, others in wireless sensor networks or smart cards. The last two systems are among the most restrictive ones in the sense of processing power, energy consumption and memory availability. Pricing policies often lead to a reduction in software functionality as cheaper hardware with less resources is demanded for the final product. In order to allow more complex software to run on such constrained systems, this thesis proposes the use of software reconfiguration. In contrast to traditional uses of reconfiguration this thesis proposes the use of reconfiguration mechanisms in order to reduce the footprint of an deeply embedded application while maintaining real-time constraints. Todays adaptable architectures require the support of reconfigurability and adaptability at design level. However, modern software products are often constructed out of reusable but non-adaptable legacy software artifacts to meet early time-to-market requirements. This thesis proposes a methodology to semiautomatically use existing binaries in a reconfigurable manner. It is based on using binary analysis techniques to reconstruct the semantics of the binary application in order to allow the system developer to select meaningful code parts as components from the binary code. Using a set of high level constraints the user is able to extract components from the binary application. These components are then subject to a design space exploration step, which optimizes the resulting reconfigurable system regarding parameters as, e.g., worst case blocking time and flash lifetime. With this approach, reconfiguration can be added with a low effort to non-adaptive binary software in order to decrease the footprint of the application while maintaining real-time constraints.Tag der Verteidigung: 05.04.2013Paderborn, Univ., Diss., 201

Belle II Technical Design Report

The Belle detector at the KEKB electron-positron collider has collected almost 1 billion Y(4S) events in its decade of operation. Super-KEKB, an upgrade of KEKB is under construction, to increase the luminosity by two orders of magnitude during a three-year shutdown, with an ultimate goal of 8E35 /cm^2 /s luminosity. To exploit the increased luminosity, an upgrade of the Belle detector has been proposed. A new international collaboration Belle-II, is being formed. The Technical Design Report presents physics motivation, basic methods of the accelerator upgrade, as well as key improvements of the detector.Comment: Edited by: Z. Dole\v{z}al and S. Un

Privacy-aware Biometric Blockchain based e-Passport System for Automatic Border Control

In the middle of 1990s, World Wide Web technology initially steps into our life. Now, 30 years after that, widespread internet access and established computing technology bring embodied real life into Metaverse by digital twin. Internet is not only blurring the concept of physical distance, but also blurring the edge between the real and virtual world. Another breakthrough in computing is the blockchain, which shifts the root of trust attached to a system administrator to the computational power of the system. Furthermore, its favourable properties such as immutable time-stamped transaction history and atomic smart contracts trigger the development of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Combining above two, this thesis presents a privacy-aware biometric Blockchain based e-passport system for automatic border control(ABC), which aims for improving the efficiency of existing ABC system. Specifically, through constructing a border control Metaverse DAO, border control workload can be autonomously self-executed by atomic smart contracts as transaction and then immutably recorded on Blockchain. What is more, to digitize border crossing documentation, biometric Blockchain based e-passport system(BBCVID) is created to generate an immutable real-world identity digital twin in the border control Metaverse DAO through Blockchain and biometric identity authentication. That is to say, by digitizing border crossing documentation and automatizing both biometric identity authentication and border crossing documentation verification, our proposal is able to significantly improve existing border control efficiency. Through system simulation and performance evaluation by Hyperledger Caliper, the proposed system turns out to be able to improve existing border control efficiency by 3.5 times more on average, which is remarkable. What is more, the dynamic digital twin constructed by BBCVID enables computing techniques such as machine learning and big data analysis applicable to real-world entity, which has a huge potential to create more value by constructing smarter ABC systems

Ames Research Center publications: A continuing bibliography, 1978

This bibliography lists formal NASA publications, journal articles, books, chapters of books, patents and contractor reports issued by Ames Research Center which were indexed by Scientific and Technical Aerospace Abstracts, Limited Scientific and Technical Aerospace Abstracts, and International Aerospace Abstracts in 1978. Citations are arranged by directorate, type of publication and NASA accession numbers. Subject, personal author, corporate source, contract number, and report/accession number indexes are provided