39,242 research outputs found
When the Hammer Meets the Nail: Multi-Server PIR for Database-Driven CRN with Location Privacy Assurance
We show that it is possible to achieve information theoretic location privacy
for secondary users (SUs) in database-driven cognitive radio networks (CRNs)
with an end-to-end delay less than a second, which is significantly better than
that of the existing alternatives offering only a computational privacy. This
is achieved based on a keen observation that, by the requirement of Federal
Communications Commission (FCC), all certified spectrum databases synchronize
their records. Hence, the same copy of spectrum database is available through
multiple (distinct) providers. We harness the synergy between multi-server
private information retrieval (PIR) and database- driven CRN architecture to
offer an optimal level of privacy with high efficiency by exploiting this
observation. We demonstrated, analytically and experimentally with deployments
on actual cloud systems that, our adaptations of multi-server PIR outperform
that of the (currently) fastest single-server PIR by a magnitude of times with
information theoretic security, collusion resiliency, and fault-tolerance
features. Our analysis indicates that multi-server PIR is an ideal
cryptographic tool to provide location privacy in database-driven CRNs, in
which the requirement of replicated databases is a natural part of the system
architecture, and therefore SUs can enjoy all advantages of multi-server PIR
without any additional architectural and deployment costs.Comment: 10 pages, double colum
Prochlo: Strong Privacy for Analytics in the Crowd
The large-scale monitoring of computer users' software activities has become
commonplace, e.g., for application telemetry, error reporting, or demographic
profiling. This paper describes a principled systems architecture---Encode,
Shuffle, Analyze (ESA)---for performing such monitoring with high utility while
also protecting user privacy. The ESA design, and its Prochlo implementation,
are informed by our practical experiences with an existing, large deployment of
privacy-preserving software monitoring.
(cont.; see the paper
Making Code Voting Secure against Insider Threats using Unconditionally Secure MIX Schemes and Human PSMT Protocols
Code voting was introduced by Chaum as a solution for using a possibly
infected-by-malware device to cast a vote in an electronic voting application.
Chaum's work on code voting assumed voting codes are physically delivered to
voters using the mail system, implicitly requiring to trust the mail system.
This is not necessarily a valid assumption to make - especially if the mail
system cannot be trusted. When conspiring with the recipient of the cast
ballots, privacy is broken.
It is clear to the public that when it comes to privacy, computers and
"secure" communication over the Internet cannot fully be trusted. This
emphasizes the importance of using: (1) Unconditional security for secure
network communication. (2) Reduce reliance on untrusted computers.
In this paper we explore how to remove the mail system trust assumption in
code voting. We use PSMT protocols (SCN 2012) where with the help of visual
aids, humans can carry out addition correctly with a 99\% degree of
accuracy. We introduce an unconditionally secure MIX based on the combinatorics
of set systems.
Given that end users of our proposed voting scheme construction are humans we
\emph{cannot use} classical Secure Multi Party Computation protocols.
Our solutions are for both single and multi-seat elections achieving:
\begin{enumerate}[i)]
\item An anonymous and perfectly secure communication network secure against
a -bounded passive adversary used to deliver voting,
\item The end step of the protocol can be handled by a human to evade the
threat of malware. \end{enumerate} We do not focus on active adversaries
Octopus: A Secure and Anonymous DHT Lookup
Distributed Hash Table (DHT) lookup is a core technique in structured
peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Its decentralized nature introduces security and
privacy vulnerabilities for applications built on top of them; we thus set out
to design a lookup mechanism achieving both security and anonymity, heretofore
an open problem. We present Octopus, a novel DHT lookup which provides strong
guarantees for both security and anonymity. Octopus uses attacker
identification mechanisms to discover and remove malicious nodes, severely
limiting an adversary's ability to carry out active attacks, and splits lookup
queries over separate anonymous paths and introduces dummy queries to achieve
high levels of anonymity. We analyze the security of Octopus by developing an
event-based simulator to show that the attacker discovery mechanisms can
rapidly identify malicious nodes with low error rate. We calculate the
anonymity of Octopus using probabilistic modeling and show that Octopus can
achieve near-optimal anonymity. We evaluate Octopus's efficiency on Planetlab
with 207 nodes and show that Octopus has reasonable lookup latency and
manageable communication overhead
Transatlantic intelligence and security cooperation
Despite recent advances in transatlantic intelligence and security cooperation, significant problems remain. The bombings in Madrid in March 2004 have demonstrated how terrorists and criminals can continue to exploit the limits of hesitant or partial exchange to dangerous effect. Intelligence and security cooperation remain problematic because of the fundamental tension between an increasingly networked world, which is ideal terrain for the new religious terrorism, and highly compartmentalized national intelligence gathering. If cooperation is to improve, we require a better mutual understanding about the relationship between privacy and security to help us decide what sort of intelligence should be shared. This is a higher priority than building elaborate new structures. While most practical problems of intelligence exchange are ultimately resolvable, the challenge of agreeing what the intelligence means in broad terms is even more problematic. The last section of this article argues that shared NATO intelligence estimates would be difficult to achieve and of doubtful value
Privacy protocols
Security protocols enable secure communication over insecure channels.
Privacy protocols enable private interactions over secure channels. Security
protocols set up secure channels using cryptographic primitives. Privacy
protocols set up private channels using secure channels. But just like some
security protocols can be broken without breaking the underlying cryptography,
some privacy protocols can be broken without breaking the underlying security.
Such privacy attacks have been used to leverage e-commerce against targeted
advertising from the outset; but their depth and scope became apparent only
with the overwhelming advent of influence campaigns in politics. The blurred
boundaries between privacy protocols and privacy attacks present a new
challenge for protocol analysis. Covert channels turn out to be concealed not
only below overt channels, but also above: subversions, and the level-below
attacks are supplemented by sublimations and the level-above attacks.Comment: 38 pages, 6 figure
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