RHyTHM: A Randomized Hybrid Scheme To Hide in the Mobile Crowd

Any on-demand pseudonym acquisition strategy is problematic should the connectivity to the credential management infrastructure be intermittent. If a vehicle runs out of pseudonyms with no connectivity to refill its pseudonym pool, one solution is the on-the-fly generation of pseudonyms, e.g., leveraging anonymous authentication. However, such a vehicle would stand out in the crowd: one can simply distinguish pseudonyms, thus signed messages, based on the pseudonym issuer signature, link them and track the vehicle. To address this challenge, we propose a randomized hybrid scheme, RHyTHM, to enable vehicles to remain operational when disconnected without compromising privacy: vehicles with valid pseudonyms help others to enhance their privacy by randomly joining them in using on-the-fly self-certified pseudonyms along with aligned lifetimes. This way, the privacy of disconnected users is enhanced with a reasonable computational overhead.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC), November 27-29, 2017, Torino, Ital

Remote attestation mechanism for embedded devices based on physical unclonable functions

Remote attestation mechanisms are well studied in the high-end computing environments; however, the same is not true for embedded devices-especially for smart cards. With ever changing landscape of smart card technology and advancements towards a true multi-application platform, verifying the current state of the smart card is significant to the overall security of such proposals. The initiatives proposed by GlobalPlatform Consumer Centric Model (GP-CCM) and User Centric Smart Card Ownership Model (UCOM) enables a user to download any application as she desire-depending upon the authorisation of the application provider. Before an application provider issues an application to a smart card, verifying the current state of the smart card is crucial to the security of the respective application. In this paper, we analyse the rationale behind the remote attestation mechanism for smart cards, and the fundamental features that such a mechanism should possess. We also study the applicability of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) for the remote attestation mechanism and propose two algorithms to achieve the stated features of remote attestation. The proposed algorithms are implemented in a test environment to evaluate their performance. © 2013 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved

State of Alaska Election Security Project Phase 2 Report

A laska’s election system is among the most secure in the country, and it has a number of safeguards other states are now adopting. But the technology Alaska uses to record and count votes could be improved— and the state’s huge size, limited road system, and scattered communities also create special challenges for insuring the integrity of the vote. In this second phase of an ongoing study of Alaska’s election security, we recommend ways of strengthening the system—not only the technology but also the election procedures. The lieutenant governor and the Division of Elections asked the University of Alaska Anchorage to do this evaluation, which began in September 2007.Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell. State of Alaska Division of Elections.List of Appendices / Glossary / Study Team / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Summary of Recommendations / Part 1 Defense in Depth / Part 2 Fortification of Systems / Part 3 Confidence in Outcomes / Conclusions / Proposed Statement of Work for Phase 3: Implementation / Reference