KALwEN: a new practical and interoperable key management scheme for body sensor networks

Key management is the pillar of a security architecture. Body sensor networks (BSNs) pose several challenges–some inherited from wireless sensor networks (WSNs), some unique to themselves–that require a new key management scheme to be tailor-made. The challenge is taken on, and the result is KALwEN, a new parameterized key management scheme that combines the best-suited cryptographic techniques in a seamless framework. KALwEN is user-friendly in the sense that it requires no expert knowledge of a user, and instead only requires a user to follow a simple set of instructions when bootstrapping or extending a network. One of KALwEN's key features is that it allows sensor devices from different manufacturers, which expectedly do not have any pre-shared secret, to establish secure communications with each other. KALwEN is decentralized, such that it does not rely on the availability of a local processing unit (LPU). KALwEN supports secure global broadcast, local broadcast, and local (neighbor-to-neighbor) unicast, while preserving past key secrecy and future key secrecy (FKS). The fact that the cryptographic protocols of KALwEN have been formally verified also makes a convincing case. With both formal verification and experimental evaluation, our results should appeal to theorists and practitioners alike

Performance Evaluation of Optimal Ate Pairing on Low-Cost Single Microprocessor Platform

The framework of low-cost interconnected devices forms a new kind of cryptographic environment with diverse requirements. Due to the minimal resource capacity of the devices, light-weight cryptographic algorithms are favored. Many applications of IoT work autonomously and process sensible data, which emphasizes security needs, and might also cause a need for specific security measures. A bilinear pairing is a mapping based on groups formed by elliptic curves over extension fields. The pairings are the key-enabler for versatile cryptosystems, such as certificateless signatures and searchable encryption. However, they have a major computational overhead, which coincides with the requirements of the low-cost devices. Nonetheless, the bilinear pairings are the only known approach for many cryptographic protocols so their feasibility should certainly be studied, as they might turn out to be necessary for some future IoT solutions. Promising results already exist for high-frequency CPU:s and platforms with hardware extensions. In this work, we study the feasibility of computing the optimal ate pairing over the BN254 curve, on a 64 MHz Cortex-M33 based platform by utilizing an optimized open-source library. The project is carried out for the company Nordic Semiconductor. As a result, the pairing was effectively computed in under 26* 10^6 cycles, or in 410 ms. The resulting pairing enables a limited usage of pairing-based cryptography, with a capacity of at most few cryptographic operations, such as ID-based key verifications per second. Referring to other relevant works, a competent pairing application would require either a high-frequency - and thus high consuming - microprocessor, or a customized FPGA. Moreover, it is noted that the research in efficient pairing-based cryptography is constantly taking steps forward in every front-line: efficient algorithms, protocols, and hardware-solutions

The zheng-seberry public key cryptosystem and signcryption

In 1993 Zheng-Seberry presented a public key cryptosystem that was considered efficient and secure in the sense of indistinguishability of encryptions (IND) against an adaptively chosen ciphertext adversary (CCA2). This thesis shows the Zheng-Seberry scheme is not secure as a CCA2 adversary can break the scheme in the sense of IND. In 1998 Cramer-Shoup presented a scheme that was secure against an IND-CCA2 adversary and whose proof relied only on standard assumptions. This thesis modifies this proof and applies it to a modified version of the El-Gamal scheme. This resulted in a provably secure scheme relying on the Random Oracle (RO) model, which is more efficient than the original Cramer-Shoup scheme. Although the RO model assumption is needed for security of this new El-Gamal variant, it only relies on it in a minimal way

Novel Techniques for Secure Use of Public Cloud Computing Resources

The federal government has an expressed interest in moving data and services to third party service providers in order to take advantage of the flexibility, scalability, and potential cost savings. This approach is called cloud computing. The thesis for this research is that efficient techniques exist to support the secure use of public cloud computing resources by a large, federated enterprise. The primary contributions of this research are the novel cryptographic system MA-AHASBE (Multi-Authority Anonymous Hierarchical Attribute-Set Based Encryption), and the techniques used to incorporate MA-AHASBE in a real world application. Performance results indicate that while there is a cost associated with enforcing the suggested security model, the cost is not unreasonable and the benefits in security can be significant. The contributions of this research give the DoD additional tools for supporting the mission while taking advantage of the cost efficient public cloud computing resources that are becoming widely available

Analysis and Implementation of the Messaging Layer Security Protocol

The use of messaging services on smartphones has increased considerably in recent years, due to the growth in the availability of mobile devices and the evolution of communication technologies via Internet, factors that have effectively replaced the use of text messages. This increase also concerned the use in the business environment, a context where the exchange of confidential information is more frequent and therefore the need to protect communication between two or more people. This is important not only on a security point of view, but also for personal privacy. The major global players have responded by implementing security measures within their services, such as end-to-end encryption and increasingly strict rules regarding the processing of personal data. In this thesis we will illustrate Messaging Layer Security, shortened as MLS, a new protocol under development that guarantees security and efficiency in group conversations. When in a conversation between two clients, security can be ensured through end-to-end encryption and key exchange. The problem arises when multiple actors participate in the conversation asynchronously: in this case the computational effort is considerable, even more so considering the use of mobile devices with reduced battery capacity that does not guarantee the continuous presence of the online device. The thesis will deal with both the architectural part, that is more general and traces the outline of the subject, and the protocol part, more technical and detailed. Finally, an implementation of MLS written in Rust and called Melissa will be illustrated, which provides all the basic functionalities indicated in the draft 05 version of the protocol

Secure service proxy : a CoAP(s) intermediary for a securer and smarter web of things

As the IoT continues to grow over the coming years, resource-constrained devices and networks will see an increase in traffic as everything is connected in an open Web of Things. The performance- and function-enhancing features are difficult to provide in resource-constrained environments, but will gain importance if the WoT is to be scaled up successfully. For example, scalable open standards-based authentication and authorization will be important to manage access to the limited resources of constrained devices and networks. Additionally, features such as caching and virtualization may help further reduce the load on these constrained systems. This work presents the Secure Service Proxy (SSP): a constrained-network edge proxy with the goal of improving the performance and functionality of constrained RESTful environments. Our evaluations show that the proposed design reaches its goal by reducing the load on constrained devices while implementing a wide range of features as different adapters. Specifically, the results show that the SSP leads to significant savings in processing, network traffic, network delay and packet loss rates for constrained devices. As a result, the SSP helps to guarantee the proper operation of constrained networks as these networks form an ever-expanding Web of Things

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

Privacy-friendly statistical counting for pedestrian dynamics

Relying on Wi-Fi signals broadcasted by smartphones became the de-facto standard in the domain of pedestrian crowd monitoring. This method got the edge over other traditional means owing to the fact that insights are built upon data which uniquely identifies individuals and, thus, allows highly accurate crowd profiling over time. On the other hand, handling such uniquely identifying data in such a way that it does not expose the sensed individuals to potential privacy infringements proves to be a difficult task. Although several protection techniques were proposed, they yield data which, combined with other external knowledge, can still be used for tracing back to specific individuals. To address this issue, we propose a construction which protects the short-term storage and processing of privacy-sensitive Wi-Fi detections under strong cryptographic guarantees and makes available in the clear, as end results, only statistical counts of crowds. To produce these statistical counts, we make use of homomorphically encrypted Bloom filters as facilitators for oblivious set membership testing under encryption. We implement the system and perform evaluation on both simulated data and a real-world crowd-monitoring dataset, demonstrating that it is feasible to achieve highly accurate statistical counts in a privacy-friendly way.</p