Tree-formed Verification Data for Trusted Platforms

The establishment of trust relationships to a computing platform relies on validation processes. Validation allows an external entity to build trust in the expected behaviour of the platform based on provided evidence of the platform's configuration. In a process like remote attestation, the 'trusted' platform submits verification data created during a start up process. These data consist of hardware-protected values of platform configuration registers, containing nested measurement values, e.g., hash values, of loaded or started components. Commonly, the register values are created in linear order by a hardware-secured operation. Fine-grained diagnosis of components, based on the linear order of verification data and associated measurement logs, is not optimal. We propose a method to use tree-formed verification data to validate a platform. Component measurement values represent leaves, and protected registers represent roots of a hash tree. We describe the basic mechanism of validating a platform using tree-formed measurement logs and root registers and show an logarithmic speed-up for the search of faults. Secure creation of a tree is possible using a limited number of hardware-protected registers and a single protected operation. In this way, the security of tree-formed verification data is maintained.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, v3: Reference added, v4: Revised, accepted for publication in Computers and Securit

Reconsidering big data security and privacy in cloud and mobile cloud systems

Large scale distributed systems in particular cloud and mobile cloud deployments provide great services improving people\u27s quality of life and organizational efficiency. In order to match the performance needs, cloud computing engages with the perils of peer-to-peer (P2P) computing and brings up the P2P cloud systems as an extension for federated cloud. Having a decentralized architecture built on independent nodes and resources without any specific central control and monitoring, these cloud deployments are able to handle resource provisioning at a very low cost. Hence, we see a vast amount of mobile applications and services that are ready to scale to billions of mobile devices painlessly. Among these, data driven applications are the most successful ones in terms of popularity or monetization. However, data rich applications expose other problems to consider including storage, big data processing and also the crucial task of protecting private or sensitive information. In this work, first, we go through the existing layered cloud architectures and present a solution addressing the big data storage. Secondly, we explore the use of P2P Cloud System (P2PCS) for big data processing and analytics. Thirdly, we propose an efficient hybrid mobile cloud computing model based on cloudlets concept and we apply this model to health care systems as a case study. Then, the model is simulated using Mobile Cloud Computing Simulator (MCCSIM). According to the experimental power and delay results, the hybrid cloud model performs up to 75% better when compared to the traditional cloud models. Lastly, we enhance our proposals by presenting and analyzing security and privacy countermeasures against possible attacks

A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield. Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

On the Exploitation of a High-throughput SHA-256 FPGA Design for HMAC

High-throughput and area-efficient designs of hash functions and corresponding mechanisms for Message Authentication Codes (MACs) are in high demand due to new security protocols that have arisen and call for security services in every transmitted data packet. For instance, IPv6 incorporates the IPSec protocol for secure data transmission. However, the IPSec's performance bottleneck is the HMAC mechanism which is responsible for authenticating the transmitted data. HMAC's performance bottleneck in its turn is the underlying hash function. In this article a high-throughput and small-size SHA-256 hash function FPGA design and the corresponding HMAC FPGA design is presented. Advanced optimization techniques have been deployed leading to a SHA-256 hashing core which performs more than 30% better, compared to the next better design. This improvement is achieved both in terms of throughput as well as in terms of throughput/area cost factor. It is the first reported SHA-256 hashing core that exceeds 11Gbps (after place and route in Xilinx Virtex 6 board)