SECURITY AND PRIVACY ISSUES IN MOBILE NETWORKS, DIFFICULTIES AND SOLUTIONS

Mobile communication is playing a vital role in the daily life for the last two decades; in turn its fields gained the research attention, which led to the introduction of new technologies, services and applications. These new added facilities aimed to ease the connectivity and reachability; on the other hand, many security and privacy concerns were not taken into consideration. This opened the door for the malicious activities to threaten the deployed systems and caused vulnerabilities for users, translated in the loss of valuable data and major privacy invasions. Recently, many attempts have been carried out to handle these concerns, such as improving systems’ security and implementing different privacy enhancing mechanisms. This research addresses these problems and provides a mean to preserve privacy in particular. In this research, a detailed description and analysis of the current security and privacy situation in the deployed systems is given. As a result, the existing shortages within these systems are pointed out, to be mitigated in development. Finally a privacy preserving prototype model is proposed. This research has been conducted as an extensive literature review about the most relevant references and researches in the field, using the descriptive and evaluative research methodologies. The main security models, parameters, modules and protocols are presented, also a detailed description of privacy and its related arguments, dimensions and factors is given. The findings include that mobile networks’ security along with users are vulnerable due to the weaknesses of the key exchange procedures, the difficulties that face possession, repudiation, standardization, compatibility drawbacks and lack of configurability. It also includes the need to implement new mechanisms to protect security and preserve privacy, which include public key cryptography, HIP servers, IPSec, TLS, NAT and DTLS-SRTP. Last but not least, it shows that privacy is not absolute and it has many conflicts, also privacy requires sophisticated systems, which increase the load and cost of the system.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Decorrelation: A Theory for Block Cipher Security

Pseudorandomness is a classical model for the security of block ciphers. In this paper we propose convenient tools in order to study it in connection with the Shannon Theory, the Carter-Wegman universal hash functions paradigm, and the Luby-Rackoff approach. This enables the construction of new ciphers with security proofs under specific models. We show how to ensure security against basic differential and linear cryptanalysis and even more general attacks. We propose practical construction scheme

On Message Authentication in 4G LTE System

After decades of evolution, the cellular system has become an indispensable part of modern life. Together with the convenience brought by the cellular system, many security issues have arisen. Message integrity protection is one of the urgent problems. The integrity of a message is usually protected by message authentication code (MAC). Forgery attacks are the primary threat to message integrity. By Simon's definition, forgery is twofold. The first is impersonation forgery, in which the opponent can forge a MAC without knowing any message-MAC pairs. The second is substitution forgery, in which the opponent can forge a MAC by knowing certain message-MAC pairs. In the 4G LTE system, MAC is applied not only to RRC control messages and user data, but also to authentication of the identities in the radio network during the authentication and key agreement (AKA) procedure. There is a set of functions used in AKA, which is called A3/A8. Originally, only one cipher suite called MILENAGE followed the definition of A3/A8. Recently, Vodafone has proposed another candidate called TUAK. This thesis first analyzes a MAC algorithm of the 4G LTE system called EIA1. The analysis shows that because of its linear structure, given two valid message-MAC pairs generated by EIA1, attackers can forge up to $2^{32}$ valid MACs by the algorithm called linear forgery attack proposed in this thesis. This thesis also proposes a well-designed scenario, in which attackers can apply the linear forgery attack to the real system. The second work presented in this thesis fixes the gap between the almost XOR universal property and the substitution forgery probability, and assesses the security of EIA1 under different attack models. After the security analysis, an optimized EIA1 using an efficient polynomial evaluation method is proposed. This polynomial evaluation method is analog to the fast Fourier transform. Compared with Horner's rule, which is used in the official implementation of EIA1, this method reduces the number of multiplications over finite field dramatically. The improvement is shown by the experiment results, which suggests that the optimized code is much faster than the official implementation, and the polynomial evaluation method is better than Horner's rule. The third work in this thesis assesses the security of TUAK, and proves TUAK is a secure algorithm set, which means $f_1$, $f_1^*$, and $f_2$ are resistant to forgery attacks, and key recovery attacks; $f_3$ - $f_5$, and $f_5^*$ are resistant to key recovery attacks and collision. A novel technique called multi-output filtering model is proposed in this work in order to study the non-randomness property of TUAK and other cryptographic primitives, such as AES, KASUMI, and PRESENT. A multi-output filtering model consists of a linear feedback shift register (LFSR) and a multi-output filtering function. The contribution of this research is twofold. First, an attack technique under IND-CPA using the multi-output filtering model is proposed. By introducing a distinguishing function, we theoretically determine the success rate of this attack. In particular, we construct a distinguishing function based on the distribution of the linear complexity of component sequences, and apply it on studying TUAK's $f_1$ algorithm, AES, KASUMI and PRESENT. The experiments demonstrate that the success rate of the attack on KASUMI and PRESENT is non-negligible, but $f_1$ and AES are resistant to this attack. Second, this research studies the distribution of the cryptographic properties of component functions of a random primitive in the multi-output filtering model. The experiments show some non-randomness in the distribution of the algebraic degree and nonlinearity for KASUMI. The last work is constructing two MACs. The first MAC called WGIA-128 is a variant of EIA1, and requires the underlying stream cipher to generate uniform distributed key streams. WG-16, a stream cipher with provable security, is a good choice to be the underlying cipher of WGIA-128 because it satisfies the requirement. The second MAC called AMAC is constructed upon APN functions. we propose two different constructions of AMAC, and both of these two constructions have provable security. The probability of substitution forgery attacks against both constructions of AMAC is upper bounded by a negligible value. Compared with EIA1 and EIA3, two message authentication codes used in the 4G LTE system, both constructions of AMAC are slower than EIA3, but much faster than EIA1. Moreover, both constructions of AMAC are resistant to cycling and linear forgery attacks, which can be applied to both EIA1 and EIA3

Decorrelation: a theory for block cipher security

Pseudorandomness is a classical model for the security of block ciphers. In this paper we propose convenient tools in order to study it in connection with the Shannon Theory, the Carter-Wegman universal hash functions paradigm, and the Luby-Rackoff approach. This enables the construction of new ciphers with security proofs under specific models. We show how to ensure security against basic differential and linear cryptanalysis and even more general attacks. We propose practical construction scheme

Security performance and protocol consideration in optical communication system with optical layer security enabled by optical coding techniques

With the fast development of communication systems, network security issues have more and more impact on daily life. It is essential to construct a high degree of optical layer security to resolve the security problem once and for all. Three different techniques which can provide optical layer security are introduced and compared. Optical chaos can be used for fast random number generation. Quantum cryptography is the most promising technique for key distribution. And the optical coding techniques can be deployed to encrypt the modulated signal in the optical layer. A mathematical equation has been derived from information theory to evaluate the information-theoretic security level of the wiretap channel in optical coding schemes. And the merits and limitation of two coherent optical coding schemes, temporal phase coding and spectral phase coding, have been analysed. The security scheme based on a reconfigurable optical coding device has been introduced, and the corresponding security protocol has been developed. By moving the encryption operation from the electronic layer to the optical layer, the modulated signals become opaque to the unauthorised users. Optical code distribution and authentication is the one of the major challenges for our proposed scheme. In our proposed protocol, both of the operations are covered and defined in detail. As a preliminary draft of the optical code security protocol, it could be a useful guidance for further research