A Thesis: A CRYPTOGRAPHIC STUDY OF SOME DIGITAL SIGNATURE SCHEMES.

In this thesis, we propose some directed signature schemes. In addition, we have discussed their applications in different situations. In this thesis, we would like to discuss the security aspects during the design process of the proposed directed digital signature schemes. The security of the most digital signature schemes widely use in practice is based on the two difficult problems, viz; the problem of factoring integers (The RSA scheme) and the problem of finding discrete logarithms over finite fields (The ElGamal scheme). The proposed works in this thesis is divided into seven chapters

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

Identity-based threshold group signature scheme based on multiple hard number theoretic problems

We introduce in this paper a new identity-based threshold signature (IBTHS) technique, which is based on a pair of intractable problems, residuosity and discrete logarithm. This technique relies on two difficult problems and offers an improved level of security relative to an individual hard problem. The majority of the denoted IBTHS techniques are established on an individual difficult problem. Despite the fact that these methods are secure, however, a prospective solution of this sole problem by an adversary will enable him/her to recover the entire private data together with secret keys and configuration values of the associated scheme. Our technique is immune to the four most familiar attack types in relation to the signature schemes. Enhanced performance of our proposed technique is verified in terms of minimum cost of computations required by both of the signing algorithm and the verifying algorithm in addition to immunity to attacks

An Efficient and Provably Secure ID-Based Threshold Signcryption Scheme

Signcryption is a cryptographic primitive that performs digital signature and public key encryption simultaneously, at a lower computational costs and communication overheads than the signature-then-encryption approach. Recently, two identity-based threshold signcryption schemes[12],[26] have been proposed by combining the concepts of identity-based threshold signature and signcryption together. However, the formal models and security proofs for both schemes are not considered. In this paper, we formalize the concept of identity-based threshold signcryption and give a new scheme based on the bilinear pairings. We prove its confidentiality under the Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption and its unforgeability under the Computational Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. Our scheme turns out to be more efficient than the two previously proposed schemes

EFFICIENT AND SCALABLE NETWORK SECURITY PROTOCOLS BASED ON LFSR SEQUENCES

The gap between abstract, mathematics-oriented research in cryptography and the engineering approach of designing practical, network security protocols is widening. Network researchers experiment with well-known cryptographic protocols suitable for different network models. On the other hand, researchers inclined toward theory often design cryptographic schemes without considering the practical network constraints. The goal of this dissertation is to address problems in these two challenging areas: building bridges between practical network security protocols and theoretical cryptography. This dissertation presents techniques for building performance sensitive security protocols, using primitives from linear feedback register sequences (LFSR) sequences, for a variety of challenging networking applications. The significant contributions of this thesis are: 1. A common problem faced by large-scale multicast applications, like real-time news feeds, is collecting authenticated feedback from the intended recipients. We design an efficient, scalable, and fault-tolerant technique for combining multiple signed acknowledgments into a single compact one and observe that most signatures (based on the discrete logarithm problem) used in previous protocols do not result in a scalable solution to the problem. 2. We propose a technique to authenticate on-demand source routing protocols in resource-constrained wireless mobile ad-hoc networks. We develop a single-round multisignature that requires no prior cooperation among nodes to construct the multisignature and supports authentication of cached routes. 3. We propose an efficient and scalable aggregate signature, tailored for applications like building efficient certificate chains, authenticating distributed and adaptive content management systems and securing path-vector routing protocols. 4. We observe that blind signatures could form critical building blocks of privacypreserving accountability systems, where an authority needs to vouch for the legitimacy of a message but the ownership of the message should be kept secret from the authority. We propose an efficient blind signature that can serve as a protocol building block for performance sensitive, accountability systems. All special forms digital signatures—aggregate, multi-, and blind signatures—proposed in this dissertation are the first to be constructed using LFSR sequences. Our detailed cost analysis shows that for a desired level of security, the proposed signatures outperformed existing protocols in computation cost, number of communication rounds and storage overhead

Adding Query Privacy to Robust DHTs

Interest in anonymous communication over distributed hash tables (DHTs) has increased in recent years. However, almost all known solutions solely aim at achieving sender or requestor anonymity in DHT queries. In many application scenarios, it is crucial that the queried key remains secret from intermediate peers that (help to) route the queries towards their destinations. In this paper, we satisfy this requirement by presenting an approach for providing privacy for the keys in DHT queries. We use the concept of oblivious transfer (OT) in communication over DHTs to preserve query privacy without compromising spam resistance. Although our OT-based approach can work over any DHT, we concentrate on communication over robust DHTs that can tolerate Byzantine faults and resist spam. We choose the best-known robust DHT construction, and employ an efficient OT protocol well-suited for achieving our goal of obtaining query privacy over robust DHTs. Finally, we compare the performance of our privacy-preserving protocols with their more privacy-invasive counterparts. We observe that there is no increase in the message complexity and only a small overhead in the computational complexity.Comment: To appear at ACM ASIACCS 201