15,761 research outputs found
Secure computation under network and physical attacks
2011 - 2012This thesis proposes several protocols for achieving secure com-
putation under concurrent and physical attacks. Secure computation
allows many parties to compute a joint function of their inputs, while
keeping the privacy of their input preserved. It is required that the pri-
vacy one party's input is preserved even if other parties participating
in the protocol collude or deviate from the protocol.
In this thesis we focus on concurrent and physical attacks, where
adversarial parties try to break the privacy of honest parties by ex-
ploiting the network connection or physical weaknesses of the honest
parties' machine.
In the rst part of the thesis we discuss how to construct proto-
cols that are Universally Composable (UC for short) based on physical
setup assumptions. We explore the use of Physically Uncloneable Func-
tions (PUFs) as setup assumption for achieving UC-secure computa-
tions. PUF are physical noisy source of randomness. The use of PUFs
in the UC-framework has been proposed already in [14]. However, this
work assumes that all PUFs in the system are trusted. This means
that, each party has to trust the PUFs generated by the other parties.
In this thesis we focus on reducing the trust involved in the use of such
PUFs and we introduce the Malicious PUFs model in which only PUFs
generated by honest parties are assumed to be trusted. Thus the secu-
rity of each party relies on its own PUF only and holds regardless of the
goodness of the PUFs generated/used by the adversary. We are able to
show that, under this more realistic assumption, one can achieve UC-
secure computation, under computational assumptions. Moreover, we
show how to achieve unconditional UC-secure commitments with (ma-
licious) PUFs and with stateless tamper-proof hardware tokens. We
discuss our contribution on this matter in Part I. These results are
contained in papers [80] and [28].
In the second part of the thesis we focus on the concurrent setting,
and we investigate on protocols achieving round optimality and black-
box access to a cryptographic primitive. We study two fundamental
functionalities: commitment scheme and zero knowledge, and we focus
on some of the round-optimal constructions and lower bounds con-
cerning both functionalities. We nd that such constructions present
subtle issues. Hence, we provide new protocols that actually achieve
the security guarantee promised by previous results.
Concerning physical attacks, we consider adversaries able to re-
set the machine of the honest party. In a reset attack a machine is
forced to run a protocol several times using the same randomness. In
this thesis we provide the rst construction of a witness indistinguish-
able argument system that is simultaneous resettable and argument of
knowledge. We discuss about this contribution in Part III, which is the
content of the paper. [edited by author]XI n.s
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
Quantum cryptography: key distribution and beyond
Uniquely among the sciences, quantum cryptography has driven both
foundational research as well as practical real-life applications. We review
the progress of quantum cryptography in the last decade, covering quantum key
distribution and other applications.Comment: It's a review on quantum cryptography and it is not restricted to QK
The Case for Quantum Key Distribution
Quantum key distribution (QKD) promises secure key agreement by using quantum
mechanical systems. We argue that QKD will be an important part of future
cryptographic infrastructures. It can provide long-term confidentiality for
encrypted information without reliance on computational assumptions. Although
QKD still requires authentication to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, it can
make use of either information-theoretically secure symmetric key
authentication or computationally secure public key authentication: even when
using public key authentication, we argue that QKD still offers stronger
security than classical key agreement.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure; to appear in proceedings of QuantumComm 2009
Workshop on Quantum and Classical Information Security; version 2 minor
content revision
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