An Authentication Method for Secure Internet Transaction Using Smart Card and Secure Coprocessor

Authentication is the process of confirming an identity. In the context of network interactions, authentication involves the confident identification of one party by another party. Authentication of users in distributed systems poses special problems because, users lack the ability to encrypt and , decrypt. In most systems today, the user is forced to trust the node he wants to use. In a more satisfactory design, the user carries a smart card with sufficient computing power to assist him. This thesis deals with relatively new methods of authentication using a smart card and secure coprocessor. We analyze two cases to authenticate a client, depending on the smart card usage. The major attacks that affect the smart card and the server are applied to our proposed methods of authentication. The result shows that using the proper system preparation and proper authentication sequence for our methods the effects could be minimized

Trusted S/MIME Gateways

The utility of Web-based email clients is clear: a user is able to access their email account from any computer anywhere at any time. However, this option is unavailable to users whose security depends on their key pair being stored either on their local computer or in their browser. Our implementation seeks to solve two problems with secure email services. The first that of mobility: users must have access to their key pairs in order to perform the necessary cryptographic operations. The second is one of transition: initially, users would not want to give up their regular email clients. Keeping these two restrictions in mind, we decided on the implementation of a secure gateway system that works in conjunction with an existing mail server and client. Our result is PKIGate, an S/MIME gateway that uses the DigitalNet (formerly Getronics) S/MIME Freeware Library and IBM\u27s 4758 secure coprocessor. This thesis presents motivations for the project, a comparison with similar existing products, software and hardware selection, the design, use case scenarios, a discussion of implementation issues, and suggestions for future work

WebALPS Implementation and Performance Analysis: Using Trusted Co-servers to Enhance Privacy and Security of Web Interactions

The client-server model of the Web poses a fundamental trust issue: clients are forced to trust in secrecy and correctness of computation occurring at a remote server of unknown credibility. The current solution for this problem is to use a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) system and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) digital certificates to prove the claimed identity of a server and establish an authenticated, encrypted channel between the client and this server. However, this approach does not address the security risks posed by potential malicious server operators or any third parties who may penetrate the server sites. The WebALPS (Web Applications with Lots of Privacy and Security) approach is proposed to address these weaknesses by moving sensitive computations at server side into trusted co-servers running inside high-assurance secure coprocessors. In this report, we examine the foundations of the credibility of WebALPS co-servers. Then we will describe our work of designing and building a prototype WebALPS co-server, which is integrated into the widely-deployed, commercial-grade Apache server. We will also present the performance test results of our system which support the argument that WebALPS approach provides a systematic and practical way to address the remote trust issue

Dynamic Group Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange under Standard Assumptions

Authenticated Diffie-Hellman key exchange allows two principals communicating over a public network, and each holding public /private keys, to agree on a shared secret value. In this paper we study the natural extension of this cryptographic problem to a group of principals. We begin from existing formal security models and refine them to incorporate major missing details (e.g., strong-corruption and concurrent sessions). Within this model we define the execution of a protocol for authenticated dynamic group Diffie-Hellman and show that it is provably secure under the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption. Our security result holds in the standard model and thus provides better security guarantees than previously published results in the random oracle model

Privacy-enhanced credential services

The use of credential directories in PKI and authorization systems such as Shibboleth introduces a new privacy risk: an insider at the directory can learn much about otherwise protected interactions by observing who makes queries, and what they ask for. Recent advances in Practical Private Information Retrieval provide promising countermeasures. In this paper, we extend this technology to solve this new privacy problem, and present a design and preliminary prototype for a LDAP-based credential service that can prevent even an insider from learning anything more than the fact a query was made. Our preliminary performance analysis suggests that the complete prototype may be sufficiently robust for academic enterprise settings

Bear: An Open-Source Virtual Secure Coprocessor based on TCPA

This paper reports on our ongoing project to use TCPA to transform a desktop Linux machine into a virtual secure coprocessor: more powerful but less secure than higher-end devices. We use TCPA hardware and modified boot loaders to protect fairly static components, such as a trusted kernel; we use an enforcer module---configured as Linux Security Module---to protected more dynamic system components; we use an encrypted loopback filesystem to protect highly dynamic components. All our code is open source and available under GPL from http://enforcer.sourceforge.net

Cryptographic-Paging Mechanism with Secure Coprocessor to Enhance Digital Signature Integrity for Cyber Hygiene Standard

Digital Signature is a mathematical algorithm to validate the authenticity and integrity of an electronic message. Modern browsers enable a wide range  of sensitive operations over SSL/TLS connections. Cryptographic protocols (SSL/TLS) are used to imbue web communications with intgrity, security, and  resilience against unauthorized tampering. It is interesting to note that PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) uses the TLS protocol to establish secure  connections between clients and servers over the internet. Thereby ensuring that the information relayed is encrypted and can not be read by an  external third party. Great scholars over the last decades have proved that a great number of internet users either tend to ignore or do not understand  browser security indicators. Hence there are flaws and vulnerabilities in the certificates and websites. This study proposes a technique hereby referred as  cryptographic paging mechanism with secure coprocessor to enhance the integrity of digital Signature. As a result of the encryption and integrity check,  data security on the outgoing page is maintained.&nbsp

Secure Hardware Enhanced MyProxy: A Ph.D. Thesis Proposal

In 1976, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman demonstrated how New Directions In Cryptography could enable secure information exchange between parties that do not share secrets. In order for public key cryptography to work in modern distributed environments, we need an infrastructure for finding and trusting other parties\u27 public keys (i.e., a PKI). A number of useful applications become possible with PKI. While the applications differ in how they use keys (e.g., S/MIME uses the key for message encryption and signing, while client-side SSL uses the key for authentication), all applications share one assumption: users have keypairs. In previous work, we examined the security aspects of some of the standard keystores and the their interaction with the OS. We concluded that desktops are not safe places to store private keys, and we demonstrated the permeability of keystores such as the default Microsoft keystore and the Mozilla keystore. In addition to being unsafe, these desktop keystores have the added disadvantage of being immobile. In other previous work, we examined trusted computing. In industry, a new trusted computing initiative has emerged: the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) (now renamed the Trusted Computing Group (TCG)). The goal of the TCG design is lower-assurance security that protects an entire desktop platform and is cheap enough to be commercially feasible. Last year, we built a trusted computing platform based on the TCG specifications and hardware. The picture painted by these previous projects suggests that common desktops are not secure enough for use as PKI clients, and trusted computing can improve the security of client machines. The question that I propose to investigate is: Can I build a system which applies trusted computing hardware in a reasonable manner in order to make desktops usable for PKI? My design begins with the Grid community\u27s MyProxy credential repository, and enhances it to take advantage of secure hardware on the clients, at the repository, and in the policy framework. The result is called Secure Hardware Enhanced MyProxy

Hardware-Assisted Secure Computation

The theory community has worked on Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC) for more than two decades, and has produced many protocols for many settings. One common thread in these works is that the protocols cannot use a Trusted Third Party (TTP), even though this is conceptually the simplest and most general solution. Thus, current protocols involve only the direct players---we call such protocols self-reliant. They often use blinded boolean circuits, which has several sources of overhead, some due to the circuit representation and some due to the blinding. However, secure coprocessors like the IBM 4758 have actual security properties similar to ideal TTPs. They also have little RAM and a slow CPU.We call such devices Tiny TTPs. The availability of real tiny TTPs opens the door for a different approach to SMC problems. One major challenge with this approach is how to execute large programs on large inputs using the small protected memory of a tiny TTP, while preserving the trust properties that an ideal TTP provides. In this thesis we have investigated the use of real TTPs to help with the solution of SMC problems. We start with the use of such TTPs to solve the Private Information Retrieval (PIR) problem, which is one important instance of SMC. Our implementation utilizes a 4758. The rest of the thesis is targeted at general SMC. Our SMC system, Faerieplay, moves some functionality into a tiny TTP, and thus avoids the blinded circuit overhead. Faerieplay consists of a compiler from high-level code to an arithmetic circuit with special gates for efficient indirect array access, and a virtual machine to execute this circuit on a tiny TTP while maintaining the typical SMC trust properties. We report on Faerieplay\u27s security properties, the specification of its components, and our implementation and experiments. These include comparisons with the Fairplay circuit-based two-party system, and an implementation of the Dijkstra graph shortest path algorithm. We also provide an implementation of an oblivious RAM which supports similar tiny TTP-based SMC functionality but using a standard RAM program. Performance comparisons show Faerieplay\u27s circuit approach to be considerably faster, at the expense of a more constrained programming environment when targeting a circuit