Privacy-preserving ciphertext-policy attribute-based search over encrypted data in cloud storage

This thesis presents Privacy-Preserving Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Searchable encryption schemes to achieve data privacy, keyword searchability, and fine-grained access control. The works related to this thesis address the issues with the existing related schemes like Data Authentication, Inefficient encryption and decryption, Inefficient traceability and revocation, Key-escrow problems, Prone to quantum attacks, and Lack of semantic search. The performance of all the proposed schemes was evaluated on a local machine.Resumen de la tesis presentada para acceder al título de Ph.D. in Computer Science de la National Institute of Technology-Warangal, Telangana, India.Facultad de Informátic

Towards Cyber Security for Low-Carbon Transportation: Overview, Challenges and Future Directions

In recent years, low-carbon transportation has become an indispensable part as sustainable development strategies of various countries, and plays a very important responsibility in promoting low-carbon cities. However, the security of low-carbon transportation has been threatened from various ways. For example, denial of service attacks pose a great threat to the electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid networks. To minimize these threats, several methods have been proposed to defense against them. Yet, these methods are only for certain types of scenarios or attacks. Therefore, this review addresses security aspect from holistic view, provides the overview, challenges and future directions of cyber security technologies in low-carbon transportation. Firstly, based on the concept and importance of low-carbon transportation, this review positions the low-carbon transportation services. Then, with the perspective of network architecture and communication mode, this review classifies its typical attack risks. The corresponding defense technologies and relevant security suggestions are further reviewed from perspective of data security, network management security and network application security. Finally, in view of the long term development of low-carbon transportation, future research directions have been concerned.Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures, accepted by journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Review

PROUD : verifiable privacy-preserving outsourced attribute based signcryption supporting access policy update for cloud assisted IoT applications

The ever-growing number of Internet connected devices poses several cybersecurity risks. Most of the exchanged data between the Internet of Things (IoT) devices are not adequately secured due to resource constraints on IoT devices. Attribute Based SignCryption (ABSC) is a powerful cryptographic mechanism suitable for distributed environments, providing flexible access control and data secrecy. However, it imposes high designcryption costs, and does not support access policy update (user addition/revocation). This paper presents PROUD, an ABSC solution, to securely outsource data designcryption process to edge servers in order to reduce the computation overhead on the user side. PROUD allows end-users to offload most of the designcryption overhead to an edge server and verify the correctness of the received partially designcrypted data from the edge server. Moreover, PROUD provides the access policy update feature with neither involving a proxy-server, nor re-signcrypting the signcrypted message and re-distributing the users’ secret keys. The access policy update feature in PROUD does not affect the size of the message received by the end-user which reduces the bandwidth and the storage usage. Our comprehensive theoretical and experimental analysis prove that PROUD outperforms existing schemes in terms of functionality, communication and computation overhead

CUPS : Secure Opportunistic Cloud of Things Framework based on Attribute Based Encryption Scheme Supporting Access Policy Update

The ever‐growing number of internet connected devices, coupled with the new computing trends, namely within emerging opportunistic networks, engenders several security concerns. Most of the exchanged data between the internet of things (IoT) devices are not adequately secured due to resource constraints on IoT devices. Attribute‐based encryption is a promising cryptographic mechanism suitable for distributed environments, providing flexible access control to encrypted data contents. However, it imposes high decryption costs, and does not support access policy update, for highly dynamic environments. This paper presents CUPS, an ABE‐based framework for opportunistic cloud of things applications, that securely outsources data decryption process to edge nodes in order to reduce the computation overhead on the user side. CUPS allows end‐users to offload most of the decryption overhead to an edge node and verify the correctness of the received partially decrypted data from the edge node. Moreover, CUPS provides the access policy update feature with neither involving a proxy‐server, nor re‐encrypting the enciphered data contents and re‐distributing the users' secret keys. The access policy update feature in CUPS does not affect the size of the message received by the end‐user, which reduces the bandwidth and the storage usage. Our comprehensive theoretical analysis proves that CUPS outperforms existing schemes in terms of functionality, communication and computation overheads

Securing Fog Federation from Behavior of Rogue Nodes

As the technological revolution advanced information security evolved with an increased need for confidential data protection on the internet. Individuals and organizations typically prefer outsourcing their confidential data to the cloud for processing and storage. As promising as the cloud computing paradigm is, it creates challenges; everything from data security to time latency issues with data computation and delivery to end-users. In response to these challenges CISCO introduced the fog computing paradigm in 2012. The intent was to overcome issues such as time latency and communication overhead and to bring computing and storage resources close to the ground and the end-users. Fog computing was, however, considered an extension of cloud computing and as such, inherited the same security and privacy challenges encountered by traditional cloud computing. These challenges accelerated the research community\u27s efforts to find practical solutions. In this dissertation, we present three approaches for individual and organizational data security and protection while that data is in storage in fog nodes or in the cloud. We also consider the protection of these data while in transit between fog nodes and the cloud, and against rogue fog nodes, man-in-the-middle attacks, and curious cloud service providers. The techniques described successfully satisfy each of the main security objectives of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Further we study the impact of rogue fog nodes on end-user devices. These approaches include a new concept, the Fog-Federation (FF): its purpose to minimize communication overhead and time latency between the Fog Nodes (FNs) and the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) during the time the system is unavailable as a rogue Fog Node (FN) is being ousted. Further, we considered the minimization of data in danger of breach by rogue fog nodes. We demonstrate the efficiency and feasibility of each approach by implementing simulations and analyzing security and performance

Anonymous certification for E-assessment opinion polls

Anonymous certification (AC) refers to cryptographic mechanisms in which users get certified from trusted issuers, with regard to some pre-defined user attributes, in order to produce presentation tokens. Such tokens satisfy service providers’ access policies, without revealing sensitive user information. AC systems are generally classified under two main different categories: (1) one-time show credentials that can be shown once for avoiding their originating user being traced from one transaction to another, and (2) multi-show credentials that can be used many times while avoiding their originating user to be traced. In this paper, we consider e-assessment opinion polls scenarios and propose an AC scheme where the one-time show property is relevant for making sure each user cannot hand in more than one poll in order to get significant results. To mitigate cheating, the scheme is provided with two extra procedures: attribute revocation and anonymity removal. The correctness of our scheme, as well as unforgeability, privacy and anonymity removal, are analyzed and demonstrated

PHOABE : securely outsourcing multi-authority attribute based encryption with policy hidden for cloud assisted IoT

Attribute based encryption (ABE) is an encrypted access control mechanism that ensures efficient data sharing among dynamic group of users. Nevertheless, this encryption technique presents two main drawbacks, namely high decryption cost and publicly shared access policies, thus leading to possible users’ privacy leakage. In this paper, we introduce PHOABE, a Policy-Hidden Outsourced ABE scheme. Our construction presents several advantages. First, it is a multi-attribute authority ABE scheme. Second, the expensive computations for the ABE decryption process is partially delegated to a Semi Trusted Cloud Server. Third, users’ privacy is protected thanks to a hidden access policy. Fourth, PHOABE is proven to be selectively secure, verifiable and policy privacy preserving under the random oracle model. Five, estimation of the processing overhead proves its feasibility in IoT constrained environments

Types of lightweight cryptographies in current developments for resource constrained machine type communication devices: challenges and opportunities

Machine-type communication devices have become a vital part of the autonomous industrial internet of things and industry 4.0. These autonomous resource-constrained devices share sensitive data, and are primarily acquired for automation and to operate consistently in remote environments under severe conditions. The requirements to secure the sensitive data shared between these devices consist of a resilient encryption technique with affordable operational costs. Consequently, devices, data, and networks are made secure by adopting a lightweight cryptosystem that should achieve robust security with sufficient computational and communication costs and counter modern security threats. This paper offers in-depth studies on different types and techniques of hardware and software-based lightweight cryptographies for machine-type communication devices in machine-to-machine communication networks

An Approach to Guide Users Towards Less Revealing Internet Browsers

When browsing the Internet, HTTP headers enable both clients and servers send extra data in their requests or responses such as the User-Agent string. This string contains information related to the sender’s device, browser, and operating system. Previous research has shown that there are numerous privacy and security risks result from exposing sensitive information in the User-Agent string. For example, it enables device and browser fingerprinting and user tracking and identification. Our large analysis of thousands of User-Agent strings shows that browsers differ tremendously in the amount of information they include in their User-Agent strings. As such, our work aims at guiding users towards using less exposing browsers. In doing so, we propose to assign an exposure score to browsers based on the information they expose and vulnerability records. Thus, our contribution in this work is as follows: first, provide a full implementation that is ready to be deployed and used by users. Second, conduct a user study to identify the effectiveness and limitations of our proposed approach. Our implementation is based on using more than 52 thousand unique browsers. Our performance and validation analysis show that our solution is accurate and efficient. The source code and data set are publicly available and the solution has been deployed

From security to assurance in the cloud: a survey

The cloud computing paradigm has become a mainstream solution for the deployment of business processes and applications. In the public cloud vision, infrastructure, platform, and software services are provisioned to tenants (i.e., customers and service providers) on a pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud tenants can use cloud resources at lower prices, and higher performance and flexibility, than traditional on-premises resources, without having to care about infrastructure management. Still, cloud tenants remain concerned with the cloud's level of service and the nonfunctional properties their applications can count on. In the last few years, the research community has been focusing on the nonfunctional aspects of the cloud paradigm, among which cloud security stands out. Several approaches to security have been described and summarized in general surveys on cloud security techniques. The survey in this article focuses on the interface between cloud security and cloud security assurance. First, we provide an overview of the state of the art on cloud security. Then, we introduce the notion of cloud security assurance and analyze its growing impact on cloud security approaches. Finally, we present some recommendations for the development of next-generation cloud security and assurance solutions