11,320 research outputs found
Denial-of-Service Resistance in Key Establishment
Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are an increasing problem for network connected systems. Key establishment protocols are applications that are particularly vulnerable to DoS attack as they are typically required to perform computationally expensive cryptographic operations in order to authenticate the protocol initiator and to generate the cryptographic keying material that will subsequently be used to secure the communications between initiator and responder. The goal of DoS resistance in key establishment protocols is to ensure that attackers cannot prevent a legitimate initiator and responder deriving cryptographic keys without expending resources beyond a responder-determined threshold. In this work we review the strategies and techniques used to improve resistance to DoS attacks. Three key establishment protocols implementing DoS resistance techniques are critically reviewed and the impact of misapplication of the techniques on DoS resistance is discussed. Recommendations on effectively applying resistance techniques to key establishment protocols are made
A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends
This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the
inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense
mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the
security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity,
confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive
overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in
view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats
are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing
security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless
network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term
evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in
physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open
communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer.
We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their
counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive
jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the
integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and
cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some
technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are
summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201
High-level Cryptographic Abstractions
The interfaces exposed by commonly used cryptographic libraries are clumsy,
complicated, and assume an understanding of cryptographic algorithms. The
challenge is to design high-level abstractions that require minimum knowledge
and effort to use while also allowing maximum control when needed.
This paper proposes such high-level abstractions consisting of simple
cryptographic primitives and full declarative configuration. These abstractions
can be implemented on top of any cryptographic library in any language. We have
implemented these abstractions in Python, and used them to write a wide variety
of well-known security protocols, including Signal, Kerberos, and TLS.
We show that programs using our abstractions are much smaller and easier to
write than using low-level libraries, where size of security protocols
implemented is reduced by about a third on average. We show our implementation
incurs a small overhead, less than 5 microseconds for shared key operations and
less than 341 microseconds (< 1%) for public key operations. We also show our
abstractions are safe against main types of cryptographic misuse reported in
the literature
Smart cards: State-of-the-art to future directions
The evolution of smart card technology provides an interesting case study of the relationship and interactions between security and business requirements. This paper maps out the milestones for smart card technology, discussing at each step the opportunities and challenges. The paper reviews recently proposed innovative ownership/management models and the security challenges associated with them. The paper concludes with a discussion of possible future directions for the technology, and the challenges these present
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