15,041 research outputs found
On Secure Workflow Decentralisation on the Internet
Decentralised workflow management systems are a new research area, where most
work to-date has focused on the system's overall architecture. As little
attention has been given to the security aspects in such systems, we follow a
security driven approach, and consider, from the perspective of available
security building blocks, how security can be implemented and what new
opportunities are presented when empowering the decentralised environment with
modern distributed security protocols. Our research is motivated by a more
general question of how to combine the positive enablers that email exchange
enjoys, with the general benefits of workflow systems, and more specifically
with the benefits that can be introduced in a decentralised environment. This
aims to equip email users with a set of tools to manage the semantics of a
message exchange, contents, participants and their roles in the exchange in an
environment that provides inherent assurances of security and privacy. This
work is based on a survey of contemporary distributed security protocols, and
considers how these protocols could be used in implementing a distributed
workflow management system with decentralised control . We review a set of
these protocols, focusing on the required message sequences in reviewing the
protocols, and discuss how these security protocols provide the foundations for
implementing core control-flow, data, and resource patterns in a distributed
workflow environment
Keeping Authorities "Honest or Bust" with Decentralized Witness Cosigning
The secret keys of critical network authorities - such as time, name,
certificate, and software update services - represent high-value targets for
hackers, criminals, and spy agencies wishing to use these keys secretly to
compromise other hosts. To protect authorities and their clients proactively
from undetected exploits and misuse, we introduce CoSi, a scalable witness
cosigning protocol ensuring that every authoritative statement is validated and
publicly logged by a diverse group of witnesses before any client will accept
it. A statement S collectively signed by W witnesses assures clients that S has
been seen, and not immediately found erroneous, by those W observers. Even if S
is compromised in a fashion not readily detectable by the witnesses, CoSi still
guarantees S's exposure to public scrutiny, forcing secrecy-minded attackers to
risk that the compromise will soon be detected by one of the W witnesses.
Because clients can verify collective signatures efficiently without
communication, CoSi protects clients' privacy, and offers the first
transparency mechanism effective against persistent man-in-the-middle attackers
who control a victim's Internet access, the authority's secret key, and several
witnesses' secret keys. CoSi builds on existing cryptographic multisignature
methods, scaling them to support thousands of witnesses via signature
aggregation over efficient communication trees. A working prototype
demonstrates CoSi in the context of timestamping and logging authorities,
enabling groups of over 8,000 distributed witnesses to cosign authoritative
statements in under two seconds.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure
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
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
Quantum e-commerce: A comparative study of possible protocols for online shopping and other tasks related to e-commerce
A set of quantum protocols for online shopping is proposed and analyzed to
establish that it is possible to perform secure online shopping using different
types of quantum resources. Specifically, a single photon based, a Bell state
based and two 3-qubit entangled state based quantum online shopping schemes are
proposed. The Bell state based scheme, being a completely orthogonal state
based protocol, is fundamentally different from the earlier proposed schemes
which were based on conjugate coding. One of the 3-qubit entangled state based
scheme is build on the principle of entanglement swapping which enables us to
accomplish the task without transmission of the message encoded qubits through
the channel. Possible ways of generalizing the entangled state based schemes
proposed here to the schemes which use multiqubit entangled states is also
discussed. Further, all the proposed protocols are shown to be free from the
limitations of the recently proposed protocol of Huang et al. (Quantum Inf.
Process. 14, 2211-2225, 2015) which allows the buyer (Alice) to change her
order at a later time (after initially placing the order and getting it
authenticated by the controller). The proposed schemes are also compared with
the existing schemes using qubit efficiency.Comment: It's shown that quantum e-commerce is not a difficult task, and it
can be done in various way
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