Attribute-based Key Exchange with General Policies

Attribute-based methods provide authorization to parties based on whether their set of attributes (e.g., age, organization, etc.) fulfills a policy. In attribute-based encryption (ABE), authorized parties can decrypt, and in attribute-based credentials (ABCs), authorized parties can authenticate themselves. In this paper, we combine elements of ABE and ABCs together with garbled circuits to construct attribute-based key exchange (ABKE). Our focus is on an interactive solution involving a client that holds a certificate (issued by an authority) vouching for that client\u27s attributes and a server that holds a policy computable on such a set of attributes. The goal is for the server to establish a shared key with the client but only if the client\u27s certified attributes satisfy the policy. Our solution enjoys strong privacy guarantees for both the client and the server, including attribute privacy and unlinkability of client sessions. Our main contribution is a construction of ABKE for arbitrary circuits with high (concrete) efficiency. Specifically, we support general policies expressible as boolean circuits computed on a set of attributes. Even for policies containing hundreds of thousands of gates the performance cost is dominated by two pairing computations per policy input. Put another way, for a similar cost to prior ABE/ABC solutions, which can only support small formulas efficiently, we can support vastly richer policies. We implemented our solution and report on its performance. For policies with 100,000 gates and 200 inputs over a realistic network, the server and client spend 957 ms and 176 ms on computation, respectively. When using offline preprocessing and batch signature verification, this drops to only 243 ms and 97 ms

Synchronized Aggregate Signatures: New Definitions, Constructions and Applications

An aggregate signature scheme is a digital signature scheme where anyone given n signatures on n messages from n users can aggregate all these signatures into a single short signature. Unfortunately, no ``fully non-interactive\u27\u27 aggregate signature schemes are known outside of the random oracle heuristic; that is, signers must pass messages between themselves, sequentially or otherwise, to generate the signature. Interaction is too costly for some interesting applications. In this work, we consider the task of realizing aggregate signatures in the model of Gentry and Ramzan (PKC 2006) when all signers share a synchronized clock, but do not need to be aware of or interactive with one another. Each signer may issue at most one signature per time period and signatures aggregate only if they were created during the same time period. We call this synchronized aggregation. We present a practical synchronized aggregate signature scheme secure under the Computational Diffie-Hellman assumption in the standard model. Our construction is based on the stateful signatures of Hohenberger and Waters (Eurocrypt 2009). Those signatures do not aggregate since each signature includes unique randomness for a chameleon hash and those random values do not compress. To overcome this challenge, we remove the chameleon hash from their scheme and find an alternative method for moving from weak to full security that enables aggregation. We conclude by discussing applications of this construction to sensor networks and software authentication

On Achieving Secure Message Authentication for Vehicular Communications

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have emerged as a new application scenario that is envisioned to revolutionize the human driving experiences, optimize traffic flow control systems, etc. Addressing security and privacy issues as the prerequisite of VANETs' development must be emphasized. To avoid any possible malicious attack and resource abuse, employing a digital signature scheme is widely recognized as the most effective approach for VANETs to achieve authentication, integrity, and validity. However, when the number of signatures received by a vehicle becomes large, a scalability problem emerges immediately, where a vehicle could be difficult to sequentially verify each received signature within 100-300 ms interval in accordance with the current Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) protocol. In addition, there are still some unsolved attacks in VANETs such as Denial of Service (Dos) attacks, which are not well addressed and waiting for us to solve. In this thesis, we propose the following solutions to address the above mentioned security related issues. First of all, to address the scalability issues, we introduce a novel roadside unit (RSU) aided message authentication scheme, named RAISE, which makes RSUs responsible for verifying the authenticity of messages sent from vehicles and for notifying the results back to vehicles. In addition, RAISE adopts the k-anonymity property for preserving user privacy, where a message cannot be associated with a common vehicle. Secondly, we further consider the situation that RSUs may not cover all the busy streets of a city or a highway in some situations, for example, at the beginning of a VANETs' deployment period, or due to the physical damage of some RSUs, or simply for economic considerations. Under these circumstances, we further propose an efficient identity-based batch signature verification scheme for vehicular communications. The proposed scheme can make vehicles verify a batch of signatures once instead of one after another, and thus it efficiently increases vehicles' message verification speed. In addition, our scheme achieves conditional privacy: a distinct pseudo identity is generated along with each message, and a trust authority can trace a vehicle's real identity from its pseudo identity. In order to find invalid signatures in a batch of signatures, we adopt group testing technique which can find invalid signatures efficiently. Lastly, we identify a DoS attack, called signature jamming attack (SJA), which could easily happen and possibly cause a profound vicious impact on the normal operations of a VANET, yet has not been well addressed in the literature. The SJA can be simply launched at an attacker by flooding a significant number of messages with invalid signatures that jam the surrounding vehicles and prevent them from timely verifying regular and legitimate messages. To countermeasure the SJA, we introduces a hash-based puzzle scheme, which serves as a light-weight filter for excluding likely false signatures before they go through relatively lengthy signature verification process. To further minimize the vicious effect of SJA, we introduce a hash recommendation mechanism, which enables vehicles to share their information so as to more efficiently thwart the SJA. For each research solution, detailed analysis in terms of computational time, and transmission overhead, privacy preservation are performed to validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed schemes

McCLS: Certificateless Signature Scheme for Emergency Mobile Wireless Cyber-Physical Systems

Mobile Ad Hoc Network is a self-configurable and self-organizing wireless network of mobile devices without fixed infrastructure support, which makes it a good candidate as underlying communication network for the Cyber-Physical Systems in emergency conditions such as earthquake, flood, and battlefields. In these scenarios, efficient communication schemes with security support are especially desired. Two cryptography approaches, the public key cryptography and the identitybased cryptography, face the costly and complex key management problem and the “key escrow" problem in the real-life deployment. Recently, the certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) was introduced to address these problems in previous approaches. However, the efficiency of the schemes based on CL-PKC is not high and can be improved further. In this paper, we present an improved certificateless signature scheme (McCLS) based on bilinear pairings. First, we theoretically compare the efficiency of McCLS with that of existing certificateless signature schemes (CLS). Second, an empirical study is conducted to compare the traditional AODV with the McCLS scheme based on AODV (McDV) in their efficiency and effectiveness against two most common attacks (i.e. redirection attack and rushing attack). Results from theoretical analysis show that the new McCLS scheme is more efficient than existing CLS solutions, and results from empirical studies show that the McDV is able to resist the two common attacks without causing substantial degradation of the network performance