Hybrid Encryption in the Multi-User Setting

This paper presents an attack in the multi-user setting on various public-key encryption schemes standardized in IEEE 1363a, SECG SEC 1 and ISO 18033-2. The multi-user setting is a security model proposed by Bellare et al., which allows adversaries to simultaneously attack multiple ciphertexts created by one or more users. An attack is considered successful if the attacker learns information about any of the plaintexts. We show that many standardized public-key encryption schemes are vulnerable in this model, and give ways to prevent the attack. We also show that the key derivation function and pseudorandom generator used to implement a hybrid encryption scheme must be secure in the multi-user setting, in order for the overall primitive to be secure in the multi-user setting. As an illustration of the former, we show that using HKDF (as standardized in NIST SP 800-56C) as a key derivation function for certain standardized hybrid public-key encryption schemes is insecure in the multi-user setting

Privacy-Friendly Load Scheduling of Deferrable and Interruptible Domestic Appliances in Smart Grids

The massive integration of renewable energy sources in the power grid ecosystem with the aim of reducing carbon emissions must cope with their intrinsically intermittent and unpredictable nature. Therefore, the grid must improve its capability of controlling the energy demand by adapting the power consumption curve to match the trend of green energy generation. This could be done by scheduling the activities of deferrable and/or interruptible electrical appliances. However, communicating the users' needs about the usage of their appliances also leaks sensitive information about their habits and lifestyles, thus arising privacy concerns. This paper proposes a framework to allow the coordination of energy consumption without compromising the privacy of the users: the service requests generated by the domestic appliances are divided into crypto-shares using Shamir Secret Sharing scheme and collected through an anonymous routing protocol by a set of schedulers, which schedule the requests by directly operating on the shares. We discuss the security guarantees provided by our proposed infrastructure and evaluate its performance, comparing it with the optimal scheduling obtained by means of an Integer Linear Programming formulation

Analysis and Design of Privacy-Enhancing Information Sharing Systems

Recent technological advancements have enabled the collection of large amounts of personal data of individuals at an ever-increasing rate. Service providers, organisations and governments can collect or otherwise acquire rich information about individuals’ everyday lives and habits from big data-silos, enabling profiling and micro-targeting such as in political elections. Therefore, it is important to analyse systems that allow the collection and information sharing between users and to design secure and privacy enhancing solutions. This thesis contains two parts. The aim of the first part is to investigate in detail the effects of the collateral information collection of third-party applications on Facebook. The aim of the second part is to analyse in detail the security and privacy issues of car sharing systems and to design a secure and privacy-preserving solution. In the first part, we present a detailed multi-faceted study on the collateral information collection privacy issues of Facebook applications; providers of third-party applications on Facebook exploit the interdependency between users and their friends. The goal is to (i) study the existence of the problem, (ii) investigate whether Facebook users are concerned about the issue, quantify its (iii) likelihood and (iv) impact of collateral information collection affecting users, (v) identify whether collateral information collection is an issue for the protection of the personal data of Facebook users under the legal framework, and (vi) we propose solutions that aim to solve the problem of collateral information collection. In order to investigate the views of the users, we designed a questionnaire and collected the responses of participants. Employing real data from the Facebook third-party applications ecosystem, we compute the likelihood of collateral information collection affecting users and quantify its significance evaluating the amount of attributes collected by such applications. To investigate whether collateral information collection is an issue in terms of users’ privacy we analysed the legal framework in light of the General Data Protection Regulation. To provide countermeasures, we propose a privacy dashboard extension that implements privacy scoring computations to enhance transparency towards collateral information collection

Internet of Things Applications - From Research and Innovation to Market Deployment

The book aims to provide a broad overview of various topics of Internet of Things from the research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies, nanoelectronics, cyber physical systems, architecture, interoperability and industrial applications. It is intended to be a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC – Internet of Things European Research Cluster from technology to international cooperation and the global "state of play".The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European research Cluster on the Internet of Things Strategic Research Agenda and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, development and deployment of IoT at the global level. Internet of Things is creating a revolutionary new paradigm, with opportunities in every industry from Health Care, Pharmaceuticals, Food and Beverage, Agriculture, Computer, Electronics Telecommunications, Automotive, Aeronautics, Transportation Energy and Retail to apply the massive potential of the IoT to achieving real-world solutions. The beneficiaries will include as well semiconductor companies, device and product companies, infrastructure software companies, application software companies, consulting companies, telecommunication and cloud service providers. IoT will create new revenues annually for these stakeholders, and potentially create substantial market share shakeups due to increased technology competition. The IoT will fuel technology innovation by creating the means for machines to communicate many different types of information with one another while contributing in the increased value of information created by the number of interconnections among things and the transformation of the processed information into knowledge shared into the Internet of Everything. The success of IoT depends strongly on enabling technology development, market acceptance and standardization, which provides interoperability, compatibility, reliability, and effective operations on a global scale. The connected devices are part of ecosystems connecting people, processes, data, and things which are communicating in the cloud using the increased storage and computing power and pushing for standardization of communication and metadata. In this context security, privacy, safety, trust have to be address by the product manufacturers through the life cycle of their products from design to the support processes. The IoT developments address the whole IoT spectrum - from devices at the edge to cloud and datacentres on the backend and everything in between, through ecosystems are created by industry, research and application stakeholders that enable real-world use cases to accelerate the Internet of Things and establish open interoperability standards and common architectures for IoT solutions. Enabling technologies such as nanoelectronics, sensors/actuators, cyber-physical systems, intelligent device management, smart gateways, telematics, smart network infrastructure, cloud computing and software technologies will create new products, new services, new interfaces by creating smart environments and smart spaces with applications ranging from Smart Cities, smart transport, buildings, energy, grid, to smart health and life. Technical topics discussed in the book include: • Introduction• Internet of Things Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda• Internet of Things in the industrial context: Time for deployment.• Integration of heterogeneous smart objects, applications and services• Evolution from device to semantic and business interoperability• Software define and virtualization of network resources• Innovation through interoperability and standardisation when everything is connected anytime at anyplace• Dynamic context-aware scalable and trust-based IoT Security, Privacy framework• Federated Cloud service management and the Internet of Things• Internet of Things Application