18,080 research outputs found
Verifiable Network-Performance Measurements
In the current Internet, there is no clean way for affected parties to react
to poor forwarding performance: when a domain violates its Service Level
Agreement (SLA) with a contractual partner, the partner must resort to ad-hoc
probing-based monitoring to determine the existence and extent of the
violation. Instead, we propose a new, systematic approach to the problem of
forwarding-performance verification. Our mechanism relies on voluntary
reporting, allowing each domain to disclose its loss and delay performance to
its neighbors; it does not disclose any information regarding the participating
domains' topology or routing policies beyond what is already publicly
available. Most importantly, it enables verifiable performance measurements,
i.e., domains cannot abuse it to significantly exaggerate their performance.
Finally, our mechanism is tunable, allowing each participating domain to
determine how many resources to devote to it independently (i.e., without any
inter-domain coordination), exposing a controllable trade-off between
performance-verification quality and resource consumption. Our mechanism comes
at the cost of deploying modest functionality at the participating domains'
border routers; we show that it requires reasonable processing and memory
resources within modern network capabilities.Comment: 14 page
Quire: Lightweight Provenance for Smart Phone Operating Systems
Smartphone apps often run with full privileges to access the network and
sensitive local resources, making it difficult for remote systems to have any
trust in the provenance of network connections they receive. Even within the
phone, different apps with different privileges can communicate with one
another, allowing one app to trick another into improperly exercising its
privileges (a Confused Deputy attack). In Quire, we engineered two new security
mechanisms into Android to address these issues. First, we track the call chain
of IPCs, allowing an app the choice of operating with the diminished privileges
of its callers or to act explicitly on its own behalf. Second, a lightweight
signature scheme allows any app to create a signed statement that can be
verified anywhere inside the phone. Both of these mechanisms are reflected in
network RPCs, allowing remote systems visibility into the state of the phone
when an RPC is made. We demonstrate the usefulness of Quire with two example
applications. We built an advertising service, running distinctly from the app
which wants to display ads, which can validate clicks passed to it from its
host. We also built a payment service, allowing an app to issue a request which
the payment service validates with the user. An app cannot not forge a payment
request by directly connecting to the remote server, nor can the local payment
service tamper with the request
Security by Spatial Reference:Using Relative Positioning to Authenticate Devices for Spontaneous Interaction
Spontaneous interaction is a desirable characteristic associated with mobile and ubiquitous computing. The aim is to enable users to connect their personal devices with devices encountered in their environment in order to take advantage of interaction opportunities in accordance with their situation. However, it is difficult to secure spontaneous interaction as this requires authentication of the encountered device, in the absence of any prior knowledge of the device. In this paper we present a method for establishing and securing spontaneous interactions on the basis of emphspatial references that capture the spatial relationship of the involved devices. Spatial references are obtained by accurate sensing of relative device positions, presented to the user for initiation of interactions, and used in a peer authentication protocol that exploits a novel mechanism for message transfer over ultrasound to ensures spatial authenticity of the sender
Energy efficient mining on a quantum-enabled blockchain using light
We outline a quantum-enabled blockchain architecture based on a consortium of
quantum servers. The network is hybridised, utilising digital systems for
sharing and processing classical information combined with a fibre--optic
infrastructure and quantum devices for transmitting and processing quantum
information. We deliver an energy efficient interactive mining protocol enacted
between clients and servers which uses quantum information encoded in light and
removes the need for trust in network infrastructure. Instead, clients on the
network need only trust the transparent network code, and that their devices
adhere to the rules of quantum physics. To demonstrate the energy efficiency of
the mining protocol, we elaborate upon the results of two previous experiments
(one performed over 1km of optical fibre) as applied to this work. Finally, we
address some key vulnerabilities, explore open questions, and observe
forward--compatibility with the quantum internet and quantum computing
technologies.Comment: 25 pages, 5 figure
S-FaaS: Trustworthy and Accountable Function-as-a-Service using Intel SGX
Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a recent and already very popular paradigm in
cloud computing. The function provider need only specify the function to be
run, usually in a high-level language like JavaScript, and the service provider
orchestrates all the necessary infrastructure and software stacks. The function
provider is only billed for the actual computational resources used by the
function invocation. Compared to previous cloud paradigms, FaaS requires
significantly more fine-grained resource measurement mechanisms, e.g. to
measure compute time and memory usage of a single function invocation with
sub-second accuracy. Thanks to the short duration and stateless nature of
functions, and the availability of multiple open-source frameworks, FaaS
enables non-traditional service providers e.g. individuals or data centers with
spare capacity. However, this exacerbates the challenge of ensuring that
resource consumption is measured accurately and reported reliably. It also
raises the issues of ensuring computation is done correctly and minimizing the
amount of information leaked to service providers.
To address these challenges, we introduce S-FaaS, the first architecture and
implementation of FaaS to provide strong security and accountability guarantees
backed by Intel SGX. To match the dynamic event-driven nature of FaaS, our
design introduces a new key distribution enclave and a novel transitive
attestation protocol. A core contribution of S-FaaS is our set of resource
measurement mechanisms that securely measure compute time inside an enclave,
and actual memory allocations. We have integrated S-FaaS into the popular
OpenWhisk FaaS framework. We evaluate the security of our architecture, the
accuracy of our resource measurement mechanisms, and the performance of our
implementation, showing that our resource measurement mechanisms add less than
6.3% latency on standardized benchmarks
Trusted Computing and Secure Virtualization in Cloud Computing
Large-scale deployment and use of cloud computing in industry
is accompanied and in the same time hampered by concerns regarding protection of
data handled by cloud computing providers. One of the consequences of moving
data processing and storage off company premises is that organizations have
less control over their infrastructure. As a result, cloud service (CS) clients
must trust that the CS provider is able to protect their data and
infrastructure from both external and internal attacks. Currently however, such
trust can only rely on organizational processes declared by the CS
provider and can not be remotely verified and validated by an external party.
Enabling the CS client to verify the integrity of the host where the
virtual machine instance will run, as well as to ensure that the virtual
machine image has not been tampered with, are some steps towards building
trust in the CS provider. Having the tools to perform such
verifications prior to the launch of the VM instance allows the CS
clients to decide in runtime whether certain data should be stored- or calculations
should be made on the VM instance offered by the CS provider.
This thesis combines three components -- trusted computing, virtualization technology
and cloud computing platforms -- to address issues of trust and
security in public cloud computing environments. Of the three components,
virtualization technology has had the longest evolution and is a cornerstone
for the realization of cloud computing. Trusted computing is a recent
industry initiative that aims to implement the root of trust in a hardware
component, the trusted platform module. The initiative has been formalized
in a set of specifications and is currently at version 1.2. Cloud computing
platforms pool virtualized computing, storage and network resources in
order to serve a large number of customers customers that use a multi-tenant
multiplexing model to offer on-demand self-service over broad network.
Open source cloud computing platforms are, similar to trusted computing, a
fairly recent technology in active development.
The issue of trust in public cloud environments is addressed
by examining the state of the art within cloud computing security and
subsequently addressing the issues of establishing trust in the launch of a
generic virtual machine in a public cloud environment. As a result, the thesis
proposes a trusted launch protocol that allows CS clients
to verify and ensure the integrity of the VM instance at launch time, as
well as the integrity of the host where the VM instance is launched. The protocol
relies on the use of Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for key generation and data protection.
The TPM also plays an essential part in the integrity attestation of the
VM instance host. Along with a theoretical, platform-agnostic protocol,
the thesis also describes a detailed implementation design of the protocol
using the OpenStack cloud computing platform.
In order the verify the implementability of the proposed protocol, a prototype
implementation has built using a distributed deployment of OpenStack.
While the protocol covers only the trusted launch procedure using generic
virtual machine images, it presents a step aimed to contribute towards
the creation of a secure and trusted public cloud computing environment
Can NSEC5 be practical for DNSSEC deployments?
NSEC5 is proposed modification to DNSSEC that simultaneously guarantees two security properties: (1) privacy against offline zone enumeration, and (2) integrity of zone contents, even if an adversary compromises the authoritative nameserver responsible for responding to DNS queries for the zone. This paper redesigns NSEC5 to make it both practical and performant. Our NSEC5 redesign features a new fast verifiable random function (VRF) based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), along with a cryptographic proof of its security. This VRF is also of independent interest, as it is being standardized by the IETF and being used by several other projects. We show how to integrate NSEC5 using our ECC-based VRF into the DNSSEC protocol, leveraging precomputation to improve performance and DNS protocol-level optimizations to shorten responses. Next, we present the first full-fledged implementation of NSEC5—extending widely-used DNS software to present a nameserver and recursive resolver that support NSEC5—and evaluate their performance under aggressive DNS query loads. Our performance results
indicate that our redesigned NSEC5 can be viable even for high-throughput scenarioshttps://eprint.iacr.org/2017/099.pdfFirst author draf
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