Blind Password Registration for Two-Server Password Authenticated Key Exchange and Secret Sharing Protocols

Many organisations enforce policies on the length and formation of passwords to encourage selection of strong passwords and protect their multi-user systems. For Two-Server Password Authenticated Key Exchange (2PAKE) and Two-Server Password Authenticated Secret Sharing (2PASS) protocols, where the password chosen by the client is secretly shared between the two servers, the initial remote registration of policy-compliant passwords represents a major problem because none of the servers is supposed to know the password in clear. We solve this problem by introducing Two-Server Blind Password Registration (2BPR) protocols that can be executed between a client and the two servers as part of the remote registration procedure. 2BPR protocols guarantee that secret shares sent to the servers belong to a password that matches their combined password policy and that the plain password remains hidden from any attacker that is in control of at most one server. We propose a security model for 2BPR protocols capturing the requirements of policy compliance for client passwords and their blindness against the servers. Our model extends the adversarial setting of 2PAKE/2PASS protocols to the registration phase and hence closes the gap in the formal treatment of such protocols. We construct an efficient 2BPR protocol for ASCII-based password policies, prove its security in the standard model, give a proof of concept implementation, and discuss its performance

Security and Efficiency Analysis of the Hamming Distance Computation Protocol Based on Oblivious Transfer

open access articleBringer et al. proposed two cryptographic protocols for the computation of Hamming distance. Their first scheme uses Oblivious Transfer and provides security in the semi-honest model. The other scheme uses Committed Oblivious Transfer and is claimed to provide full security in the malicious case. The proposed protocols have direct implications to biometric authentication schemes between a prover and a verifier where the verifier has biometric data of the users in plain form. In this paper, we show that their protocol is not actually fully secure against malicious adversaries. More precisely, our attack breaks the soundness property of their protocol where a malicious user can compute a Hamming distance which is different from the actual value. For biometric authentication systems, this attack allows a malicious adversary to pass the authentication without knowledge of the honest user's input with at most $O(n)$ complexity instead of $O(2^n)$, where $n$ is the input length. We propose an enhanced version of their protocol where this attack is eliminated. The security of our modified protocol is proven using the simulation-based paradigm. Furthermore, as for efficiency concerns, the modified protocol utilizes Verifiable Oblivious Transfer which does not require the commitments to outputs which improves its efficiency significantly

Immunohistochemical localization of fibronectin as a tool for the age determination of human skin wounds

We analyzed the distribution of fibronectin in routinely embedded tissue specimens from 53 skin wounds and 6 postmortem wounds. In postmortem wounds a faint but focal positive staining was exclusively found at the margin of the specimens which dit not extend into the adjacent stroma. Vital wounds were classified into 3 groups. The first comprising lesions with wound ages ranging from a few seconds to 30 min, the second comprising those with wound ages upt to 3 weeks, and the third group with lesions more than 3 weeks old. Ten out of 17 lesions with a wound age up to 30 min showed a clear positive reaction within the wound area. Three specimens in this group were completely negative, while in 4 additional cases the result was not significantly different from postmortem lesions. These 7 cases were characterized by acute death with extremely short survival times (only seconds). In wounds up to 3 weeks old fibronectin formed a distinct network containing an increasing number of inflammatory cells corresponding to the wound age. In 2 cases with a survival time of 17 days and in all wounds older than 3 weeks fibronectin was restricted to the surface of fibroblasts and to parallel arranged fibers in the granulation tissue without any network structures. We present evidence that fibronectin is a useful marker for vital wounds with a survival time of more than a few minutes. Fibronectin appears before neutrophilic granulocytes migrate into the wound area. Since a faint positive fibronectin staining is seen in postmortem lesions and bleedings, we propose that only those wounds which show strong positive fibronectin staining also extending into the adjacent stroma should be regarded as vital

Universally Composable Two-Server PAKE

Two-Server Password Authenticated Key Exchange (2PAKE) protocols apply secret shar-ing techniques to achieve protection against server-compromise attacks. 2PAKE protocols eliminate the need for password hashing and remain secure as long as one of the servers remains honest. This concept has also been explored in connection with two-server password authenticated secret sharing (2PASS) protocols for which game-based and universally composable versions have been proposed. In contrast, universally composable PAKE protocols exist currently only in the single-server scenario and all proposed 2PAKE protocols use game-based security definitions. In this paper we propose the first construction of an universally composable 2PAKE protocol, alongside with its ideal functionality. The protocol is proven UC-secure in the standard model, assuming a common reference string which is a common assumption to many UC-secure PAKE and PASS protocols. The proposed protocol remains secure for arbitrary password distributions. As one of the building blocks we define and construct a new cryptographic primitive, called Trapdoor Distributed Smooth Projective Hash Function (TD-SPHF), which could be of independent interest

Efficient Techniques for Privacy-Preserving Sharing of Sensitive Information

The need for privacy-preserving sharing of sensitive information occurs in many different and realistic everyday scenarios, ranging from national security to social networking. A typical setting involves two parties: one seeks information from the other without revealing the interest while the latter is either willing, or compelled, to share only the requested information. This poses two challenges: (1) how to enable sharing such that parties learn no information beyond what they are entitled to, and (2) how to do so efficiently, in real-world practical terms. This paper explores the notion of Privacy-Preserving Sharing of Sensitive Information (PPSSI), and provides a concrete and efficient instantiation, modeled in the context of simple database querying. Proposed approach functions as a privacy shield to protect parties from disclosing more than the required minimum of their respective sensitive information. PPSSI deployment prompts several challenges, which are addressed in this paper. Extensive experimental results attest to the practicality of attained privacy features and show that our approach incurs quite low overhead (e.g., 10% slower than standard MySQL). © 2011 Springer-Verlag

An Offline Dictionary Attack Against zkPAKE Protocol

Password Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) allows a user to establish a strong cryptographic key with a server, using only knowledge of a pre-shared password. One of the basic security requirements of PAKE is to prevent o ine dictionary attacks. In this paper, we revisit zkPAKE, an augmented PAKE that has been recently proposed by Mochetti, Resende, and Aranha (SBSeg 2015). Our work shows that the zkPAKE protocol is prone to o ine password guessing attack, even in the presence of an adversary that has only eavesdropping capabilities. Therefore, zkPAKE is insecure and should not be used as a password-authenticated key exchange mechanis

OPAQUE: An Asymmetric PAKE Protocol Secure Against Pre-Computation Attacks

Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) protocols allow two parties that only share a password to establish a shared key in a way that is immune to offline attacks. Asymmetric PAKE (aPAKE) strengthens this notion for the more common client-server setting where the server stores a mapping of the password and security is required even upon server compromise, that is, the only allowed attack in this case is an (inevitable) offline exhaustive dictionary attack against individual user passwords. Unfortunately, current aPAKE protocols (that dispense with the use of servers\u27 public keys) allow for pre-computation attacks that lead to the instantaneous compromise of user passwords upon server compromise, thus forgoing much of the intended aPAKE security. Indeed, these protocols use - in essential ways - deterministic password mappings or use random salt transmitted in the clear from servers to users, and thus are vulnerable to pre-computation attacks. We initiate the study of Strong aPAKE protocols that are secure as aPAKE\u27s but are also secure against pre-computation attacks. We formalize this notion in the Universally Composable (UC) settings and present two modular constructions using an Oblivious PRF as a main tool. The first builds a Strong aPAKE from any aPAKE (which in turn can be constructed from any PAKE [GMR\u2706]) while the second builds a Strong aPAKE from any authenticated key-exchange protocol secure against reverse impersonation (a.k.a. KCI). Using the latter transformation, we show a practical instantiation of a UC-secure Strong aPAKE in the Random Oracle model. The protocol ( OPAQUE ) consists of 2 messages (3 with mutual authentication), requires 3 and 4 exponentiations for server and client, respectively (2 to 4 of which can be fixed-base depending on optimizations), provides forward secrecy, is PKI-free, supports user-side hash iterations, has a built-in facility for password-based storage and retrieval of secrets and credentials, and accommodates a user-transparent server-side threshold implementation

Compact E-Cash and Simulatable VRFs Revisited

Abstract. Efficient non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs are a powerful tool for solving many cryptographic problems. We apply the recent Groth-Sahai (GS) proof system for pairing product equations (Eurocrypt 2008) to two related cryptographic problems: compact e-cash (Eurocrypt 2005) and simulatable verifiable random functions (CRYPTO 2007). We present the first efficient compact e-cash scheme that does not rely on a random oracle. To this end we construct efficient GS proofs for signature possession, pseudo randomness and set membership. The GS proofs for pseudorandom functions give rise to a much cleaner and substantially faster construction of simulatable verifiable random functions (sVRF) under a weaker number theoretic assumption. We obtain the first efficient fully simulatable sVRF with a polynomial sized output domain (in the security parameter).

Adaptive Oblivious Transfer and Generalization

International audienceOblivious Transfer (OT) protocols were introduced in the seminal paper of Rabin, and allow a user to retrieve a given number of lines (usually one) in a database, without revealing which ones to the server. The server is ensured that only this given number of lines can be accessed per interaction, and so the others are protected; while the user is ensured that the server does not learn the numbers of the lines required. This primitive has a huge interest in practice, for example in secure multi-party computation, and directly echoes to Symmetrically Private Information Retrieval (SPIR). Recent Oblivious Transfer instantiations secure in the UC framework suf- fer from a drastic fallback. After the first query, there is no improvement on the global scheme complexity and so subsequent queries each have a global complexity of O(|DB|) meaning that there is no gain compared to running completely independent queries. In this paper, we propose a new protocol solving this issue, and allowing to have subsequent queries with a complexity of O(log(|DB|)), and prove the protocol security in the UC framework with adaptive corruptions and reliable erasures. As a second contribution, we show that the techniques we use for Obliv- ious Transfer can be generalized to a new framework we call Oblivi- ous Language-Based Envelope (OLBE). It is of practical interest since it seems more and more unrealistic to consider a database with uncontrolled access in access control scenarii. Our approach generalizes Oblivious Signature-Based Envelope, to handle more expressive credentials and requests from the user. Naturally, OLBE encompasses both OT and OSBE, but it also allows to achieve Oblivious Transfer with fine grain access over each line. For example, a user can access a line if and only if he possesses a certificate granting him access to such line. We show how to generically and efficiently instantiate such primitive, and prove them secure in the Universal Composability framework, with adaptive corruptions assuming reliable erasures. We provide the new UC ideal functionalities when needed, or we show that the existing ones fit in our new framework. The security of such designs allows to preserve both the secrecy of the database values and the user credentials. This symmetry allows to view our new approach as a generalization of the notion of Symmetrically PIR

Whacked and Rab35 polarize dynein-motor-complex-dependent seamless tube growth

Seamless tubes form intracellularly without cell–cell or autocellular junctions. Such tubes have been described across phyla, but remain mysterious despite their simple architecture. In Drosophila, seamless tubes are found within tracheal terminal cells, which have dozens of branched protrusions extending hundreds of micrometres. We find that mutations in multiple components of the dynein motor complex block seamless tube growth, raising the possibility that the lumenal membrane forms through minus-end-directed transport of apical membrane components along microtubules. Growth of seamless tubes is polarized along the proximodistal axis by Rab35 and its apical membrane-localized GAP, Whacked. Strikingly, loss of whacked (or constitutive activation of Rab35) leads to tube overgrowth at terminal cell branch tips, whereas overexpression of Whacked (or dominant-negative Rab35) causes formation of ectopic tubes surrounding the terminal cell nucleus. Thus, vesicle trafficking has key roles in making and shaping seamless tubes