Can price transparency contribute to more affordable patient access to medicines?

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Quantum cryptography: a practical information security perspective

Quantum Key Exchange (QKE, also known as Quantum Key Distribution or QKD) allows communicating parties to securely establish cryptographic keys. It is a well-established fact that all QKE protocols require that the parties have access to an authentic channel. Without this authenticated link, QKE is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Overlooking this fact results in exaggerated claims and/or false expectations about the potential impact of QKE. In this paper we present a systematic comparison of QKE with traditional key establishment protocols in realistic secure communication systems.Comment: 5 pages, new title, published version, minor changes onl

e-EMV: Emulating EMV for Internet payments using Trusted Computing technology v-2

The introduction of EMV-compliant payment cards, with their improved cardholder verification and card authentication capabilities, has resulted in a dramatic reduction in the levels of fraud seen at Point of Sale (PoS) terminals across Europe. However, this reduction has been accompanied by an alarming increase in the level of fraud associated with Internet-based Card Not Present (CNP) transactions. This increase is largely attributable to the weaker authentication pro- cedures involved in CNP transactions. This paper shows how the functionality associated with EMV-compliant payment cards can be securely emulated in software on platforms supporting Trusted Com- puting technology. We describe a detailed system architecture encom- passing user enrollment, card deployment (in the form of software), card activation, and subsequent transaction processing. Our proposal is compatible with the existing EMV transaction processing architec- ture, and thus integrates fully and naturally with already deployed EMV infrastructure. We show that our proposal, which effectively makes available the full security of PoS transactions for Internet-based CNP transactions, has the potential to significantly reduce the oppor- tunity for fraudulent CNP transactions

Augmenting Internet-based Card Not Present Transactions with Trusted Computing: An Analysis

In this paper, we demonstrate how the staged roll out of Trusted Computing technology, beginning with ubiquitous client-side Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs), can be used to enhance the security of Internet-based Card Not Present (CNP) transactions. This approach can be seen as an alternative to the proposed mass deployment of unconnected card readers in the provision of CNP transaction authorisation. Using TPM functionality (and the new PC architecture that will evolve around it) we demonstrate how TPM-enabled platforms can integrate with SSL, 3-D Secure and server-side SET. We highlight how the use of TPM functionality, as is currently being deployed in the marketplace, is not a panacea for solving all the problems associated with CNP transactions. In this instance, a more holistic approach requiring additional Trusted Computing components incorporating Operating System, processor and chipset support is required to combat the threat of malware

Challenges for Trusted Computing

This article identifies and discusses some of the key challenges that need to be addressed if the vision of Trusted Computing is to become reality. Topics addressed include issues with setting up and maintaining the PKI required to support the full set of Trusted Computing functionality, the practical use and verification of attestation evidence, and backwards compatibility, usability and compliance issues

Improved Reconstruction Attacks on Encrypted Data Using Range Query Leakage

We analyse the security of database encryption schemes supporting range queries against persistent adversaries. The bulk of our work applies to a generic setting, where the adversary's view is limited to the set of records matched by each query (known as access pattern leakage). We also consider a more specific setting where certain rank information is also leaked. The latter is inherent to multiple recent encryption schemes supporting range queries, including Kerschbaum's FH-OPE scheme (CCS 2015), Lewi and Wu's order-revealing encryption scheme (CCS 2016), and the recently proposed Arx scheme of Poddar et al. (IACR eprint 2016/568, 2016/591). We provide three attacks. First, we consider full reconstruction, which aims to recover the value of every record, fully negating encryption. We show that for dense datasets, full reconstruction is possible within an expected number of queries NlogN+O(N)Nlog⁡N+O(N), where NN is the number of distinct plaintext values. This directly improves on a O(N2logN)O(N2log⁡N) bound in the same setting by Kellaris et al. (CCS 2016). We also provide very efficient, data-optimal algorithms that succeed with the minimum possible number of queries (in a strong, information theoretical sense), and prove a matching data lower bound for the number of queries required. Second, we present an approximate reconstruction attack recovering all plaintext values in a dense dataset within a constant ratio of error (such as a 5% error), requiring the access pattern leakage of only O(N)O(N) queries. We also prove a matching lower bound. Third, we devise an attack in the common setting where the adversary has access to an auxiliary distribution for the target dataset. This third attack proves highly effective on age data from real-world medical data sets. In our experiments, observing only 25 queries was sufficient to reconstruct a majority of records to within 5 years. In combination, our attacks show that current approaches to enabling range queries offer little security when the threat model goes beyond snapshot attacks to include a persistent server-side adversary