(Password) authenticated key establishment: From 2-party to group

Proceedings of: TCC 2007: Fourth IACR Theory of Cryptography Conference, 21-24 February 2007, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.A protocol compiler is described, that transforms any provably secure authenticated 2-party key establishment into a provably secure authenticated group key establishment with 2 more rounds of communication. The compiler introduces neither idealizing assumptions nor high-entropy secrets, e.g., for signing. In particular, applying the compiler to a password-authenticated 2-party key establishment without random oracle assumption, yields a password-authenticated group key establishment without random oracle assumption. Our main technical tools are non-interactive and non-malleable commitment schemes that can be implemented in the common reference string (CRS) model.The first author was supported in part by the European Commission through the IST Program under Contract IST-2002-507932 ECRYPT and by France Telecom R&D as part of the contract CIDRE, between France Telecom R&D and École normale supérieure

Security and Privacy Enhancing Multi-Cloud Architectures

Security challenges are still among the biggest obstacles when considering the adoption of cloud services. This triggered a lot of research activities, resulting in a quantity of proposals targeting the various cloud security threats. Alongside with these security issues, the cloud paradigm comes with a new set of unique features, which open the path toward novel security approaches, techniques, and architectures. This paper provides a survey on the achievable security merits by making use of multiple distinct clouds simultaneously. Various distinct architectures are introduced and discussed according to their security and privacy capabilities and prospects

PoTS - A Secure Proof of TEE-Stake for Permissionless Blockchains

Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocols have been actively researched for the past few years. PoS finds direct applicability in permissionless blockchain platforms and emerges as one of the strongest candidates to replace the largely inefficient Proof of Work mechanism that is currently plugged in the majority of existing permissionless blockchain systems. Although a number of PoS variants have been proposed, these protocols suffer from a number of security shortcomings. Namely, most existing PoS variants are either subject to the nothing at stake, the long range, or the stake grinding attacks which considerably degrade security in the blockchain. These shortcomings do not result from a lack of foresight when designing these protocols, but are inherently due to the ease of manipulating stake when compared to other more established variants, such as work . In this paper, we address these problems and propose a secure Proof of Stake protocol, PoTS, that leverages Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX, to ensure that each miner can generate at most one block per height for strictly increasing heights—thus thwarting the problem of nothing at stake and a large class of long-range attacks. In combination with TEEs, PoTS additionally uses cryptographic techniques to also prevent grinding attacks and protect against posterior corruption. We show that our protocol is secure, in the sense of well-established cryptographic notions for blockchain protocols, down to realistic hardware assumptions on TEE and well-established cryptographic assumptions. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our proposal by means of implementation. Our evaluation results show that PoTS offers a strong tradeoff between security of performance of the underlying PoS protocol