Privacy-Preserving Electronic Ticket Scheme with Attribute-based Credentials

Electronic tickets (e-tickets) are electronic versions of paper tickets, which enable users to access intended services and improve services' efficiency. However, privacy may be a concern of e-ticket users. In this paper, a privacy-preserving electronic ticket scheme with attribute-based credentials is proposed to protect users' privacy and facilitate ticketing based on a user's attributes. Our proposed scheme makes the following contributions: (1) users can buy different tickets from ticket sellers without releasing their exact attributes; (2) two tickets of the same user cannot be linked; (3) a ticket cannot be transferred to another user; (4) a ticket cannot be double spent; (5) the security of the proposed scheme is formally proven and reduced to well known (q-strong Diffie-Hellman) complexity assumption; (6) the scheme has been implemented and its performance empirically evaluated. To the best of our knowledge, our privacy-preserving attribute-based e-ticket scheme is the first one providing these five features. Application areas of our scheme include event or transport tickets where users must convince ticket sellers that their attributes (e.g. age, profession, location) satisfy the ticket price policies to buy discounted tickets. More generally, our scheme can be used in any system where access to services is only dependent on a user's attributes (or entitlements) but not their identities.Comment: 18pages, 6 figures, 2 table

Identity-based data storage in cloud computing

Identity-based proxy re-encryption schemes have been proposed to shift the burden of managing numerous files from the owner to a proxy server. Nevertheless, the existing solutions suffer from several drawbacks. First, the access permission is determined by the central authority, which makes the scheme impractical. Second, they are insecure against collusion attacks. Finally, only queries from the same domain (intra-domain) are considered. We note that one of the main applications of identity-based proxy re-encryption schemes is in the cloud computing scenario. Nevertheless, in this scenario, users in different domains can share files with each other. Therefore, the existing solutions do not actually solve the motivating scenario, when the scheme is applicable for cloud computing. Hence, it remains an interesting and challenging research problem to design an identity-based data storage scheme which is secure against collusion attacks and supports intra-domain and inter-domain queries. In this paper, we propose an identity-based data storage scheme where both queries from the intra-domain and inter-domain are considered and collusion attacks can be resisted. Furthermore, the access permission can be determined by the owner independently. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Attribute-based data transfer with filtering scheme in cloud computing

Data transfer is a transmission of data over a point-to-point or point-to-multipoint communication channel. To protect the confidentiality of the transferred data, public-key cryptography has been introduced in data transfer schemes (DTSs). Data transfer is a transmission of data over a point-to-point or point-to-multipoint communication channel. To protect the confidentiality of the transferred data, public-key cryptography has been introduced in data transfer schemes (DTSs). Unfortunately, there exist some drawbacks in the current DTSs. First, the sender must know who the real receivers are. This is undesirable in a system where the number of the users is very large, such as cloud computing. In practice, the sender only knows some descriptive attributes of the receivers. Secondly, the receiver cannot be guaranteed to only receive messages from the legal senders. Therefore, it remains an elusive and challenging research problem on how to design a DTS scheme where the sender can send messages to the unknown receivers and the receiver can filter out false messages according to the described attributes. In this paper, we propose an attribute-based data transfer with filtering (ABDTF) scheme to address these problems. In our proposed scheme, the receiver can publish an access structure so that only the users whose attributes satisfy this access structure can send messages to him. Furthermore, the sender can encrypt a message under a set of attributes such that only the users who hold these attributes can obtain the message. In particular, we provide an efficient filtering algorithm for the receiver to resist the denial-of-service attacks. Notably, we propose the formal definition and security models for ABDTF schemes. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that a provable ABDTF scheme is proposed. Hence, this work provides a new research approach to ABDTF schemes. must know who are the real receivers. This is undesirable in a system where the number of the users is very large, such as cloud computing. In practice, the sender only knows some descriptive attributes of the receivers. Second, the receiver cannot be guaranteed to only receive messages from the legal senders. Therefore, it remains an elusive and challenging research problem on how to design a DTS scheme where the sender can send messages to the unknown receivers and the receiver can filter out false messages according to the described attributes. In this paper, we propose an attribute-based data transfer with filtering (ABDTF) scheme to address these problems. In our proposed scheme, the receiver can publish an access structure so that only the users whose attributes satisfy this access structure can send messages to him. Furthermore, the sender can encrypt a message under a set of attributes such that only the users who hold these attributes can obtain the message. In particular, we provide an efficient filtering algorithm for the receiver to resist the denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Notably, we propose the formal definition and security models for ABDTF schemes. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that a provable ABDTF scheme is proposed. Hence, this work provides a new research approach to ABDTF schemes

When Intrusion Detection Meets Blockchain Technology: A Review

With the purpose of identifying cyber threats and possible incidents, intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are widely deployed in various computer networks. In order to enhance the detection capability of a single IDS, collaborative intrusion detection networks (or collaborative IDSs) have been developed, which allow IDS nodes to exchange data with each other. However, data and trust management still remain two challenges for current detection architectures, which may degrade the effectiveness of such detection systems. In recent years, blockchain technology has shown its adaptability in many fields, such as supply chain management, international payment, interbanking, and so on. As blockchain can protect the integrity of data storage and ensure process transparency, it has a potential to be applied to intrusion detection domain. Motivated by this, this paper provides a review regarding the intersection of IDSs and blockchains. In particular, we introduce the background of intrusion detection and blockchain, discuss the applicability of blockchain to intrusion detection, and identify open challenges in this direction

User collusion avoidance scheme for privacy-preserving decentralized key-policy attribute-based encryption

Decentralized attribute-based encryption (ABE) is a variant of multi-authority based ABE whereby any attribute authority (AA) can independently join and leave the system without collaborating with the existing AAs. In this paper, we propose a user collusion avoidance scheme which preserves the user's privacy when they interact with multiple authorities to obtain decryption credentials. The proposed scheme mitigates the well-known user collusion security vulnerability found in previous schemes. We show that our scheme relies on the standard complexity assumption (decisional bilienar Deffie-Hellman assumption). This is contrast to previous schemes which relies on non-standard assumption (q-decisional Diffie-Hellman inversion)

PPDCP-ABE: Privacy-Preserving Decentralized Cipher-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption

Cipher-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a more efficient and flexible encryption system as the encryptor can control the access structure when encrypting a message. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving decentralized CP-ABE (PPDCP-ABE) scheme where the central authority is not required, namely each authority can work independently without the cooperation to initialize the system. Meanwhile, a user can obtain secret keys from multiple authorities without releasing his global identifier (GID) and attributes to them. This is contrasted to the previous privacy-preserving multi-authority ABE (PPMA-ABE) schemes where a user can obtain secret keys from multiple authorities with them knowing his attributes and a central authority is required. However, some sensitive attributes can also release the user’s identity information. Hence, contemporary PPMA-ABE schemes cannot fully protect users’ privacy as multiple authorities can cooperate to identifier a user by collecting and analyzing his attributes. Therefore, it remains a challenging and important work to construct a PPMA-ABE scheme where the central authority is not required and both the identifiers and the attributes are considere

Privacy-preserving access control techniques in distributed systems

An access control scheme is designed to restrict users access to the protected data in distributed systems. To satisfy different access requirements, various access control schemes have been proposed. Nevertheless, the privacy problem in them has not been considered extensively, while it is a primary concern of network users. Hence, constructing access control schemes with a sound privacy protection is an important task. The main contribution of this thesis is to propose privacy-preserving access control schemes in the following three aspects. First, we design access control schemes where the contents required by users are protected against any proxy servers or other parties. We develop two identity-based data storage schemes, which are secure against collusion attacks. In these schemes, a user can access one of the data outsourced by the owner if he has obtained an access permission from the owner. A proxy server can transfer a ciphertext for the owner to a ciphertext for the requester without observing anything about the plaintext. Second, we construct three access control schemes where users’ personal sensitive information, such as access credentials, identities and attributes, can be protected. We develop two attribute-based access control schemes, each with distinctive features. The first scheme is a decentralized attribute-based encryption scheme where a user can obtain secret keys from multiple authorities without releasing anything about his/her identifier to them and furthermore, it is secure against collusion attacks. Multiple authorities can work independently without any cooperation. Especially, an authority can dynamically leave or add in the system without re-initializing the system and re-issuing secret keys to users. Further, the second scheme captures the feature that only the senders whose attributes satisfy the access structure specified by the receiver can send messages to him/her and only the receiver whose attributes satisfies the access structure published by the sender can obtain the protected data. Furthermore, we give a provable generic construction of dynamic single sign-on schemes where a user can access multiple services using one credential and only the designated service providers can validate his credential. Third, we develop several access control schemes where an authorized user can access the protected data without releasing anything about his personal sensitive information and the accessed contents to the database. We construct an attributebased oblivious access control scheme by introducing an attribute-based encryption scheme with constant computation and communication cost to an oblivious transfer scheme. Furthermore, we design efficient oblivious transfer with access control schemes by introducing oblivious signature-based envelope schemes to an oblivious transfer scheme. In these schemes, an authorized user can access the protected data obliviously, while the database only knows the number of the data accessed by the user. Notably, all schemes developed in this thesis are derived from cryptographic primitives and formally proven in the proposed security models under complexity assumptions

New constructions of OSBE schemes and their applications in oblivious access control

Oblivious signature-based envelope (OSBE) schemes have demonstrated their potential applications in the protection of users privacy and rights. In an OSBE protocol, an encrypted message can only be decrypted by the receiver who holds a valid signature on a public message, while the sender (encrypter) does not know whether the receiver has the signature or not. Our major contributions in this work lie in the following aspects. We improve the notion of OSBE so that a valid credential holder cannot share his/her credential with other users (i. e., all-or-nothing non-transferability). We clarify the relationship between one-round OSBE and identity-based encryption (IBE) and show that one-round OSBE and semantically secure IBE against the adaptively chosen identity attack (IND-ID-CPA) are equivalent, if the signature in the OSBE scheme is existentially unforgeable against adaptively chosen message attacks. We propose an oblivious access control scheme to protect user privacy without the aid of any zero-knowledge proof. Finally, we also highlight some other novel applications of OSBE, such as attributed-based encryption. 2012 Springer-Verlag