Towards a Flexible Intra-Trustcenter Management Protocol

This paper proposes the Intra Trustcenter Protocol (ITP), a flexible and secure management protocol for communication between arbitrary trustcenter components. Unlike other existing protocols (like PKCS#7, CMP or XKMS) ITP focuses on the communication within a trustcenter. It is powerful enough for transferring complex messages which are machine and human readable and easy to understand. In addition it includes an extension mechanism to be prepared for future developments.Comment: 12 pages, 0 figures; in The Third International Workshop for Applied PKI (IWAP2004

In-packet Bloom filters: Design and networking applications

The Bloom filter (BF) is a well-known space-efficient data structure that answers set membership queries with some probability of false positives. In an attempt to solve many of the limitations of current inter-networking architectures, some recent proposals rely on including small BFs in packet headers for routing, security, accountability or other purposes that move application states into the packets themselves. In this paper, we consider the design of such in-packet Bloom filters (iBF). Our main contributions are exploring the design space and the evaluation of a series of extensions (1) to increase the practicality and performance of iBFs, (2) to enable false-negative-free element deletion, and (3) to provide security enhancements. In addition to the theoretical estimates, extensive simulations of the multiple design parameters and implementation alternatives validate the usefulness of the extensions, providing for enhanced and novel iBF networking applications.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, preprint submitted to Elsevier COMNET Journa

On the State of Crypto-Agility

The demand for crypto-agility, although dating back for more than two decades, recently started to increase in the light of the expected post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration. Nevertheless, it started to evolve into a science on its own. Therefore, it is important to establish a unified definition of the notion, as well as its related aspects, scope, and practical applications. This paper presents a literature survey on crypto-agility and discusses respective development efforts categorized into different areas, including requirements, characteristics, and possible challenges. We explore the need for crypto-agility beyond PQC algorithms and security protocols and shed some light on current solutions, existing automation mechanisms, and best practices in this field. We evaluate the state of readiness for crypto-agility, and offer a discussion on the identified open issues. The results of our survey indicate a need for a comprehensive understanding. Further, more agile design paradigms are required in developing new IT systems, and in refactoring existing ones, in order to realize crypto-agility on a broad scale

QuantumCharge: Post-Quantum Cryptography for Electric Vehicle Charging

ISO 15118 enables charging and billing of Electric Vehicles (EVs) without user interaction by using locally installed cryptographic credentials that must be secure over the long lifetime of vehicles. In the dawn of quantum computers, Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) needs to be integrated into the EV charging infrastructure. In this paper, we propose QuantumCharge, a PQC extension for ISO 15118, which includes concepts for migration, crypto-agility, verifiable security, and the use of PQC-enabled hardware security modules. Our prototypical implementation and the practical evaluation demonstrate the feasibility, and our formal analysis shows the security of QuantumCharge, which thus paves the way for secure EV charging infrastructures of the future

Using LDAP Directories for Management of PKI Processes

We present a framework for extending the functionality of LDAP servers from their typical use as a public directory in public key infrastructures. In this framework the LDAP servers are used for administrating infrastructure processes. One application of this framework is a method for providing proof-of-possession, especially in the case of encryption keys. Another one is the secure delivery of software personal security environments