Universally composable secure geographic area verification without pre-shared secret

We put forward a framework for the modular design and analysis of multi-party protocols. Our framework is called “GNUC” (with the recursive meaning “GNUC’s Not UC”), already alluding to the similarity to Canetti’s Universal Composability (UC) framework. In particular, like UC, we offer a universal composition theorem, as well as a theorem for composing protocols with joint state. We deviate from UC in several important aspects. Specifically, we have a rather different view than UC on the structuring of protocols, on the notion of polynomial-time protocols and attacks, and on corruptions. We will motivate our definitional choices by explaining why the definitions in the UC framework are problematic, and how we overcome these problems. Our goal is to offer a framework that is largely compatible with UC, such that previous results formulated in UC carry over to GNUC with minimal changes. We exemplify this by giving explicit formulations for several important protocol tasks, including authenticated and secure communication, as well as commitment and secure function evaluation.

The relationship of three cryptographic channels, secure channels (SC), anonymous channels (AC) and direction-indeterminable channels (DIC), was investigated by Okamoto. He showed that the three cryptographic channels are reducible to each other, but did not consider communication schedules clearly as well as composable security. This paper refines the relationship of the three channels in the light of communication schedules and composable security. We model parties by the task-probabilistic input/output automata (PIOA) to treat communication schedules, and adopt the universally composable (UC) framework by Canetti to treat composable security. We show that a class of anonymous channels, two-anonymous channels (2AC), and DIC are reducible to each other under any schedule and that DIC and SC are reducible to each other under some types of schedules, in the UC framework with the PIOA model.KeywordsSecure Channel (SC)Two-Anonymous Channel (2AC)Direction-Indeterminable Channel (DIC)Universal Composability (UC)Probabilistic Input/Output Automaton (PIOA)

The universal composability (UC) framework is the established standard for analyzing cryptographic protocols in a modular way, such that security is preserved under concurrent composition with arbitrary other protocols. However, although UC is widely used for on-paper proofs, prior attempts at systemizing it have fallen short, either by using a symbolic model (thereby ruling out computational reduction proofs), or by limiting its expressiveness. In this paper, we lay the groundwork for building a concrete, executable implementation of the UC framework. Our main contribution is a process calculus, dubbed the Interactive Lambda Calculus (ILC). ILC faithfully captures the computational model underlying UC—interactive Turing machines (ITMs)—by adapting ITMs to a subset of the π-calculus through an affine typing discipline. In other words, well-typed ILC programs are expressible as ITMs. In turn, ILC’s strong confluence property enables reasoning about cryptographic security reductions. We use ILC to develop a simplified implementation of UC called SaUCy.

Recent advances in Internet of Things (IoT) technologies require a new type of IoT security environment. Various heterogeneous smart devices have easy access to IoT environment, and as the number of users increases, they are exposed to various threats such as malicious attacks on IoT devices and IoT infrastructure, and data tampering by malicious code. Malware detection in IoT requires data and models for continuous and changing learning of smart devices. Methods/Statistical analysis: To minimize these security threats, various malware detection techniques in the field of IoT security have been studied. Malware detection in IoT environment is important for data derivation and learning model required for continuous and changing learning of smart devices. The metadata of malware detection can be normalized by the value of device id, time, behavior, location and state. This paper proposes behavior-based malware detection using deep learning (BMD-DL). Findings: BMD-DL was able to collect metadata about behavior-based malicious behavior and learn and detect malicious codes through deep learning. In addition, through the learned model, IoT Security is provided by disconnecting malicious devices that cause malicious behavior in the IoT environment. Improvements/Applications: BMD-DL collects behavioral data generated from multiple devices in the IoT and applies the results learned through deep learning to detect persistent malware.

Yao et al. (A note on the feasibility of generalized universal composability.Theory and Applications of Models of Computationpp. 474–485, 2007; A note on the feasibility of generalised universal composability.Mathematical Structures in Computer Science,19(1), pp. 193–205) claimed a potential limitation on the class of protocols that could be securely implemented in the generalized universal composability (GUC) framework proposed by Canetti et al. (Universally composable security with global setup.Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 61–85, 2007). Specifically, Yao et al. presented a concrete attack on a GUC Zero Knowledge (GUCZK) protocol, a natural adaptation Blum's ZK proof for Directed Hamiltonicity using the general GUC feasibility of Canetti et al. (Universally composable security with global setup.Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 61–85, 2007). Interestingly, the attack was not analysed in the GUC model in Yao et al. (A note on the feasibility of generalised universal composability.Mathematical Structures in Computer Science19(1), pp. 193–205, 2009) but in theFUC model, a new UC-like framework proposed in the same work. Nonetheless, Yao et al. (A note on the feasibility of generalised universal composability.Mathematical Structures in Computer Science19(1), pp. 193–205, 2009) argued that, in light of this attack, GUC would lose its concurrent general composability and proof of knowledge properties. Concretely, they argue that GUC composability would now be with respect to some adversaries with limited access to external arbitrary protocols.In this work, we show that the claimed attack from Yao et al. is indeed harmless and does not contradict the security of the mentioned GUCZK protocol, thus restoring the general feasibility for GUC.

Since the Internet of Things (IoT) will be entwined with everything we use in our daily life, the consequence of security flaws escalates. Smart objects will govern most of the home appliances and car engines yielding potential disaster scenarios. In this context, successful attacks could lead to chaos and scary scenarios (www.darkreading.com). Unprotected personal information may expose sensitive and embarrassing data to the public and attacks may threaten not only our computers and smart devices, but our intimacy and perhaps our lives too. Because persons and objects will be bonded with each other, user consent becomes critical. Therefore, thing, object, and user Identity will be the focus of future IoT security solutions, yielding a Trust, Security, and Privacy (TSP) paradigm, which may constitute the Achilles' heel of IoT. While security issues are quite straightforward, mainly from background knowledge, privacy issues are far more complex. Privacy constitutes a rather challenging task, even for the m...

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has constituted a driving force of modern technological advancement, and it has become increasingly common as its impacts are seen in a variety of application domains, including healthcare. IoT is characterized by the interconnectivity of smart sensors, objects, devices, data, and applications. With the unprecedented use of IoT in industrial, commercial and domestic, it becomes very imperative to harness the benefits and functionalities associated with the IoT technology in (re)assessing the provision and positioning of healthcare to ensure efficient and improved healthcare delivery. In this research, we are focusing on two important services in healthcare systems, which are cancer care services and business analytics/cloud services. These services incorporate the implementation of an IoT that provides solution and framework for analyzing health data gathered from IoT through various sensor networks and other smart devices in order to improve healthcare delivery and to help health care providers in their decision-making process for enhanced and efficient cancer treatment. In addition, we discuss the wireless sensor network (WSN), WSN routing and data transmission in the healthcare environment. Finally, some operational challenges and security issues with IoT-based healthcare system are discussed.

It is well-known that most cryptographic tasks do not have universally composable (UC) secure protocols, if no trusted setup is available in the framework. On the other hand, if a task like fair coin-tossing is available as a trusted setup, then all cryptographic tasks have UC-secure protocols. What other trusted setups allow UC-secure protocols for all tasks? More generally, given a particular setup, what tasks have UC-secure protocols? We show that, surprisingly, every trusted setup is either useless (equivalent to having no trusted setup) or all-powerful (allows UC-secure protocols for all tasks). There are no intermediate trusted setups in the UC framework. We prove this zero-one law under a natural intractability assumption, and consider the class of deterministic, finite, 2-party functionalities as candidate trusted setups. One important technical contribution in this work is to initiate the comprehensive study of the cryptographic properties of reactive functionalities. We model these functionalities as finite automata and develop an automata-theoretic methodology for classifying and studying their cryptographic properties. Consequently, we completely characterize the reactive behaviors that lead to cryptographic non-triviality. Another contribution of independent interest is to optimize the hardness assumption used by Canetti et al. (STOC 2002) in showing that the common random string functionality is complete (a result independently obtained by Damgard et al. (TCC 2010)).

The fusion of Internet of Intelligent Things (IoIT) in remote diagnosis of obstructive Sleep Apnea: A survey and a new model

The universal composability framework is a new approach for designing and analyzing the security of cryptographic protocols. In this framework, the security of protocols is maintained under a general protocol composition operation. In the paper, we propose the universal composability framework for the analysis of proxy threshold signature and present a universally composable secure proxy threshold signature scheme which is the first one in this area. The proposed scheme is suitable for the mobile agents, which should migrate across different environment through network. Furthermore, we give the concrete analysis of the reduction to prove the security of the proposed scheme.

Three-party password authenticated key exchange (3PAKE) allows two clients, each sharing a password with a trusted server, to establish a session key with the help of the server. It is a quite practical mechanism for establishing secure channels in large communication network. However, most current 3PAKE protocols are analyzed in security models that don’t adequately address protocol composition problem. In this paper, a direct definition of security for 3PAKE within the universal composability framework is proposed, which captures the basic security requirements of the problem and is proven to be stronger than the commonly used security notions. To further justify our formulation of 3PAKE, we prove that a slight variant of a generic 3PAKE protocol by Wang and Hu securely realizes the new security definition.

In this paper, we provide the first scheme that realises an attribute-based access control system for static resources that offers maximal privacy and is secure in the universal composability framework (UC). More precisely, we offer a protocol for adaptive oblivious transfer, where the sender can enforce an attribute-based access control policy for each record and nevertheless learns neither which record a user retrieves nor which attributes a user has. As additional results we provide a new structure-preserving signature scheme from the SXDH assumption and a new universally composable adaptive oblivious transfer protocol that is secure under two DDH-like assumptions and is the most efficient one secure under ``non $q$-type'' assumptions. We believe the new signature scheme to be of independent interest as a building block that is compatible with Groth-Sahai non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs.

SummaryThree‐party password‐authenticated key exchange (3PAKE) allows two clients, each sharing a password with a trusted server, to establish a session key with the help of the server. It is a quite practical mechanism for establishing secure channels in a large communication network. However, most current 3PAKE protocols are analyzed in security models that do not adequately address protocol composition problem. In this paper, an ideal functionality for 3PAKE within the universal composability framework is defined, which not only provides security guarantees under arbitrary composition with other protocols but also achieves contributiveness and explicit authentication. Moreover, we propose a generic construction of contributory 3PAKE protocol and prove that it securely realizes the ideal functionality in the static corruption model. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Everlasting (EL) privacy offers an attractive solution to the Store-Now-Decrypt-Later (SNDL) problem, where future increases in the attacker's capability could break systems which are believed to be secure today. Instead of requiring full information-theoretic security, everlasting privacy allows computationally-secure transmissions of ephemeral secrets, which are only "effective" for a limited periods of time, after which their compromise is provably useless for the SNDL attacker. In this work we revisit such everlasting privacy model of Dodis and Yeo (ITC'21), which we call Hypervisor EverLasting Privacy (HELP). HELP is a novel architecture for generating shared randomness using a network of semi-trusted servers (or "hypervisors"), trading the need to store/distribute large shared secrets with the assumptions that it is hard to: (a) simultaneously compromise too many publicly accessible ad-hoc servers; and (b) break a computationally-secure encryption scheme very quickly. While Dodis and Yeo presented good HELP solutions in the asymptotic sense, their solutions were concretely expensive and used heavy tools (like large finite fields or gigantic Toeplitz matrices). We abstract and generalize the HELP architecture to allow for more efficient instantiations, and construct several concretely efficient HELP solutions. Our solutions use elementary cryptographic operations, such as hashing and message authentication. We also prove a very strong composition theorem showing that our EL architecture can use any message transmission method which is computationally-secure in the Universal Composability (UC) framework. This is the first positive composition result for everlasting privacy, which was otherwise known to suffer from many "non-composition" results (Müller-Quade and Unruh; J of Cryptology'10).

Anonymous Communication (AC) hides traffic patterns and protects message metadata from being leaked during message transmission. Many practical AC systems have been proposed aiming to reduce communication latency and support a large number of users. However, how to design AC systems which possess strong security property and at the same time achieve optimal performance (i.e., the lowest latency or highest horizontal scalability) has been a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an ObliComm framework, which consists of six modular AC subroutines. We also present a strong security definition for AC, named oblivious communication, encompassing confidentiality, unobservability, and a new requirement sending-and-receiving operation hiding. The AC subroutines in ObliComm allow for modular construction of oblivious communication systems in different network topologies. All constructed systems satisfy oblivious communication definition and can be provably secure in the universal composability (UC) framework. Additionally, we model the relationship between the network topology and communication measurements by queuing theory, which enables the system's efficiency can be optimized and estimated by quantitative analysis and calculation. Through theoretical analyses and empirical experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency of our scheme and soundness of the queuing model.