Authenticated Communication Channels Research Articles

Data storage operations protection in mobile cloud computing

Cloud computing is revolutionizing Customer Internet computing and the IT industry by integrating with mobile environments through remote access technologies. This growth involves using smartphones and sensors as data collection nodes interacting with the cloud. However, widespread adoption faces a hurdle in data security concerns, as users are hesitant about entrusting sensitive data to public clouds operated by external providers. To tackle barriers in cloud computing, we urgently require innovative and secure management architectures. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework addressing user concerns, focusing on secure data sharing in the cloud. The framework covers aspects like transport, aggregation, usage, and destruction of sensitive data, emphasizing the semi-trusted nature of the cloud to boost user confidence and address security concerns. One key aspect of the proposed framework is the integration of the Kerberos protocol over the network. This protocol plays a pivotal role in establishing secure and authenticated communication channels, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of the data being transferred within the cloud infrastructure. Additionally, the paper introduces a user process protection method based on a virtual machine monitor. This method contributes to enhancing overall system security by providing a layer of isolation and protection for user processes operating in the cloud environment. The combined integration of the Kerberos protocol and the virtual machine monitor-based user process protection method forms a cohesive approach towards realizing robust system functionalities. By offering a secure foundation for data management in the cloud, this framework addresses the current limitations and instills a sense of trust among users, fostering a more widespread and confident adoption of cloud computing techniques.

A worst-case approach to safety and reference tracking for cyber-physical systems under network attacks

In this technical note, the safety and reference tracking control problems for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) equipped with authenticated communication channels are addressed. In this class of CPSs, network attacks can break the feedback loop at two different points for an arbitrarily long period. In this scenario, we design a novel control architecture that, by taking a worst-case approach, aims to preserve the safety of the systems while minimizing, whenever possible, the tracking performance degradation. On the plant side, a local safety controller is designed to take care of attacks on the actuation channel. In particular, given a finite number of pre-determined admissible safe equilibrium points, this unit exploits a Voronoi partition of the state space and a family of dual-model set-theoretic model predictive controllers to safely confine, in a finite number of steps, the system into the closest robust control invariant region. On the other hand, on the controller side, the reference tracking controller operations are enhanced with an add-on module in charge of dealing with attack occurrences on the measurement channel. Specifically, by leveraging the Voronoi partition used on the plant's side and reachability arguments, the objective of this unit is to reduce the performance loss by allowing a supervised system evolution until the best outcome in terms of tracking is achieved. The obtained theoretical results are proved and the solution's effectiveness is shown through a simulation example.

Asset logging in the energy sector: a scalable blockchain-based data platform

Due to a steeply growing number of energy assets, the increasingly decentralized and segmented energy sector fuels the potential for new digital use cases. In this paper, we focus our attention on the application field of asset logging, which addresses the collection, documentation, and usage of relevant asset data for direct or later verification. We identified a number of promising use cases that so far have not been implemented; supposedly due to the lack of a suitable technical infrastructure. Besides the high degree of complexity associated with various stakeholders and the diversity of assets involved, the main challenge we found in asset logging use cases is to guarantee the tamper-resistance and integrity of the stored data while meeting scalability, addressing cost requirements, and protecting sensitive data. Against this backdrop, we present a blockchain-based platform and argue that it can meet all identified requirements. Our proposed technical solution hierarchically aggregates data in Merkle trees and leverages Merkle proofs for the efficient and privacy-preserving verification of data integrity, thereby ensuring scalability even for highly frequent data logging. By connecting all stakeholders and assets involved on the platform through bilateral and authenticated communication channels and adding a blockchain as a shared foundation of trust, we implement a wide range of asset logging use cases and provide the basis for leveraging platform effects in future use cases that build on verifiable data. Along with the technical aspects of our solution, we discuss the challenges of its practical implementation in the energy sector and the next steps for testing in a regulatory sandbox approach.

Privacy and Trust Redefined in Federated Machine Learning

A common privacy issue in traditional machine learning is that data needs to be disclosed for the training procedures. In situations with highly sensitive data such as healthcare records, accessing this information is challenging and often prohibited. Luckily, privacy-preserving technologies have been developed to overcome this hurdle by distributing the computation of the training and ensuring the data privacy to their owners. The distribution of the computation to multiple participating entities introduces new privacy complications and risks. In this paper, we present a privacy-preserving decentralised workflow that facilitates trusted federated learning among participants. Our proof-of-concept defines a trust framework instantiated using decentralised identity technologies being developed under Hyperledger projects Aries/Indy/Ursa. Only entities in possession of Verifiable Credentials issued from the appropriate authorities are able to establish secure, authenticated communication channels authorised to participate in a federated learning workflow related to mental health data.

A Provably Secure and Lightweight Identity-Based Two-Party Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for IIoT Environments

With the significant development of the Internet, Internet of Things (IoT) has become an emerging technology in many industries. To support security and privacy in the Industrial IoT environment, a user may interact with another user on the Internet to share confidential information, which requires an authenticated communication channel. To meet this demand, in this article the authors developed an identity-based two-party authenticated key agreement (ID-2PAKA) protocol that allows two users to communicate securely and share sensitive data across IoT-enabled regions. Similar protocols found in the literature either proven to be insecure or carry the burden of high communication and computational costs. The proposed ID-2PAKA protocol is analyzed in the random oracle model to achieve provable security based on the hardness assumptions of computational Diffie-Hellman and bilinear Diffie-Hellman problems. The performance analysis of the proposed ID-2PAKA protocol is performed using the pairing-based cryptography library. The comparative results from the perspective of the computation and communication costs against the competing protocols showed that the proposed ID-2PAKA protocol is secure and efficient.

Concurrently Deniable Group Key Agreement and Its Application to Privacy‐Preserving VANETs

VANETs need secure communication. Authentication in VANETs resists the attack on the receipt of false information. Authenticated group key agreement (GKA) is used to establish a confidential and authenticated communication channel for the multiple vehicles. However, authentication incurs privacy leakage, that is, by using digital signature. Therefore, the deniability is deserved for GKA (which is termed as DGKA) due to the privacy protection. In the DGKA protocol, each participant interacts with intended partners to establish a common group session key. After this agreement session, each participant can not only be regarded as the intended sender but also deny that it has ever participated in this session. Therefore, under this established key, vehicles send confidential messages with authentication property and the deniability protects the vehicles privacy. We present a novel transformation from an unauthenticated group key agreement to a deniable (authenticated) group key agreement without increasing communication round. Our full deniability is achieved even in the concurrent setting which suits the Internet environment. In addition, we design an authenticated and privacy‐preserving communication protocol for VANETs by using the proposed deniable group key agreement.

Gait-Key

Recent years have witnessed a remarkable growth in the number of smart wearable devices. For many of these devices, an important security issue is to establish an authenticated communication channel between legitimate devices to protect the subsequent communications. Due to the wireless nature of the communication and the extreme resource constraints of sensor devices, providing secure, efficient, and user-friendly device pairing is a challenging task. Traditional solutions for device pairing mostly depend on key predistribution, which is unsuitable for wearable devices in many ways. In this article, we design Gait-Key, a shared secret key generation scheme that allows two legitimate devices to establish a common cryptographic key by exploiting users’ walking characteristics (gait). The intuition is that the sensors on different locations on the same body experience similar accelerometer signals when the user is walking. However, one main challenge is that the accelerometer also captures motion signals produced by other body parts (e.g., swinging arms). We address this issue by using the blind source separation technique to extract the informative signal produced by the unique gait patterns. Our experimental results show that Gait-Key can generate a common 128-bit key for two legitimate devices with 98.3% probability. To demonstrate the feasibility, the proposed key generation scheme is implemented on modern smartphones. The evaluation results show that the proposed scheme can run in real time on modern mobile devices and incurs low system overhead.

A highly secure identity-based authenticated key-exchange protocol for satellite communication

In recent years, significant improvements have been made to the techniques used for analyzing satellite communication and attacking satellite systems. In 2003, a research team at Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA, demonstrated the ease with which civilian global positioning system (GPS) spoofing attacks can be implemented. They fed fake signals to the GPS receiver so that it operates as though it were located at a position different from its actual location. Moreover, Galileo in-orbit validation element A and Compass-M1 civilian codes in all available frequency bands were decoded in 2007 and 2009. These events indicate that cryptography should be used in addition to the coding technique for secure and authenticated satellite communication. In this study, we address this issue by using an authenticated key-exchange protocol to build a secure and authenticated communication channel for satellite communication. Our protocol uses identity-based cryptography. We also prove the security of our protocol in the extended Canetti-Krawczyk model, which is the strongest security model for authenticated key-exchange protocols, under the random oracle assumption and computational Diffie-Hellman assumption. In addition, our protocol helps achieve high efficiency in both communication and computation and thus improve security in satellite communication.

A controllable and accountable state-oriented Card-Aided Firewall

This paper proposes a new approach, named Card-Aided Firewall (CAF) that combines the simplified firewall and the state-oriented smart card technologies to construct a controllable and accountable Internet access framework. The idea suggests that a client computer, protected by a light-weight firewall, could establish diversified authenticated communication channels, controlled and accounted by “legal” states of the smart card. The program of a smart card is state-oriented or a state machine, which defines a chain of events involving various state transitions. The “legal” states of a smart card program are defined to be legal to communicate with surfing targets. A predefined Access Control List (ACL), stored in the same card, is necessary. An ACL is a sequential list of permit or deny statements that apply to addresses or upper-layer protocols. The proposed firewall decides acceptance or rejection messages by matching the current state of the card program and the ACL. In addition, a complete surfing account for tracing back is recorded. It is a by-product of the smart card authentication. The proposed Card-Aided Firewall framework is implemented to demonstrate its effectiveness. The implementation is done at the driver level. It keeps up with the high line speed. The driver takes 39K bytes and works well with other firewalls. The average packet processing time of the CAF driver is 31.74 μs. On the premise of secure authentication within the smart card, the Card-Aided Firewall would facilitate various rapidly growing applications in campus cards, family cards, and employee cards, etc. that require accurate controllability and accountability in the surfing boundary.

Byzantine Agreement Given Partial Broadcast

This paper considers unconditionally secure protocols for reliable broadcast among a set of n players, where up to t of the players can be corrupted by a (Byzantine) adversary but the remaining h = n - t players remain honest. In the standard model with a complete, synchronous network of bilateral authenticated communication channels among the players, broadcast is achievable if and only if 2n/h < 3. We show that, by extending this model by the existence of partial broadcast channels among subsets of b players, global broadcast can be achieved if and only if the number h of honest players satisfies 2n/h < b + 1. Achievability is demonstrated by protocols with communication and computation complexities polynomial in the size of the network, i.e., in the number of partial broadcast channels. A respective characterization for the related consensus problem is also given.