Black-box Tracing Research Articles

An enhanced traceable CP-ABE scheme against various types of privilege leakage in cloud storage

Cloud storage can save not only local storage costs but also provide data-sharing services. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) can work as the underlying engine for cloud storage since it supports one-to-many encryption and fine-grained access control. To prevent users from disclosing their access permissions, we can apply traceable CP-ABE systems. There are two kinds of traceability: white-box traceability and black-box traceability. White-box traceability is simple and efficient, but it cannot support black-box tracing; black-box traceability supports white-box tracing, but its operations are usually cumbersome. So, these two kinds of traceability are unable (or unsuitable) to solve each other’s problems. However, in cloud storage applications, users may leak their privileges in various ways, which means the underlying CP-ABE system should have multiple traceability. Unfortunately, the current traceable CP-ABE schemes only support single traceability. Therefore, we propose a novel CP-ABE scheme with enhanced traceability. It intertwines white-box and black-box traceability together securely and efficiently, which makes it more targeted and simpler to solve distinct tracing problems than previous schemes. Moreover, the proposed scheme has scalability, flexible policy expressiveness, and certain advantages in computing performance.

Microservices Monitoring with Event Logs and Black Box Execution Tracing

Monitoring is a core practice in any software system. Trends in microservices systems exacerbate the role of monitoring and pose novel challenges to data sources being used for monitoring, such as event logs. Current deployments create a distinct log per microservice; moreover, composing microservices by different vendors exacerbates format and semantic heterogeneity of logs. Understanding and traversing the logs from different microservices demands for substantial cognitive work by human experts. This paper proposes a novel approach to accompany microservices logs with black box tracing to help practitioners in making informed decisions for troubleshooting. Our approach is based on the passive tracing of request-response messages of the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) communication model. Differently from many existing tools for microservices, our tracing is application transparent and non-intrusive. We present an implementation called MetroFunnel and conduct an assessment in the context of two case studies: a Clearwater IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) setup consisting of Docker microservices and a Kubernetes orchestrator deployment hosting tens of microservices. MetroFunnel allows making useful attributions in traversing the logs; more important, it reduces the size of collected monitoring data at negligible performance overhead with respect to traditional logs.

Dynamic asymmetric group key agreement protocol with traitor traceability

In asymmetric group key agreement (ASGKA) protocols, a group of users establish a common encryption key which is publicly accessible and compute pairwise different decryption keys. It is left as an open problem to design an ASGKA protocol with traitor traceability in Eurocrypt 2009. A one-round dynamic authenticated ASGKA protocol with public traitor traceability is proposed in this study. It provides a black-box tracing algorithm. Ind-CPA security with key compromise impersonation resilience (KCIR) and forward secrecy of ASGKA protocols is formally defined. The proposed protocol is proved to be Ind-CPA secure with KCIR and forward secrecy under D k-HDHE assumption. It is also proved that the proposed protocol resists collusion attack. In Setup algorithm and Join algorithm, one communication round is required. In Leave algorithm, no message is required to be transmitted. The proposed protocol adopts O ( log ⁡ N ) -way asymmetric multilinear map to make the size of public key and the size of ciphertext both achieve O ( log ⁡ N ) , where N is the number of potential group members. This is the first ASGKA protocol with public traitor traceability which is more efficient than trivial construction of ASGKA protocols.

Security analysis of two multi-oriented traitor tracing schemes

ZHANG Xue-jun et al.presented two multi-oriented traitor tracing schemes with full collusion resistance.They asserted that it was computationally infeasible for any number of users to get a different key by collusion.Here,these two schemes were cryptographically analyzed and a concrete collusion attack method was proposed based on simple linear combination which three or more traitors can build more than one valid decryption key.Further,these traitors cannot be identified by using black box tracing method.The result show that neither of the two traitor tracing schemes accomplish the full collusion resistance because of their intrinsic flaws.

Precise, Scalable, and Online Request Tracing for Multitier Services of Black Boxes

As more and more multitier services are developed from commercial off-the-shelf components or heterogeneous middleware without source code available, both developers and administrators need a request tracing tool to (1) exactly know how a user request of interest travels through services of black boxes and (2) obtain macrolevel user request behaviors of services without manually analyzing massive logs. This need is further exacerbated by IT system “agility,” which mandates the tracing tool to provide online performance data since offline approaches cannot reflect system changes in real time. Moreover, considering the large scale of deployed services, a pragmatic tracing approach should be scalable in terms of the cost in collecting and analyzing logs. In this paper, we introduce a precise, scalable, and online request tracing tool for multitier services of black boxes. Our contributions are threefold. First, we propose a precise request tracing algorithm for multitier services of black boxes, which only uses application-independent knowledge. Second, we present a microlevel abstraction, component activity graph, to represent causal paths of each request. On the basis of this abstraction, we use dominated causal path patterns to represent repeatedly executed causal paths that account for significant fractions, and we further present a derived performance metric of causal path patterns, latency percentages of components, to enable debugging performance-in-the-large. Third, we develop two mechanisms, tracing on demand and sampling, to significantly increase the system scalability. We implement a prototype of the proposed system, called PreciseTracer, and release it as open source code. In comparison with WAP5-a black-box tracing approach, PreciseTracer achieves higher tracing accuracy and faster response time. Our experimental results also show that PreciseTracer has low overhead, and still achieves high tracing accuracy even if an aggressive sampling policy is adopted, indicating that PreciseTracer is a promising tracing tool for large-scale production systems.

Towards Practical Black-Box Accountable Authority IBE: Weak Black-Box Traceability With Short Ciphertexts and Private Keys

At Crypto'07, Goyal introduced the concept of Accountable Authority Identity-Based Encryption (A-IBE) as a convenient tool to reduce the amount of trust in authorities in Identity-Based Encryption. In this model, if the Private Key Generator (PKG) maliciously re-distributes users' decryption keys, it runs the risk of being caught and prosecuted. Goyal proposed two constructions: the first one is efficient but can only trace well-formed decryption keys to their source; the second one allows tracing obfuscated decryption boxes in a model (called weak black-box model) where cheating authorities have no decryption oracle. The latter scheme is unfortunately far less efficient in terms of decryption cost and ciphertext size. The contribution of this paper is to describe a new construction that combines the efficiency of Goyal's first proposal with a simple weak black-box tracing mechanism. The proposed scheme is the first A-IBE that meets all security properties (although traceability is only guaranteed in the weak black-box model) in the adaptive-ID sense.

Fully CCA2 secure identity-based broadcast encryption with black-box accountable authority

AbstractThe concept of accountable authority identity-based encryption was introduced as a convenient tool to reduce the amount of trust in authorities in identity-based encryption. In this model, if the Private Key Generator (PKG) maliciously re-distributes users’ decryption keys, it runs the risk of being caught and prosecuted. Libert and Vergnaud proposed an accountable authority identity-based broadcast encryption, which allows white-box tracing or weak black-box tracing. Their scheme was proved only secure in selective-ID model. We present a weak black-box accountable authority identity-based broadcast encryption scheme, which is proven as fully CCA2 secure against adaptive adversary with tight reduction. Our scheme achieves O(m) public keys size, O(m) private keys size, and O(1) ciphertext length, where m is the maximum number of receivers allowed in each broadcast.

Fully collusion-resistant traitor tracing scheme with shorter ciphertexts

A traitor tracing scheme allows a content distributor to detect at least one of the traitors whose secret key is used to create a pirate decoder. In building efficient traitor tracing schemes, reducing ciphertext size is a significant factor since the traitor tracing scheme must handle a larger number of users. In this paper, we present a fully collusion-resistant traitor tracing scheme where the ciphertext size is 2.8 times shorter and encryption time is 2.6 times faster, compared to the best cases of fully collusion-resistant schemes previously suggested. We can achieve these efficiency results without sacrificing other costs. Also, our scheme supports public tracing and black-box tracing. To achieve our goal, we use asymmetric bilinear maps in prime order groups, and we introduce a new cancellation technique that has the same effect as that in composite order groups.

Cryptanalysis and improvement of complete asymmetric public-key traitor tracing scheme

A complete asymmetric public-key traitor tracing scheme was proposed by Wang Qing-long et al.,which claimed that it had some advantages such as revoking unlimited traitors and higher transmission efficiency.The scheme and its obvious defect were carefully analyzed,and then a attack was given.And traitors can perform a collusion attack,but the manager can not trace the traitors by the black-box traitor tracing method.Finally,an improved scheme was proposed in which traitors still could play the above attack,but they can be traced.

A Flexible-Revocation Scheme for Efficient Public-Key Black-Box Traitor Tracing

We propose a new type of revocation scheme for efficient public-key black-box traitor tracing. Our revocation scheme is flexible and efficient in the sense that (i) any number of subscribers can be revoked in each distribution under an assumption that the number of revoked subscribers who collude in one coalition is limited to a threshold and (ii) both each subscriber's storage and the transmission overhead are independent of n, while (i) the maximum number of revoked ones cannot be changed or (ii) they depend on n in previous schemes, where n is the total number of subscribers. The flexibility in revocation is significant since flexible revocation can be integrated with efficient black-box tracing and this integration can be achieved without a substantial increase in the transmission overhead over the previous schemes. In this paper, we present a concrete construction of an efficient public-key black-box traceable and revocable scheme by combining flexible revocation with a known black-box tracing algorithm which works under the same attack model as assumed in the previous schemes. Our scheme achieves that (i) the transmission overhead remains efficient, especially linear only in k in case of bulk revocation and (ii) the tracing algorithm runs in O(log n) time, while the previous ones cannot satisfy both of these properties, where k is the maximum number of traitors in a coalition.