Desirable Security Research Articles

Regulating pore structure of aramid nanofiber (ANF) separators for lithium–sulfur (Li–S) batteries

Excellent ionic conductivity and mechanical robustness are significant for separators of Li–S batteries. Aramid nanofiber (ANF) has been widely used in separators due to their excellent mechanical properties and high-temperature resistance. However, pure ANF separator possesses a dense pore structure resulting from the closely intertwined nanofibrous network, leading to inferior ionic conductivity. Herein, we propose a strategy of inhibiting of hydrogen bonding (IHB) among nanofibers to regulate the pore structure of ANF separators via employing pore-forming agent, solvation, and differentiated drying methods. Notably, a graph theoretical methodology (structural GT) is introduced to analyze the percolating network of ANF separator, revealing that the higher average nodal connectivity, the more abundant and homogeneous porous structure and higher conductivity. Excitingly, the pore size and the ionic conductivity of ANF separator by supercritical carbon dioxide drying (S-ANFs) is 44 nm and 0.171 mS/cm, which is 5 times and 1.9 times higher than pure ANF separator, respectively. Moreover, the ANF separator is dimensionally stable under 200 °C, demonstrating its desirable security under extreme conditions. Finally, the half-cell equipped resultant S-ANFs exhibits outstanding cycling stability (566 mAh/g after 200 cycles at 0.5 C) and Coulombic efficiency (99.25%). This work provides an efficient strategy to regulate the pore structure of ANF separator.

2F-MASK-VSS: Two-factor mutual authentication and session key agreement scheme for video surveillance system

The trend for deploying Video Surveillance Systems (VSSs) in public places has become common practice to maintain effective law and order in modern civilization. Further, data access control and the proper management of surveillance data with valid users are desirable for the safety and security of the communities. This paper aims to develop practical solutions to protect VSSs against evolving threats and challenges. This paper proposes a Two-Factor Mutual Authentication and Session Key Agreement usable in VSS (2F-MASK-VSS) environments for real-time data storage and access. In 2F-MASK-VSS, lightweight cryptographic tools, viz. hash function and symmetric key encryption, are used to maintain the desirable security features. In 2F-MASK-VSS, a surveillance camera captures real-time data and sends them securely to a central server for storage through the established session key agreement among valid concerns. Moreover, 2F-MASK-VSS can protect access control among valid users. The security strength of 2F-MASK-VSS has been proven by formal and informal analysis. The BAN logic model, AVISPA and Scyther tools validate the attack-resilience of 2F-MASK-VSS. Furthermore, the security analysis in the random oracle model shows that 2F-MASK-VSS is provably secure. In addition, 2F-MASK-VSS has been implemented using the Raspberry PI testbed to demonstrate its practical implementation.

Trustworthy AI using Confidential Federated Learning

The principles of security, privacy, accountability, transparency, and fairness are the cornerstones of modern AI regulations. Classic FL was designed with a strong emphasis on security and privacy, at the cost of transparency and accountability. CFL addresses this gap with a careful combination of FL with TEEs and commitments. In addition, CFL brings other desirable security properties, such as code-based access control, model confidentiality, and protection of models during inference. Recent advances in confidential computing such as confidential containers and confidential GPUs mean that existing FL frameworks can be extended seamlessly to support CFL with low overheads. For these reasons, CFL is likely to become the default mode for deploying FL workloads.

Efficient and quantum‐secure authenticated key exchange scheme for mobile satellite communication networks

SummaryThe mobile satellite communication (MSC) system is a vital communication method in which mobile users and network control centers connect via satellites. Since the satellite's communication is wireless, communication security is a critical factor to ensure accountable communication. Key exchange and authentication (KEA) mechanism is widely used to achieve data security for data transmitted in an insecure or open channel. Different authentication systems are suggested in the last many years to establish safe communication, whereas most existing security protocols are based on factorization or discrete logarithm. However, these systems are no longer reliable by Shor's algorithm as any discrete logarithm and factorization can be resolved in polynomial time on quantum computers. Thus, developing a quantum secure KEA protocol for MSC systems is necessary. In this direction, recently a ring learning with an error‐based KEA technique is proposed to ensure a quantum‐safe environment. This scheme is quantum‐safe and satisfies desirable security attributes but has low efficiency in computation and communication. Moreover, establishing a secure session requires six communications among involved entities. As a result, replay attack detection at an early stage is not possible for the central authority (server), which could delay the server response, and the adversary gets the advantage of drawing a denial of service scenario for authorized entities. We propose a lattice‐based KEA protocol for the MSC system to improve computation, communication efficiency, and early‐stage replay attack detection. The security analysis of the proposed scheme is presented in the random oracle model. Calculation of performance is also presented to observe advantages in computation and communication overhead.

Cryptanalysis with improvement on lattice‐based authenticated key exchange protocol for mobile satellite communication networks

SummaryThe mobile satellite communication (MSC) system represents a crucial means of communication, facilitating connections between mobile users and network control centres through satellites. Given the wireless nature of satellite communication, ensuring communication security is paramount for maintaining accountability. Key exchange and authentication (KEA) mechanisms are commonly employed to secure data transmitted over insecure or open channels. Developing a lattice‐based KEA protocol for MSC systems is imperative to achieve both quantum security and efficient communication. In this direction, Yadav et al. devised ring learning with an error‐based KEA technique to ensure a quantum‐safe environment. Their scheme is quantum‐safe and satisfies desirable security attributes but has low efficiency in computation. Moreover, we have identified that their scheme is susceptible to denial of service attack and session key established at user and NCC ends is different. To overcome the flaws of Yadav et al., we propose a lattice‐based KEA protocol for the MSC system to improve computation efficiency, and get resistance against key mismatch attack. The security analysis of the proposed scheme is presented in the random oracle model. Comparative study is also presented to observe advantages in computation efficiency.

SCADvanceXP—an intelligent Polish system for threat detection and monitoring of industrial networks

SCADvanceXP is an industrial network intrusion detection system that scans and monitors data exchange between engineering stations, field divides, controllers, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), and other elements of the operational technology network in detail. SCADvanceXP has the potential to detect advanced attacks on industrial infrastructures with the use of rulebased, signature-based, and behavioural detection methods, which are supported by sophisticated machine and deep learning models. As a system developed in Poland, it addresses the needs of industry in that region of Europe. The goal of this work was to assess SCADvanceXP’s potential to detect common industrial threats. In order to check SCADvanceXP’s potential, an effort was undertaken to evaluate its functionality on major industrial threats. For that purpose, twelve malware strains interfering with industrial systems were described. Later, the SCADvanceXP functionality was overlapped on malware behavioural and detection markers, pointing out exact mechanisms in SCADvanceXP that would detect analysed threats. The results show that SCADvanceXP is able to detect a wide range of attacks on industrial networks. SCADvanceXP’s rich functionality is able to provide a high standard of security. However, if a threat is affecting systems not directly connected with industrial networks, SCADvanceXP will not be able to detect it. SCADvanceXP only monitors industrial systems; hence, corporate networks must be protected by a different solution to provide the required level of security. Nonetheless, SCADvanceXP is dedicated to operating within industrial networks and does not have access to regular IT networks. It can be concluded that SCADvanceXP is a specialist tool providing desired security for industrial networks.

BDACD: Blockchain-based decentralized auditing supporting ciphertext deduplication

Public auditing enables data owners to entrust a third-party auditor (TPA) to perform auditing tasks periodically. To resist malicious TPAs, a plethora of blockchain-based public auditing mechanisms have been proposed. However, existing schemes cannot effectively mitigate single point of failure and collusion between TPAs and miners. These schemes are burdened by significant wastage of storage resources due to the presence of redundant data. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based decentralized auditing scheme supporting ciphertext deduplication (BDACD). BDACD leverages a decentralized blockchain, which takes over the role traditionally played by a centralized TPA. A decentralized autonomous organization is incorporated to enhance resistance against collusion attacks. By integrating advanced ciphertext deduplication techniques, BDACD effectively mitigates storage overhead. Furthermore, we introduce a novel concept, T-Merkle hash tree, along with a corresponding search algorithm. This innovation significantly enhances blockchain storage utilization and enables efficient half-interval searches within a block. To ensure accountability and fairness, a smart contract is employed to establish an arbitration mechanism. This mechanism serves a dual purpose: penalizing any malevolent actions by cloud servers and providing adequate compensation to data owners whose data integrity has been compromised. Detailed security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate BDACD has desirable security and efficiency.

Efficient Identity-Based Data Integrity Auditing With Key-Exposure Resistance for Cloud Storage

The key exposure is a serious threat for the security of data integrity auditing. Once the user's private key for auditing is exposed, most of the existing data integrity auditing schemes would inevitably become unable to work. To deal with this problem, we construct a novel and efficient identity-based data integrity auditing scheme with key-exposure resilience for cloud storage. This is achieved by designing a novel key update technique, which is fully compatible with BLS signature used in identity-based data integrity auditing. In our design, the Third Party Auditor (TPA) is responsible for generating update information. The user can update his private key based on the private key in one previous time period and the update information from the TPA. Furthermore, the proposed scheme supports real lazy update, which greatly improves the efficiency and the feasibility of key update. Meanwhile, the proposed scheme relies on identity-based cryptography, which makes certificate management easy. The security proof and the performance analysis demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves desirable security and efficiency.

A regulated anonymous cryptocurrency with batch linkability

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin use blockchain to conduct peer-to-peer value transmission. Nevertheless, the publicly nature of on-chain data might violate the privacy of the users. Subsequently, several anonymous cryptocurrencies, such as Zerocash and Monero, were proposed to enhance the privacy of cryptocurrencies. However, the strong privacy makes these cryptocurrencies perfect tools for illegal gains such as money laundering, extortion, and terrorist financing. As a result, regulation becomes a necessity for cryptocurrencies. In order to balance the contradiction between privacy and regulation in cryptocurrencies, in this paper, we propose a new regulated anonymous cryptocurrency protocol that can protect the privacy of honest payers while enabling a tracing authority to find out all the correlations among a batch of dubious transactions by a single query, and even trace malicious payers’ real identity if necessary. We formalize its system model and security model, including anonymity, sort-blindness, non-frameability and linkability. We also demonstrate that the proposed protocol achieves these desirable security properties with detailed security analysis. Finally, we show the validity and feasibility of this protocol by implementing a prototype system.

A Blockchain-Based Copyright Protection Scheme With Proactive Defense

Copyright protection, including copyright registration, copyright transfer and infringement penalty, plays a critical role in preventing illegal usage of original works. The mainstream traditional copyright protection schemes need an authority online all the time to handle copyright issues and face some problems such as intricate copyright transfer, single point of failure and so on. To alleviate the burden of the authority, a few blockchain-based copyright protection schemes are proposed. However, most of them do not consider copyright transfer, and their infringement penalty may only happen after copyright owners discover the infringement behavior (i.e., “ex-post penalty”). In this article, we propose a new security strategy, called “Proactive Defense” in copyright protection which can prevent infringement before it occurs. With our proposed proactive defense strategy, we design a secure copyright protection scheme which provides advantages of compact copyright transfer and prior infringement penalty. More concrete, both copyright registration and transfer are regarded as transactions and recorded to the blockchain. Based on the double-authentication-prevention signature and non-interactive zero-knowledge proof techniques, illegal copyright transfer can be detected and the infringement penalty can be done automatically with a tailored smart contract before the completion of the transfer. Our security analysis shows that the proposed scheme can achieve all desirable security properties. Moreover, we implement our scheme in Java and evaluate the performance experimentally. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme has good security and efficiency, which can be applied for the copyright protection.

Blockchain-Based Security Configuration Management for ICT Systems

The world has become increasingly dependent on large-scale and distributed information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures and systems in sectors such as energy, transport, banking, healthcare, water supply, and digital services, while their protection is considered of paramount importance and has already drawn remarkable attention from governments and key industry players. Establishing common approaches by leveraging existing frameworks and cyber security practices for improving the security postures of those systems is one of the major objectives for ensuring an adequate level of protection and avoiding the detrimental effects of disruptions on society and citizens. Configuration management (CM) is one of those common practices for establishing and maintaining the integrity and consistency of a system and its elements with regard to the function, performance, and status of technical and physical attributes, and it contributes to a desirable security posture throughout the lifecycle of a system. This study addresses the importance of CM, and while considering the corresponding frameworks, standards, and best practices, it proposes a permissioned blockchain-based approach, that inherits the benefits of the blockchain technology and ensures the integrity of the systems’ configuration across the complete lifecycle management of its products and services as an underlying model for mapping and integrating CM functions. Furthermore, this study briefly presents the benefits and challenges of the application of permissioned blockchain models and proposes a smart-contract-based role-based access control mechanism, in addition to presenting an operating concept based on brief but real-life lifecycle requirements of organizational configuration management.

Extremely Lightweight Constant-Round Membership-Authenticated Group Key Establishment for Resource-Constrained Smart Environments toward 5G

AbstractWith rapid development of next-generation mobile networks and communications (5G networks), group-oriented applications in resource-constrained smart environments (RSEs), such as smart homes and smart classrooms, have attracted great attentions. Due to the insecure communications between resource-constrained devices, secure group communications in RSE toward 5G face many challenges. In RSE toward 5G, lightweight communications and low computational overheads are crucial. Besides, the private tokens used to generate the group key are expected to be reused multiple times. However, the conventional frameworks for secure group communications cannot meet these requirements. A practical construction of extremely lightweight constant-round membership authenticated group key establishment framework is proposed in this paper for RSE toward 5G, which not only implements identity authentication among the members and group key establishment but also ensures extremely lightweight computation and communication costs by each group member. In our proposed scheme, the increase in the number of group members will not lead to a linear or logarithmic increase in the communication and calculation costs at the member side. Our framework also resists external and internal attacks and meets all the desirable security features. In this framework, the privacy of tokens can be well protected, so that they can be reused for multiple times. Therefore, our scheme significantly reduces the costs of communication and calculation, and it is more efficient compared with the related schemes in the literature. This proposal is fairly suitable for lightweight membership authentication and group key establishment in RSE toward 5G.

Privacy-preserving data aggregation scheme against deletion and tampering attacks from aggregators

Because privacy-preserving data aggregation protocols provide data privacy and data compression, they have been extensively studied in smart grids. However, most of the existing data aggregation protocols are based on honest-but-curious aggregators, or adopt computationally intensive asymmetric homomorphic encryption, making these protocols only provably secure in weak security models, or resulting in high computational complexity for terminal users. To address the aforementioned issues, in this work, we propose a novel lightweight privacy-preserving data aggregation scheme against malicious aggregators based on our symmetric homomorphic encryption. The proposed scheme can reduce the computational cost of smart meters while also resisting tampering and deletion attacks from malicious aggregators. One of the highlights of the proposed scheme is its ability to withstand deletion attacks from malicious aggregators, which makes it unnecessary for the malicious aggregator to aggregate the readings of all smart meters instead of only a part of them. Therefore, our scheme is more secure than other schemes. It is the first privacy-preserving data aggregation scheme based on a stronger security model without multiple rounds of interaction. Finally, the detailed security analysis shows that the proposed scheme satisfies desirable security properties. Moreover, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is superior to the other four schemes in terms of computational complexity and communication overhead.

Secure Protocols for Best Arm Identification in Federated Stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits

The stochastic multi-armed bandit is a classical reinforcement learning model, where a learning agent sequentially chooses an action (pull a bandit arm) and the environment responds with a stochastic reward drawn from an unknown distribution associated with the chosen action. A popular objective for the agent is to identify the arm having the maximum expected reward, also known as the best arm identification problem. We address the security concerns that occur in a cross-silo federated learning setting, where multiple data owners collaborate under the orchestration of a server to execute a best arm identification algorithm. We propose three secure protocols, which guarantee desirable security properties for the: input data (i.e., reward values), intermediate data (i.e., sums of rewards), and output data (i.e., ranking of arms and in particular the identified best arm). More precisely: (1) no data owner can learn the identified best arm; moreover, no data owner can learn local data pertaining to another data owner; (2) the orchestration participants cannot learn the identified best arm, any reward value, or any sum of rewards; (3) by analyzing the messages exchanged over the network, an external observer cannot learn the identified best arm, or any reward value, or any sum of rewards. Each protocol has a different architecture, uses different techniques, and proposes a different trade-off with respect to several criteria that we thoroughly analyze: number of participants, generality of the supported reward functions, cryptographic overhead, and communication cost. To build our protocols, we rely on secure multi-party computation, AES-CBC, and the additive homomorphic property of Paillier.

Secure protocols for cumulative reward maximization in stochastic multi-armed bandits

We consider the problem of cumulative reward maximization in multi-armed bandits. We address the security concerns that occur when data and computations are outsourced to an honest-but-curious cloud i.e., that executes tasks dutifully, but tries to gain as much information as possible. We consider situations where data used in bandit algorithms is sensitive and has to be protected e.g., commercial or personal data. We rely on cryptographic schemes and propose UCB - MS, a secure multi-party protocol based on the UCB algorithm. We prove that UCB - MS computes the same cumulative reward as UCB while satisfying desirable security properties. In particular, cloud nodes cannot learn the cumulative reward or the sum of rewards for more than one arm. Moreover, by analyzing messages exchanged among cloud nodes, an external observer cannot learn the cumulative reward or the sum of rewards produced by some arm. We show that the overhead due to cryptographic primitives is linear in the size of the input. Our implementation confirms the linear-time behavior and the practical feasibility of our protocol, on both synthetic and real-world data.

Multi-message multi-receiver signcryption scheme based on blockchain.

In conventional message communication systems, the practice of multi-message multi-receiver signcryption communication encounters several challenges, including the vulnerability to Key Generation Center (KGC) attacks, privacy breaches and excessive communication data volume. The KGC necessitates a secure channel to transmit partial private keys, thereby rendering the security of these partial private keys reliant on the integrity of the interaction channel. This dependence introduces concerns regarding the confidentiality of the private keys. Our proposal advocates for the substitution of the KGC in traditional certificateless schemes with blockchain and smart contract technology. Parameters are publicly disclosed on the blockchain, leveraging its tamper-proof property to ensure security. Furthermore, this scheme introduces conventional encryption techniques to achieve user identity privacy in the absence of a secure channel, effectively resolving the issue of user identity disclosure inherent in blockchain-based schemes and enhancing communication privacy. Moreover, users utilize smart contract algorithms to generate a portion of the encrypted private key, thereby minimizing the possibility of third-party attacks. In this paper, the scheme exhibits resilience against various attacks, including KGC leakage attacks, internal privilege attacks, replay attacks, distributed denial of service attacks and Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks. Additionally, it possesses desirable security attributes such as key escrow security and non-repudiation. The proposed scheme has been theoretically and experimentally analyzed under the random oracle model, based on the computational Diffie-Hellman problem and the discrete logarithm problem. It has been proven to possess confidentiality and unforgeability. Compared with similar schemes, our scheme has lower computational cost and shorter ciphertext length. It has obvious advantages in communication and time overhead.

A competitive analysis of information security investment: The role of hacker attacks

The role of hacker attacks on information security investment and firm profits is fundamental in information security economics, which, however, has not been fully examined yet. This paper builds a duopolistic horizontal differentiation model to study this issue and yields a series of interesting findings. First, we find that each firm may benefit from an increase of the probability of hacker attacks when it gains more from security differentiation and suffers less from investment competition. Second, when market competition becomes fiercer, each firm invests less in information security to maintain security differentiation. Third, each firm may benefit from an increase of consumer security loss because the resulting security investment can lead to a more desirable security differentiation. Finally, an increase of cost coefficient of security investment may be profitable to each firm in spite of an increase of security expenditure. This is because an increase of cost coefficient may facilitate security differentiation through discouraging security investment. Additionally, the model is extended to analytically and numerically check the robustness of the main results.

GASE: A Lightweight Group Authentication Scheme With Key Agreement for Edge Computing Applications

Motivated by the fact that mass authentication is one of the desirable security features in the edge computing paradigm, we propose a lightweight group authentication protocol with a session key-agreement. Most of the previously proposed group authentication schemes (GASs) are heavyweight and do not support multiple authentications or key-agreement. On the other hand, our protocol, which is based on secret sharing scheme and aggregated message authentication code, is lightweight and provides multiple asynchronous authentications. Furthermore, we implement a simple key refreshing mechanism in which, in each session, a new session-key between an Internet of Things node and the authenticating server is established without the need for redistributing new shares. Our security analysis includes proving that our protocol provides group authentication, message forward secrecy, and prevents several attacks. Additionally, we present a formal automated verification using Verifpal tool. Furthermore, we show that our scheme has better performance than other relative schemes in terms of communication complexity, secret-share redistribution, and session key derivations.

An Effective Privacy-Preserving Blockchain-Assisted Security Protocol for Cloud-Based Digital Twin Environment

Recently, the Digital Twin (DT) technology has procured a lot of attention because of its applicability in the manufacturing and space industries. The DT environment involves the formation of a clone of the tangible object to perform simulations in the virtual space. The combination of conceptual development, predictive maintenance, real-time monitoring, and simulation characteristics of DT has increased the utilization of DT in different scenarios, such as medical environments, healthcare, manufacturing industries, aerospace, etc. However, these utilizations have also brought serious security pitfalls in DT deployment. Towards this, several authentication protocols with different security and privacy features for DT environments have been proposed. In this article, we first review a recently proposed two-factor authentication protocol for DT environments that utilizes the blockchain technology. However, the analyzed scheme is unable to offer the desirable security and cannot withstand various security attacks like offline password-guessing attack, smart card stolen attack, anonymity property, and known session-specific temporary information attack. We also demonstrate that an attacker can impersonate the analyzed protocol’s legal user, owner, and cloud server. To mitigate these security loopholes, we devise an effective three-factor privacy-preserving authentication scheme for DT environments. The proposed work is demonstrated to be secure by performing the informal security analysis, the formal security analysis using the widely recognized Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, and the Real-or-Random (ROR) model. A detailed comparative study with the existing competing schemes including the analyzed scheme demonstrates that the devised framework furnishes better security features while also having lower computation costs and comparable communication costs than the existing schemes.

The origin of LYONs: A case study in financial innovation

The origin of LYONs: A case study in financial innovation