Homomorphic Message Authentication Code Research Articles

On the Design and Implementation of the External Data Integrity Tracking and Verification System for Stream Computing System in IoT.

Data integrity is a prerequisite for ensuring data availability of IoT data and has received extensive attention in the field of IoT big data security. Stream computing systems are widely used in the field of IoT for real-time data acquisition and computing. However, the real-time, volatility, suddenness, and disorder of stream data make data integrity verification difficult. According to the survey, there is no mature and universal solution. To solve this issue, we constructed a data integrity verification algorithm scheme of the stream computing system (S-DIV) by utilizing homomorphic message authentication code and pseudo-random function security assumption. Furthermore, based on S-DIV, an external data integrity tracking and verification system is constructed to track and analyze the message data stream in real time. By verifying the data integrity of message during the whole life cycle, the problem of data corruption or data loss can be found in time, and error alarm and message recovery can be actively implemented. Then, we conduct the formal security analysis under the standard model and, finally, implement the S-DIV scheme in simulation environment. Experimental results show that the scheme can guarantee data integrity in an acceptable time without affecting the efficiency of the original system.

Secure Data Aggregation Aided by Privacy Preserving in Internet of Things

With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT), more and more wireless smart devices are widely deployed in its typical applications. These devices acquire numerous data, and their security transmission is a challenge issue due to the openness and broadcast nature of wireless network. Security data aggregation (SDA) plays a significant role in IoT which can not only protect the data privacy but also reduce the network traffic among smart devices. In this paper, a multiple application SDA (MASDA) mechanism is proposed and it can ensure the data confidentiality without losing the integrity of data transmission. Firstly, we discuss an improved homomorphic message authentication code (iHMAC) which can verify the integrity of sensing data and eliminate the injection of false data. Secondly, a multiple application elliptic curve cryptography mechanism (iECC) is described. We introduce multiple types of data simultaneous encryption into an elliptic curve encryption system. This encryption mechanism aggregates the encrypted sensing data and prevents the sensing from being tampered and leaked in relay nodes. Finally, MASDA is a multiple application mechanism and provide both the confidentiality and integrity compared with other SDA schemes. It fuses the sensing data of different applications in a single data packet, and the base station can recover them one-by-one. The security analysis and the simulation experiments verify that MASDA has better performances in terms of the security, the computation cost, the communication overhead, and the data accuracy.

Toward Both Privacy and Efficiency of Homomorphic MACs for Polynomial Functions and Its Applications

Abstract Homomorphic message authentication codes (MACs) allow a user to outsource data to an untrusted server and verify the correctness of returned computation results over the outsourced data. Many cloud applications need delegation computations over outsourced data with dual capabilities. On one hand, they need to keep the outsourced data secret such that the server cannot trace and infer any sensitive information from the computation results. On the other hand, the user should be able to efficiently verify the computation results. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art homomorphic MAC schemes are not so desirable due to either poor privacy or low verification efficiency. In this paper, we first put forward a new cryptographic primitive called privacy-preserving homomorphic MACs (PHMAC) that simultaneously provides data privacy and efficient verification. Then, we present a PHMAC construction capable for the evaluation of polynomials of fixed degree $d\geq 1$, in which the tag does not reveal any information of underlying authenticated data while being verifiable in constant time (in an amortized sense). As an application, we give a generic construction of homomorphic authenticated encryption (HAE) from proposed PHMAC and homomorphic encryption. Benefited from the functionalities of underlying PHMAC scheme, the derived HAE enjoys stronger authenticity and supports larger classes of functions than that of Lai et al. (Verifiable Computation on Outsourced Encrypted Data. In Computer Security—ESORICS 2014—19th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, Wroclaw, Poland, September 7–11, Part I, pp. 273–291. Springer, Berlin). Such HAE enables verifiable delegation computations over growing outsourced encrypted data in an efficient way.

An HMAC-based authentication scheme for network coding with support for error correction and rogue node identification

Authentication schemes based on homomorphic message authentication codes (HMACs) with or without a homomorphic cryptographic signature (HCS) have always played a vital role in network coding (NC). A newly developing trend with respect to research in this area takes authentication in NC-compatible networks beyond error detection. Current HMAC-based authentication schemes for networks that support NC not only detect and drop corrupted packets but also identify the rogue nodes that begun the attack. However, in order to completely optimize the performance of an NC-enabled network, nodes that identify corrupted packets should also be able to correct the errors. Doing this eliminates the communication cost associated with the need for re-transmission and improves throughput. In this paper we propose what to the best of our knowledge is the first of such HMAC-based authentication schemes. Like all current state of the art HMAC-based authentication schemes, the proposed scheme is able to identify pollution attacks and the nodes that launched them. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is also able to correct the corruption. This according to our evaluation improves the throughput of the network when compared to other similar state of the art schemes that do not possess this feature.

Efficient TPA-based auditing scheme for secure cloud storage

In recent years, how to design efficient auditing protocol to verify the integrity of users’ data, which is stored in cloud services provider (CSP), becomes a research focus. Homomorphic message authentication code (MAC) and homomorphic signature are two popular techniques to respectively design private and public auditing protocols. On the one hand, it is not suitable for the homomorphic-MAC-based auditing protocols to be outsourced to third-party auditor (TPA), who has more professional knowledge and computational abilities, although they have high efficiencies. On the other hand, the homomorphic-signature-based ones are very suitable for employing TPA without compromising user’s signing key but have very low efficiency (compared to the former case). In this paper, we propose a new auditing protocol, which perfectly combines the advantages of above two cases. In particular, it is almost as efficient as a homomorphic-MAC-based protocol proposed by Zhang et al. recently. Moreover, it is also suitable for outsourcing to TPA because it does not compromise the privacy of users’ signing key, which can be seen from our security analysis. Finally, numerical analysis and experimental results demonstrate the high-efficiency of our protocol.

A bandwidth efficient HMAC-based authentication scheme for network coding

Pollution attacks in network coding result in the waste of bandwidth and computational resources. Several homomorphic message authentication code (HMAC) and signature-based schemes have been proposed to mitigate such attacks. In these schemes, authentication is achieved by appending several HMAC tags with or without a signature to the packet payload. This approach negatively affects the throughput as well as the communication overhead incurred by such schemes. A phenomenon determined by a property we dubbed as the admissible payload rate (APR). In this paper we propose an HMAC and signature-based authentication scheme that addresses the afore mentioned problems. It achieves this by reducing the number of symbols needed to represent a packet. We evaluated the performance of our scheme and compared our findings to the performance of similar, state of the art authentication schemes. Our comparisons revealed that the proposed scheme incurred a negligible percentage gain in computational complexity. However, with no extra key storage overhead, and without sacrificing security, our scheme achieved a significant percentage reduction in communication overhead. The above mentioned favorable characteristics make our scheme an ideal and practical authentication solution for networks where bandwidth is a constraint or an optimal throughput is a requirement.

Security overhead of random linear network coding in multicast relay networks

AbstractThe relays in random linear network coding (RLNC) approach recode and transmit the coded packets to boost the performance against packet loss. However, this can endanger the system to pollution attacks, which can be eliminated by Homomorphic message authentication code (HMAC). Cache coding limits RLNC by coding only the decoded packets in the relays. In the other words, the relay node in cache coding first decodes the coded packets, then recodes and protects them by a MAC‐based scheme that allows the next hop to discover the pollution in the network. This study provides analytical models for cache coding and RLNC to compare their communication overhead. First, we approximate the number of transmissions in a network consisting several relays. The approximation models are for the cases of a few and large number of relays. Then, we validate our analysis using simulation results and illustrate that cache coding can eliminate the pollution attack issue of RLNC with only a slight increase in the bandwidth usage when there are no malicious nodes in the network. Moreover, we conclude that it is more beneficial to employ the cache coding approach at the presence of malicious nodes in the network.

Towards Developing Secure Data Aggregation with Integrity Verification Model (SDA-IV) in People Centric Sensing Systems

In present scenario of vast developments in wireless communication methods, embedded device based operations and mobile communications, sensor based techniques are widely adopted. Such systems are termed as People Centric Sensing Systems, which become very popular and acquires greater attention of researchers recently. However, security and privacy in transmitting data has been the major issue in People Centric Sensing Network (PCSN). For handling that problem efficiently, this paper presents a model called Security Data Aggregation and Integrity Verification (SDA-IV) model for providing privacy preserved data sharing between devices in PCSN. A new peer-to-peer oriented secure data sharing is achieved with the proposed model by making the user to shares their data randomly with other nodes along with the incorporating of integrity checking conceit. Moreover, the work comprises four phases: Initial Setup, Data Division and Encryption, Data Aggregation and Integrity Verification. Homomorphic Message Authentication Code is user for privacy preserving process and Hashing Functions are incorporated for integrity verification of shared data. Furthermore, the efficiency of the proposed SDA-IC model is evidenced using simulation results and comparative evaluations.

A Novel Intrusion Detection and Prevention Scheme for Network Coding-Enabled Mobile Small Cells

Network coding (NC)-enabled mobile small cells are observed as a promising technology for fifth-generation (5G) networks that can cover the urban landscape by being set up on-demand at any place and at any time on any device. Nevertheless, despite the significant benefits that this technology brings to the 5G of mobile networks, major security issues arise due to the fact that NC-enabled mobile small cells are susceptible to pollution attacks; a severe security threat exploiting the inherent vulnerabilities of NC. Therefore, intrusion detection and prevention mechanisms to detect and mitigate pollution attacks are of utmost importance so that NC-enabled mobile small cells can reach their full potential. Thus, in this article, we propose for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, a novel intrusion detection and prevention scheme (IDPS) for NC-enabled mobile small cells. The proposed scheme is based on a null space-based homomorphic message authentication code (MAC) scheme that allows detection of pollution attacks and takes proper risk mitigation actions when an intrusive incident is detected. The proposed scheme has been implemented in Kodo and its performance has been evaluated in terms of computational overhead.

Security Analysis of an Efficient Null Space-Based Homomorphic MAC Scheme Against Tag Pollution Attacks in RLNC

Recently, Esfahani, Mantas, and Rodriguez proposed a homomorphic message authentication code (MAC) scheme for the random linear network coding (RLNC) to resist tag pollution attacks (TPAs), and also presented the security analysis. As Esfahani et al. said, their scheme is based on the null space properties of Kehdi and Li, and the main contribution lies in adding the process of swapping when generating the tags for data packets. However, in this paper, we first point out that Esfahani et al.'s swapping technique is not essential for the TPA security, because the underlying non-swapping homomorphic MAC scheme has been secure against TPA and the process of swapping only improves the TPA security with a non-negligible factor. More importantly, we find that the security proof of Esfahani et al. is incorrect and misguided. In particular, according to Esfahani et al. suggestion, one should enlarge the number of neighbor nodes to reduce the probability of the TPA. However, this paper gives contrary suggestions in Esfahani et al.'s work by presenting the precise proof for the proposed homomorphic MAC scheme.

General transformations from single-generation to multi-generation for homomorphic message authentication schemes in network coding

Homomorphic (broadcast) message authentication code (MAC for short) scheme is a powerful tool for network coding to resist the pollution attack. However, many existing schemes only support the single-generation transmission and hence, potentially are vulnerable to multi-generation pollution attacks considered by Cheng et al. in 2016. In this paper, we consider how to securely convert the single-generation homomorphic (broadcast) MAC schemes into multi-generation ones so that they can resist the multi-generation attacks. Concretely, •We first present the multi-generation pollution attack on the single-generation homomorphic MAC scheme and propose a general transformation from single-generation scheme to one that supports multi-generation transmission.•Second, we prove that the multi-generation pollution attack also holds for a kind of homomorphic broadcast MAC schemes and any c-collusion secure single-generation scheme using cover-free set system as its key-distribution strategy, can also be securely converted into one that supports multi-generation transmission.•Third, as applications of the two transformations, we point out the existing two single-generation schemes can be respectively transformed into ones that are secure against the multi-generation pollution attacks.

Privacy-preserving auditing scheme for shared data in public clouds

Recent advances in cloud storage have enabled users to outsource large amounts of data to a remote cloud server in order to reduce storage and management costs, and share files among many users in a group. However, how to efficiently audit the integrity of shared data while maintaining data privacy and user identity anonymity, is still a critical issue. We propose a novel public auditing scheme for data stored in a remote cloud server and shared among users in a large group. In particular, the proposed scheme incorporates group signature, homomorphic message authentication code to create data block tags, so that it can support public auditing and provide user identity anonymity. Furthermore, we use the random masking technique in the proposed scheme to preserve data privacy from the third-party auditor. The correctness and security analyses demonstrate that the proposed scheme is correct and provably secure under a robust security model. The performance evaluation and experimental results show that the proposed scheme is efficient while maintaining the desirable security properties.

SupAUTH: A new approach to supply chain authentication for the IoT

AbstractRecent advances of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have enhanced the use of radio‐frequency identification‐based tracking system to be widely deployed in supply chain management covering every step involved in the flow of merchandise from the supplier to the customer to ensure a trustworthy delivery environment. Such authentication system (also known as path authentication) not only guarantees the merchandise to be available in the right destination with no discrepancies and errors but also ensures the route of the merchandise progress to be valid. This paper outlines the current state‐of‐the‐art cryptographic solutions for path authentication, highlights their properties and weakness, and proposes a novel, privacy‐preserving, and efficient solution. Compared with the existing elliptic curve ElGamal re‐encryption–based solution, our homomorphic message authentication code on arithmetic circuit–based solution offers less memory storage (with limited scalability) and no computational requirement on the reader. Moreover, we allow computational ability inside the tag that articulates a new privacy direction to the state‐of‐the‐art path privacy. This privacy notion helps support the confidentiality of the tag movement in the context of IoT‐enabled cross‐organizational tracking environment where the stakeholders can be from different organizations associated together with the merchandise being delivered. As a potential extension to the path authentication protocol, we further propose a polynomial‐based mutual authentication as a security extension and batch initialization as an efficiency extension. Besides our brief security and privacy analysis, our evaluation shows that the proposed solution can significantly reduce memory requirements on tags with marginal computational overhead to ensure transmission path confidentiality. We observe that SupAUTH requires maximum 513‐bit tag memory and 57.3 ms of processing time during evaluation, which is not only practical but also suitable for any suitable low‐cost radio‐frequency identification deployment in IoT.

Auditing for Distributed Storage Systems

Distributed storage codes have recently received a lot of attention in the community. Independently, another body of work has proposed integrity-checking schemes for cloud storage, none of which, however, is customized for coding-based storage or can efficiently support repair. In this work, we bridge the gap between these two currently disconnected bodies of work. We propose $ {\ssr NC {\mathchar702D }Audit}$ , a novel cryptography-based remote data integrity-checking scheme, designed specifically for network-coding-based distributed storage systems. $ {\ssr NC {\mathchar702D }Audit}$ combines, for the first time, the following desired properties: 1) efficient checking of data integrity; 2) efficient support for repairing failed nodes; and 3) protection against information leakage when checking is performed by a third party. The key ingredient of the design of $ {\ssr NC {\mathchar702D }Audit}$ is a novel combination of $ {\ssr SpaceMac}$ , a homomorphic message authentication code (MAC) scheme for network coding, and $ {\ssr NCrypt}$ , a novel chosen-plaintext attack (CPA) secure encryption scheme that preserves the correctness of $ {\ssr SpaceMac}$ . Our evaluation of $ {\ssr NC {\mathchar702D }Audit}$ based on a real Java implementation shows that the proposed scheme has significantly lower overhead compared to the state-of-the-art schemes for both auditing and repairing of failed nodes.

Security analysis of a TESLA-based homomorphic MAC scheme for authentication in P2P live streaming system

In this paper, we present a pollution attack on the homomorphic message authentication code scheme PMAC, which was proposed, by Cheng, Jiang, and Zhang in [IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications/Supplement 2013; 319: 291-298]. In particular, Cheng et al. claimed that their main contribution lies in that, compared with the existing scheme, such as SpaceMac, PMAC can achieve a reliable security 1/qi?ź instead of 1/q for SpaceMac, where q is usually set as a small number in practical applications and i?ź is a flexible parameter chosen by users to improve their security level. However, by presenting a pollution attack, we prove that PMAC can only achieve the security at most 1/q no matter how large i?ź is. Our attack shows that it may be dangerous to directly use PMAC in the peer-to-peer live streaming systems. Moreover, we also point out a basic but fatal error in their proof of theorem 1 and hope that by identifying the design flaw, similar mistakes can be avoided in future design of homomorphic message authentication code. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An Efficient Null Space-Based Homomorphic MAC Scheme Against Tag Pollution Attacks in RLNC

This letter proposes an efficient null space-based homomorphic message authentication code scheme providing resistance against tag pollution attacks in random linear network coding, where these attacks constitute a severe security threat. In contrast to data pollution attacks, where an adversary injects into the network corrupted packets, in tag pollution attacks the adversary corrupts (i.e. pollutes) tags appended to the end of the coded packets to prevent the destination nodes from decoding correctly. Our results show that the proposed scheme is more efficient compared to other competitive tag pollution immune schemes in terms of computational complexity.

Efficient Pairing-Free Privacy-Preserving Auditing Scheme for Cloud Storage in Distributed Sensor Networks

With the rapid growth of the distributed sensor networks, the distributed sensor network data security problems begin to attract the attention of people. The previous research of distributed sensor network security has focused on secure information in communication; however the research of secure data storage has been overlooked. As we know, cloud data storage and retrieval have become popular for efficient data management in distributed sensor networks; thus they can enjoy the on-demand high-quality cloud storage service. Meanwhile, it also introduces new security challenges. To tackle with these security challenges, many classic auditing schemes of cloud storage have been proposed. However, these schemes all need very expensive pairing computation, which is not suitable for sensor networks. In this paper, we propose an efficient pairing-free auditing scheme for data storage of distributed sensor networks. We exploit homomorphic message authentication codes (MACs) to reduce the space used to store the verification information. We also employ the random masking technique to make sure the TPA cannot recover the primitive data blocks of the sensor networks data manager. Experimental results show that our auditing scheme is more light-weight than previous auditing schemes and more practical in applied distributed sensor networks environments.

Comment on “An Efficient Homomorphic MAC with Small Key Size for Authentication in Network Coding”

Quite recently, Cheng and Jiang [1] designed an efficient homomorphic message authentication code (MAC) scheme for authentication in network coding, and claimed that the newly proposed scheme can achieve much higher security level with a formal security proof. However, in this comment, we will point out there exists a design flaw in their proposed scheme, leading to an inherent vulnerability, and also show an inaccuracy in their formal security proof. We hope that by identifying the design flaw, similar mistakes can be avoided in future design of homomorphic MAC authentication for network coding.

A Generic Construction of Homomorphic MAC for Multi-File Transmission in Network Coding

—Homomorphic message authentication codes (MAC) have been proposed to thwart pollution attacks in network coding. The existing schemes mainly are based on the vector inner product or trace function over finite fields. Recently, Wang and Hu presented a generic construction of homomorphic MAC scheme based on linear mapping over finite fields which is an excellent abstract of the vector inner product and the trace function. However, their construction can only be used for single-file transmission. In this paper, we convert their scheme into a new one that supports multi-file transmission. Moreover, our scheme needs shorter key when one wants to achieve the same security as that of Wang et al.

Energy-saving data aggregation algorithm for protecting privacy and integrity

How to protect data privacy and data integrity is the major challenge in data aggregation of Wireless Sensor Networks( WSN). This paper proposed an integrity-Energy-Saving Privacy-preserving Aggregation( iESPART), which was based on Energy-Saving Privacy-preserving Aggregation( ESPART). By using a homomorphic message authentication code scheme, iESPART was not only able to protect data integrity, but also able to determine which nodes had been attacked. The simulation results show that iESPART achieves the same data privacy-preserving effect as integrity-protecting Private Data Aggregation( iPDA), with a more comprehensive integrity detection mechanism and less communication overhead.