Key Security Properties Research Articles

A systematization of voter registration security

Abstract Voter registration is an essential part of almost any election process, and its security is a critical component of election security. Yet, despite notable compromises of voter registration systems, relatively little academic work has been devoted to securing voter registration systems, compared to research on other aspects of election security. In this paper, we present a systematic treatment of voter registration system security. We propose the first rigorous definitional framework for voter registration systems, describing the entities and core functionalities inherent in most voter registration systems, the jurisdictional policies that constrain specific implementations, and key security properties. Our definitions are configurable based on jurisdiction-specific parameters and policies. We provide a template for the structured presentation of detailed jurisdictional policy information, via a series of tables, and illustrate its application with detailed case studies of the voter registration systems of three US states and Panama. Throughout our research, with the aim of realism and practical applicability, we consulted current and former US election officials, civil society, and nonprofits in the elections space. We conclude with a list of critical questions regarding voter registration security.

Formal Verification of a Trusted Execution Environment-Based Architecture for IoT Applications

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) scenarios commonly present security and privacy concerns, either due to the processing constraints of devices or the employment of external servers to process and store data, for instance, in cloud-based IoT applications. In this sense, to protect data and decrease user distrust in external entities, security technologies are of utmost importance. Trusted execution environments (TEEs), which process data in an isolated and protected region of memory, are among these technologies. We focus on a trusted architecture solution based on the use of TEEs and the application of authentication, authorization, and encryption mechanisms to protect data in IoT applications. We specified the trusted IoT architecture (TIoTA) using hierarchical colored Petri nets, and performed simulations and model checking of key security properties related to desired and prohibited behaviors, enabling model-based testing. This article enhances the state of the art by providing project artifacts (e.g., executable and parametric models) for correctly implementing the TIoTA and by presenting evidence that the usage of the architecture can improve security and privacy.

Integrating RBAC, MIC, and MLS in Verified Hierarchical Security Model for Operating System

Designing a trusted access control mechanism of an operating system (OS) is a complex task if the goal is to achieve high level of security assurance and guarantees of unwanted information flows absence. Even more complex it becomes when the integration of several heterogeneous mechanisms, like role-based access control (RBAC), mandatory integrity control (MIC), and multi-level security (MLS) is considered. This paper presents results of development of a hierarchical integrated model of access control and information flows (HIMACF), which provides a holistic integration of RBAC, MIC, and MLS preserving key security properties of all those mechanisms. Previous version of this model is called MROSL DP-model. Now the model is formalized using Event-B formal method and its correctness is formally verified. In the hierarchical representation of the model, each hierarchy level (module) corresponds to a separate security control mechanism, so the model can be verified with less effort reusing the results of verification of lower level modules. The model is implemented in a Linux-based operating system using the Linux Security Modules infrastructure.

Integrating RBAC, MIC, and MLS in Verified Hierarchical Security Model for Operating System

Designing a trusted access control mechanism of an operating system (OS) is a complex task if the goal is to achieve high level of security assurance and guarantees of unwanted information flows absence. Even more complex it becomes when the integration of several heterogeneous mechanisms, like role-based access control (RBAC), mandatory integrity control (MIC), and multi-level security (MLS) is considered. This paper presents results of developement of a hierarchical integrated model of access control and information flows (HIMACF), which provides a holistic integration of RBAC, MIC, and MLS preserving key security properties of all those mechanisms. Previous version of this model is called MROSL~DP-model. Now the model is formalized using Event-B formal method and its correctness is formally verified. In the hierarchical representation of the model, each hierarchy level (module) corresponds to a separate security control mechanism, so the model can be verified with less effort reusing the results of verification of lower level modules. The model is implemented in a Linux-based operating system using the Linux Security Modules infrastructure.

An Efficient Group Key Transfer protocol for Secure Encryption

Cryptography algorithms provide confidentiality, integrity and authentication of communication channels. These algorithms and protocols are based on sophisticated mathe-matics such as computational and algorithmic algebraic geometry, coding theory, and generic algorithms for finite abelian groups. For secure encryption, establishing or transferring a shared key between the parties is an interesting challenge. Key management is an essential crypto-graphic primitive upon which other security primitives are built.In this paper, we present a generic construction of asymmetric key Group key transfer protocol using one way function and coding theory technique. By guaranteeing the freshness of authentication messages, the authenticity of the generator of authentication messages and the completeness of the authenticator, the improved protocol can resist various passive and active attacks. The protocol allows the participants in the group to derive a common encryption key, provide the key security and unknown key share properties. Security analysis of proposed scheme is also discussed.

SEEN: A Selective Encryption Method to Ensure Confidentiality for Big Sensing Data Streams

Resource constrained sensing devices are being used widely to build and deploy self-organizing wireless sensor networks for a variety of critical applications such as smart cities, smart health, precision agriculture and industrial control systems. Many such devices sense the deployed environment and generate a variety of data and send them to the server for analysis as data streams. A Data Stream Manager (DSM) at the server collects the data streams (often called big data) to perform real time analysis and decision-making for these critical applications. A malicious adversary may access or tamper with the data in transit. One of the challenging tasks in such applications is to assure the trustworthiness of the collected data so that any decisions are made on the processing of correct data. Assuring high data trustworthiness requires that the system satisfies two key security properties: confidentiality and integrity. To ensure the confidentiality of collected data, we need to prevent sensitive information from reaching the wrong people by ensuring that the right people are getting it. Sensed data are always associated with different sensitivity levels based on the sensitivity of emerging applications or the sensed data types or the sensing devices. For example, a temperature in a precision agriculture application may not be as sensitive as monitored data in smart health. Providing multilevel data confidentiality along with data integrity for big sensing data streams in the context of near real time analytics is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a Selective Encryption (SEEN) method to secure big sensing data streams that satisfies the desired multiple levels of confidentiality and data integrity. Our method is based on two key concepts: common shared keys that are initialized and updated by DSM without requiring retransmission, and a seamless key refreshment process without interrupting the data stream encryption/decryption. Theoretical analyses and experimental results of our SEEN method show that it can significantly improve the efficiency and buffer usage at DSM without compromising the confidentiality and integrity of the data streams.

VerSAMI: Versatile and Scalable key management for Smart Grid AMI systems

In this paper, we propose four new key management schemes for Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) to secure data communications in the Smart Grid (SG). The schemes are based on individual and batch rekeying operations using a novel multi-group key graph structure, are also versatile in the sense that they can support broadcast, unicast, as well as multicast communications. Security analysis shows that our schemes satisfy key management security properties. Furthermore, performance analysis and simulation results demonstrate that our schemes can scale to large AMI systems, and they incur low cost in terms of storage, communication overheads and time of key distribution compared to state-of-the-art schemes.

OCPP Protocol: Security Threats and Challenges

One benefit postulated for the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is their ability to act as stabilizing entities in smart grids through bidirectional charging, allowing local or global smoothing of peaks and imbalances. This benefit, however, hinges indirectly on the reliability and security of the power flows thus achieved. Therefore, this paper studies key security properties of the already-deployed Open Charge Point Protocol specifying communication between charging points and energy management systems. It is argued that possible subversion or malicious endpoints in the protocol can also lead to destabilization of power networks. While reviewing these aspects, we focus, from a theoretical and practical standpoint, on attacks that interfere with resource reservation originating with the EV, which may also be initiated by a man in the middle, energy theft, or fraud. Such attacks may even be replicated widely, resulting in over- or under-shooting of power network provisioning, or the (total/partial) disintegration of the integrity and stability of power networks.

A Model Checker for the Verification of Browser Based Protocols

A browser based protocol is the chief security component of a safety critical web application, such as e-banking. Accordingly, browser based protocols need to be thoroughly verified in order to guarantee they are up to comply with key security properties. To this end, we have developed WebMC, a model checker especially designed to consider web standards, with the aim of analyzing browser based protocol execution, as encompassed by the interactions of a typical user, a browser, and active attacker playing the role of the network, and one or more servers. In this paper, we shall show how to use WebMC in the design and the development of browser based protocols. Our tool has been successfully validated: WebMC has been able to reproduce a number of the verification results found in the literature, but fully automatically.

How to explain modern security concepts to your children

ABSTRACTAt the main cryptography conference, CRYPTO, in 1989, Quisquater and colleagues published a paper showing how to explain the complex notion of zero-knowledge proof in a simpler way that children can understand. In the same line of work, this article presents simple and intuitive explanations of various modern security concepts and technologies, including symmetric encryption, public key encryption, homomorphic encryption, intruder models (CPA, CCA1, CCA2), and security properties (OW, IND, NM). The explanations given in this article may also serve in demystifying such complex security notions for non-expert adults.

Verifying the Security Characteristics of a Secure Physical Access Control Protocol

Physical access control protocols provide a structured method of controlling the behavior of physical devices which in many cases are not only remotely located with respect to the accessing entity, but require the exchange of messages over one or more untrusted networks, such as the internet. Therefore, if it is necessary to prevent unauthorized access to the controlled physical devices, it is essential that the physical access control protocol exhibit certain verifiable security properties. We studied the Universal Physical Access Control System (UPACS) and used the formal protocol verification tool Proverif to verify that it possesses several key security properties. We also conducted a security analysis of the protocol and verified that it was resilient or otherwise invulnerable to several known forms of security attack, including Attacks on User Privacy and Anonymity, Session Key Security Attacks, Password Guessing Attacks, De-Synchronization Attacks, Replay Attacks, Eavesdropping Attacks, Denial-of-Service Attacks, User and Server Masquerade Attacks, Stolen Verifier Attacks and Stolen Password Attacks.

LINCS: Towards building a trustworthy litigation hold enabled cloud storage system

Litigation holds are inevitable parts of modern civil lawsuits that mandate an organization to preserve all forms of documents related to a lawsuit. In current data storage models, this includes documents stored in clouds. However, due to the fundamental natures of today's clouds, incorporating a trustworthy litigation hold management system is very challenging. To make the situation more complicated, defendants or plaintiffs may collude with the cloud service provider (CSP) to manipulate the documents under the hold. Serious consequences can follow if a litigant party fails to comply with the litigation hold for evidence stored in the cloud, resulting in legal sanctions for spoliation. This will not only harm the reputation of an organization but also levy of sanctions, such as fines, penalties, etc.In this paper, we define a model of trustworthy litigation hold management for cloud-based storage systems and identify the key security properties. Based on the model, we propose a trustworthy LIitigation hold eNabled Cloud Storage (LINCS) system. We show that LINCS can provide the required security properties in a strong adversarial scenario, where a plaintiff or defendant colludes with a malicious CSP. Our prototype implementation reveals that the performance overhead of using LINCS is very low (average 1.4% for the user), which suggests that such litigation hold enabled storage system can be integrated with real clouds.

A New Privacy-Enhanced Matchmaking Protocol

Although several wide-spread internet applications (e.g., job-referral services, dating services) can benefit from online matchmaking, protocols defined over the past two decades fail to address important privacy concerns. In this paper, we enhance traditional privacy requirements (e.g., user anonymity, matching-wish authenticity) with new privacy goals (e.g., resistance to off-line dictionary attacks, and forward privacy of users’ identities and matching wishes), and argue that privacy-enhanced matchmaking cannot be provided by solutions to seemingly related problems such as secret handshakes, set intersection, and trust negotiation. We define an adversary model, which captures the key security properties of privacy-enhanced matchmaking, and show that a simple, practical protocol derived by a two-step transformation of a password-based authenticated key exchange counters adversary attacks in a provable manner (in the standard model of cryptographic security).

Staged information flow for javascript

Modern websites are powered by JavaScript, a flexible dynamic scripting language that executes in client browsers. A common paradigm in such websites is to include third-party JavaScript code in the form of libraries or advertisements. If this code were malicious, it could read sensitive information from the page or write to the location bar, thus redirecting the user to a malicious page, from which the entire machine could be compromised. We present an information-flow based approach for inferring the effects that a piece of JavaScript has on the website in order to ensure that key security properties are not violated. To handle dynamically loaded and generated JavaScript, we propose a framework for staging information flow properties. Our framework propagates information flow through the currently known code in order to compute a minimal set of syntactic residual checks that are performed on the remaining code when it is dynamically loaded. We have implemented a prototype framework for staging information flow. We describe our techniques for handling some difficult features of JavaScript and evaluate our system's performance on a variety of large real-world websites. Our experiments show that static information flow is feasible and efficient for JavaScript, and that our technique allows the enforcement of information-flow policies with almost no run-time overhead.

LTL model checking for security protocols

Most model checking techniques for security protocols make a number of simplifying assumptions on the protocol and/or on its execution environment that greatly complicate or even prevent their applicability in some important cases. For instance, most techniques assume that communication between honest principals is controlled by a Dolev-Yao intruder, i.e. a malicious agent capable to overhear, divert, and fake messages. Yet we might be interested in establishing the security of a protocol that relies on a less unsecure channel (e.g. a confidential channel provided by some other protocol sitting lower in the protocol stack). In this paper we propose a general model for security protocols based on the set-rewriting formalism that, coupled with the use of LTL, allows for the specification of assumptions on principals and communication channels as well as of complex security properties that are normally not handled by state-of-the-art security protocol analysers. By using our approach we have been able to formalise all the assumptions required by the ASW protocol for optimistic fair exchange and some of its key security properties. Besides the previously reported attacks on the protocol, we report a new attack on a patched version of the protocol.

Probabilistic Analysis and Verification of the ASW Protocol Using PRISM

The ASW protocol is one of the prominent optimistic fair exchange protocols that is used for contract signing between two participants, the originator and the responder, with the aid of a trusted third party in case of a dispute. In this paper, the key security objectives of ASW protocol-fairness, effectiveness and timeliness-have been verified using a probabilistic model checking tool, PRISM. First, the security objectives of ASW protocol have been defined with probabilistic equations. The roles of the participants (i.e., the originator and the responder) and the trusted third party have been modeled in PRISM code. The security objectives of ASW protocol have been expressed using a temporal logic, PCTL. The PCTL expressions are analogous to the probabilistic equations that we have developed to define the security objectives. Next, the model is analyzed using these PCTL expressions, and different outputs have been observed. The outputs confirm the fairness of the ASW protocol. Moreover, the effectiveness and the timeliness of the protocol are also established. Hence, the key security properties of ASW protocol have been verified.

Advanced method for cryptographic protocol verification

Based on a previous work using abstract interpretation for secret property verification, we propose a new method for protocol verification combining abstract interpretation for Input/Output set description and finite state machine for property propagation and verification. Generating Input/Output set for FSM is a bit difficult specially when one want to apply such technique on cryptographic protocol implementation. It is true that one can verify protocol specification, but in such case one cannot discover any significant logical follows introduced by implementation. To overcome this, we develop a particular semantic defined for cryptographic protocol verification, that facilitates verifying or detecting a large set of faults and attacks. Faults and attacks will be described as scenarios with a set of preconditions and post conditions. The FSM based method is used to discover a transition is possible from an initial set (inputs) to a final state describing a fault or a global attack state. This semantic along with the model and the verification tool SSPV allow the prove of more key security properties.

Computer-assisted verification of a protocol for certified email

We present the formalization and verification of a recently developed cryptographic protocol for certified email. Relying on a tool for automatic protocol analysis, we establish the key security properties of the protocol. This case study explores the use of general correspondence assertions in automatic proofs, and aims to demonstrate the considerable power of the tool and its applicability to non-trivial, interesting protocols.