Low Storage Overhead Research Articles

ERA: Towards privacy preservation and verifiability for online ad exchanges

Ad exchanges are kind of the most popular online advertising marketplaces for trading ad spaces over the Internet. Ad exchanges run auctions to sell diverse ad spaces on the publishers’ web-pages to advertisers, who want to display ads on ad spaces. However, the parties in an ad auction cannot verify whether the auction is carried out correctly or not. Furthermore, the advertisers are usually unwilling to reveal their sensitive bids and identities. In this paper, we jointly consider the auction verifiability and the advertisers’ privacy preservation, and thus propose ERA, which is an E fficient, pR ivacy-preserving, and verifiA ble online auction mechanism for ad exchanges. ERA exploits an order preserving encryption scheme to guarantee privacy preservation, and achieves verifiability by constructing a novel protocol of privacy preserving integer comparison, which is built on the Paillier homomorphic encryption scheme. We extensively evaluate the performance of ERA, and our evaluation results show that ERA satisfies several desirable properties with low computation, communication, and storage overheads, so ERA can be easily deployed in today's ad exchanges.

An Improved Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for SIP-Based-VoIP Using Smart Card

Secure information sharing has become very popular in immigration, military applications, healthcare, education and foreign affairs for the past few years. The security and privacy of such type of information cannot easily be compromised because the secure communication utilizes both wireless and wired communication media for exchanging sensitive information. Voice over IP (VoIP) offers many unique capabilities to its users. An important robust dynamism behind the use of IP telephony is cost savings, especially for businesses with large data networks. By transporting voice traffic over IP-based networks, businesses can decrease or abolish the toll charges related to carrying calls over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) promises simple and efficient management of multimedia sessions amongst several users. To improve the security, integrity, authenticity and privacy issues while sharing sensitive information, numerous authentication schemes or set-of-rules have been recommended by different researchers in recent times. These authentication schemes are vulnerable to prospective security flaws e.g. replay attack, masquerading, insider attack, impersonation, password guessing, server spoofing, Denning Sacco and denial-of-service (DoS). Further, these schemes also fail to deliver mutual authentication. Almost, no researcher claims with conviction about a foolproof secure authentication scheme. This research mainly focuses on designing VoIP system based on SIP scheme that caters all the weaknesses in these schemes having low computation costs and low communication complexity and low storage overhead and shows a significant balance between performance and security. The proposed protocol also offers mutual authentication and reliable information delivery between user and server. A provable formal security analysis for the scheme will also be established mathematically, using BAN logic of authentication.

High-reliability hash-chain based broadcast method in wireless network for factory automation

Authentication is important to broadcast, which is a widely-used communication method in wireless network for factory automation. Traditional hash-chain based methods maintain long key chains for authentication. However, these methods face the trade-off between the broadcast amount supported and huge storage of the key chain. This paper presents a high-reliability secure broadcast method TuTESLA based on multiple hash chains. First, multiple-transmission is applied to improve the reliability of broadcast; second, multiple hash chains are introduced and the structure of them are optimised to eliminate the dependence between the length of chains and the amount of the broadcasts supported. Compared with the traditional methods based on hash chain, in the security aspect, TuTESLA has comparable message security and key security, and higher replay-attack protection, but weaker resistance to denial of service attacks; in the overhead aspect, TuTESLA has much lower storage overhead, but slightly higher computing and communication overhead.

High-reliability hash-chain based broadcast method in wireless network for factory automation

Authentication is important to broadcast, which is a widely-used communication method in wireless network for factory automation. Traditional hash-chain based methods maintain long key chains for authentication. However, these methods face the trade-off between the broadcast amount supported and huge storage of the key chain. This paper presents a high-reliability secure broadcast method TuTESLA based on multiple hash chains. First, multiple-transmission is applied to improve the reliability of broadcast; second, multiple hash chains are introduced and the structure of them are optimised to eliminate the dependence between the length of chains and the amount of the broadcasts supported. Compared with the traditional methods based on hash chain, in the security aspect, TuTESLA has comparable message security and key security, and higher replay-attack protection, but weaker resistance to denial of service attacks; in the overhead aspect, TuTESLA has much lower storage overhead, but slightly higher computing and communication overhead.

A Lightweight Authentication Mechanism for M2M Communications in Industrial IoT Environment

In the emerging industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) era, machine-to-machine (M2M) communication technology is considered as a key underlying technology for building IIoT environments, where devices (e.g., sensors, actuators, and gateways) are enabled to exchange information with each other in an autonomous way without human intervention. However, most of the existing M2M protocols that can be also used in the IIoT domain provide security mechanisms based on asymmetric cryptography resulting in high computational cost. As a consequence, the resource-constrained IoT devices are not able to support them appropriately and thus, many security issues arise for the IIoT environment. Therefore, lightweight security mechanisms are required for M2M communications in IIoT in order to reach its full potential. As a step toward this direction, in this paper, we propose a lightweight authentication mechanism, based only on hash and XOR operations, for M2M communications in IIoT environment. The proposed mechanism is characterized by low computational cost, communication, and storage overhead, while achieving mutual authentication, session key agreement, device’s identity confidentiality, and resistance against the following attacks: replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack, impersonation attack, and modification attack.

An adaptive cache coherence protocol: Trading storage for traffic

This paper introduces a new adaptive cache coherence protocol which minimizes energy requirements and guarantees scalability. It includes two complementary parts: a non-inclusive sparse-directory to track only actively shared blocks and a structure to determine the presence of a block in the private caches based on an improved counting bloom filter. It uses token counting to preserve the system correctness, to improve performance and to reduce the implementation complexity. Combining all these characteristics, the proposal has a low storage overhead and is able to suppress most of the traffic inherent to snoop-based protocols and reduce the size of directory-based structures. Using a capacity to track only 40% of all the blocks allocated in the private caches, this coherence protocol is able to achieve better performance than an over-provisioned sparse-directory with a capacity to track 160% of the blocks kept in private caches. The complementarity of both structures enables the coherence controller to change dynamically the way the storage available is dedicated according to the data-sharing properties of the application. Thus, applications with high-sharing degree will need more directory space while low-sharing degree patterns will need more private block-presence space to include more information. With only 5% of the private cache entries tracked, the average performance degradation is less than 8% compared to a 160% over-provisioned sparse-directory.

Cryptanalysis and Improvement in User Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for Wireless Sensor Network

Turkanovic et al. (Ad Hoc Netw 20:96---112, 2014) proposed a user authentication and key agreement scheme based on the notion of the `internet of things' for wireless sensor network. Authors claimed that their scheme is safe against various attacks. We found that this scheme fails against session key recovery attack. If an attacker has stolen the smartcard, he can easily obtain the session key generated between user and sensor node. In this paper, we shows that the attacker is able to compute the secret parameter $$ K_{{GW - U_{i}}} $$KGW-Ui, which is the used by a gateway during communication with others. Now the attacker can modify the first message that was send by the user to the sensor node. Finally, he breaks the complete system. We also provide few other insecurities and vulnerability to many attacks like offline password guessing attack, replay attack and impersonate attack etc. To remedy this, an enhanced scheme is also proposed to remove the flaws of the Turkanovic et al. scheme. The result and performance analysis of our proposed scheme shows that the new enhanced scheme provides high security with low computation, communication and storage overhead.

Template attack on SPA and FA resistant implementation of Montgomery ladder

Hardware implementations of the well-known Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm have been shown to be vulnerable to power and fault analysis (FA) attacks. To implement protected designs of RSA-Chinese remainder theorem in embedded devices, like smart cards or RFIDs, the one needs to find solutions which require less computations as well as incurs low storage overheads. One such efficient scheme was proposed by Joye et al. in CHES'02 and it was claimed to be secure against both simple power analysis (SPA) and FA attacks. In this study, the authors demonstrate a template attack (TA) against Joye's countermeasure and show that the scheme can be broken with a low number of power traces. In addition, the authors report the experimental results of the proposed attack against an implementation of Joye's scheme on a Xilinx Microblaze soft-core processor of SASEBO-W standard side-channel analysis board. The authors used least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) based binary classifiers to analyse the collected power traces. The authors also describe the potential threat posed by cache timing attacks on Joye's ladder in presence of a concurrently running spy process and outline a probable countermeasure to the posed attacks.

Design of a new CP‐ABE with constant‐size secret keys for lightweight devices using elliptic curve cryptography

AbstractThe energy cost of public‐key cryptography is a vital component of modern secure communications. It inhibits the widespread adoption within the ultra‐low energy regimes (for example, implantable medical devices and Radio Frequency Identification tags). In the ciphertext‐policy attribute‐based encryption (CP‐ABE), an encryptor can decide the access policy that who can decrypt the data. Thus, data will be protected from the unauthorized users. However, most of the existing CP‐ABE schemes require huge storage and computational overheads. Moreover, CP‐ABE schemes based on bilinear map loose high efficiency over the elliptic curve cryptography because of the requirement of the security parameters of larger size. These drawbacks prevent the use of ultra‐low energy devices in practice. In this paper, we aim to propose a novel expressive AND gate access structured CP‐ABE scheme with constant‐size secret keys (CSSK) with cost‐efficient solutions for encryption and decryption using elliptic curve cryptography, called the CP‐ABE‐CSSK scheme. In the proposed CP‐ABE‐CSSK, the size of the secret key is as small as 320 bits. In addition, elliptic curve cryptography is efficient and more suitable for lightweight devices as compared with bilinear pairing‐based cryptosystem. Thus, the proposed CP‐ABE‐CSSK scheme provides low computation and storage overheads with an expressive AND gate access structure as compared with related existing schemes. Consequently, our scheme becomes very practical for CP‐ABE key storage and computation cost for ultra‐low energy devices. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Conjunctive Keyword Search With Designated Tester and Timing Enabled Proxy Re-Encryption Function for E-Health Clouds

An electronic health (e-health) record system is a novel application that will bring great convenience in healthcare. The privacy and security of the sensitive personal information are the major concerns of the users, which could hinder further development and widely adoption of the systems. The searchable encryption (SE) scheme is a technology to incorporate security protection and favorable operability functions together, which can play an important role in the e-health record system. In this paper, we introduce a novel cryptographic primitive named as conjunctive keyword search with designated tester and timing enabled proxy reencryption function (Re-dtPECK), which is a kind of a time-dependent SE scheme. It could enable patients to delegate partial access rights to others to operate search functions over their records in a limited time period. The length of the time period for the delegatee to search and decrypt the delegator’s encrypted documents can be controlled. Moreover, the delegatee could be automatically deprived of the access and search authority after a specified period of effective time. It can also support the conjunctive keywords search and resist the keyword guessing attacks. By the solution, only the designated tester is able to test the existence of certain keywords. We formulate a system model and a security model for the proposed Re-dtPECK scheme to show that it is an efficient scheme proved secure in the standard model. The comparison and extensive simulations demonstrate that it has a low computation and storage overhead.

Intellectual property core protection of control data flow graphs using robust watermarking during behavioural synthesis based on user resource constraint and loop unrolling factor

A novel robust watermarking methodology for intellectual property core protection of control data flow graphs during behavioural synthesis based on user specified resource constraints and loop unrolling factor is proposed. The proposed methodology incorporates robust multi-variable signature encoding scheme for securing against typical attacks such as false claim of ownership and tampering. Some of the features of the watermarking include greater robustness, lower embedding cost, lower storage overhead, fault tolerance and faster encoding/decoding. Experimental results suggest that the watermarked solution generated by the proposed approach produces lower embedding cost than previous approaches, as well as is more secured due to its multi-variable signature encoding rules.

IRIS

In this work, we present the first scalable distributed information system, that is, a system with low storage overhead, that is provably robust against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks by a current insider. We allow a current insider to have complete knowledge about the information system and to have the power to block any ε-fraction of its servers by a DoS attack, where ε can be chosen up to a constant. The task of the system is to serve any collection of lookup requests with at most one per nonblocked server in an efficient way despite this attack. Previously, scalable solutions were only known for DoS attacks of past insiders, where a past insider only has complete knowledge about some past time point t 0 of the information system. Scheideler et al. [Awerbuch and Scheideler 2007; Baumgart et al. 2009] showed that in this case, it is possible to design an information system so that any information that was inserted or last updated after t 0 is safe against a DoS attack. But their constructions would not work at all for a current insider. The key idea behind our IRIS system is to make extensive use of coding. More precisely, we present two alternative distributed coding strategies with an at most logarithmic storage overhead that can handle up to a constant fraction of blocked servers.

Public Integrity Auditing for Dynamic Data Sharing With Multiuser Modification

In past years, the rapid development of cloud storage services makes it easier than ever for cloud users to share data with each other. To ensure users' confidence of the integrity of their shared data on cloud, a number of techniques have been proposed for data integrity auditing with focuses on various practical features, e.g., the support of dynamic data, public integrity auditing, low communication/computational audit cost, and low storage overhead. However, most of these techniques consider that only the original data owner can modify the shared data, which limits these techniques to client read-only applications. Recently, a few attempts started considering more realistic scenarios by allowing multiple cloud users to modify data with integrity assurance. Nevertheless, these attempts are still far from practical due to the tremendous computational cost on cloud users, especially when high error detection probability is required by the system. In this paper, we propose a novel integrity auditing scheme for cloud data sharing services characterized by multiuser modification, public auditing, high error detection probability, efficient user revocation as well as practical computational/communication auditing performance. Our scheme can resist user impersonation attack, which is not considered in existing techniques that support multiuser modification. Batch auditing of multiple tasks is also efficiently supported in our scheme. Extensive experiments on Amazon EC2 cloud and different client devices (contemporary and mobile devices) show that our design allows the client to audit the integrity of a shared file with a constant computational cost of 340 ms on PC (4.6 s on mobile device) and a bounded communication cost of 77 kB for 99% error detection probability with data corruption rate of 1%.

Improving reliability of erasure codes‐based storage paradigm under correlated failures for wireless sensor networks

SummaryIn distributed sensor networks, ensuring data availability and reliability in the presence of node failures and malicious attacks is an important requirement. Traditionally, redundant schemes such as erasure codes and network coding are used to improve storage efficiency. However, prior works do not consider the scenario that node failures might cut the network into multiple components and result in unsuccessful data reconstruction. To address this problem, we first devise a data segment distribution scheme that enables randomly connected component of remaining network to have enough data symbols to recreate the initial data. Because the optimal symbol distribution is Nondeterministic Polynomial (NP)‐complete problem, we further propose an approximation solution to solve it for arbitrary network model. Second, an efficient data recovery scheme with integrity check is proposed to reconstruct the initial data and repair the data saved on the disabled nodes in case of Byzantine failures. Compared with the previous approaches, the proposed scheme benefits from low data loss and storage overhead, which is confirmed by evaluations. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Landmark Classification With Hierarchical Multi-Modal Exemplar Feature

Landmark image classification attracts increasing research attention due to its great importance in real applications, ranging from travel guide recommendation to 3-D modelling and visualization of geolocation. While large amount of efforts have been invested, it still remains unsolved by academia and industry. One of the key reasons is the large intra-class variance rooted from the diverse visual appearance of landmark images. Distinguished from most existing methods based on scalable image search, we approach the problem from a new perspective and model landmark classification as multi-modal categorization , which enjoys advantages of low storage overhead and high classification efficiency. Toward this goal, a novel and effective feature representation, called hierarchical multi-modal exemplar (HMME) feature, is proposed to characterize landmark images. In order to compute HMME, training images are first partitioned into the regions with hierarchical grids to generate candidate images and regions. Then, at the stage of exemplar selection, hierarchical discriminative exemplars in multiple modalities are discovered automatically via iterative boosting and latent region label mining. Finally, HMME is generated via a region-based locality-constrained linear coding (RLLC), which effectively encodes semantics of the discovered exemplars into HMME. Meanwhile, dimension reduction is applied to reduce redundant information by projecting the raw HMME into lower-dimensional space. The final HMME enjoys advantages of discriminative and linearly separable. Experimental study has been carried out on real world landmark datasets, and the results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach over several state-of-the-art techniques.

Privacy-Preserving and Truthful Detection of Packet Dropping Attacks in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Link error and malicious packet dropping are two sources for packet losses in multi-hop wireless ad hoc network. In this paper, while observing a sequence of packet losses in the network, we are interested in determining whether the losses are caused by link errors only, or by the combined effect of link errors and malicious drop. We are especially interested in the insider-attack case, whereby malicious nodes that are part of the route exploit their knowledge of the communication context to selectively drop a small amount of packets critical to the network performance. Because the packet dropping rate in this case is comparable to the channel error rate, conventional algorithms that are based on detecting the packet loss rate cannot achieve satisfactory detection accuracy. To improve the detection accuracy, we propose to exploit the correlations between lost packets. Furthermore, to ensure truthful calculation of these correlations, we develop a homomorphic linear authenticator (HLA) based public auditing architecture that allows the detector to verify the truthfulness of the packet loss information reported by nodes. This construction is privacy preserving, collusion proof, and incurs low communication and storage overheads. To reduce the computation overhead of the baseline scheme, a packet-block-based mechanism is also proposed, which allows one to trade detection accuracy for lower computation complexity. Through extensive simulations, we verify that the proposed mechanisms achieve significantly better detection accuracy than conventional methods such as a maximum-likelihood based detection.

An Efficient Two-Dimension BIST Compression Approach

In this paper a two-dimension BIST compression scheme is presented; the proposed scheme is utilized in order to drive down the number of deterministic vectors to achieve complete fault coverage in BIST applications. By introducing shifting compression and input reduction, vertical and horizontal compression are realized respectively to achieve two-dimension BIST compression. Experimental results show that the BIST shifting compression based on input reduction can achieve great compression rate as much as 99%. Comparisons with previously competitive presented schemes indicate that the proposed scheme provide an efficient BIST compression approach with lower storage overhead.

Modeling Opportunistic Social Networks with Decayed Aggregation Graph

The emerging mobile applications including contact-based forwarding and online worm containment have put a heavy burden on opportunistic social networks (OSNs), the first goal is to develop an effective model that can reveal the hidden, important social features underlying the OSNs. This problem is especially challenging because of the time-varying network topology. Traditional time expanded graph caches each snapshot of networks, resulting in low computation efficiency and high storage overhead. By aggregating past contact events between two nodes to a simple boolean indicator, the binary graph model can alleviate this issue. However, it only provides a coarse-grained level of identifying the relationship between nodes. It neglects the differences in contact events. Intuitively, recent contact events are generally more important than old ones, and in computing an aggregation, we should assign bigger weights to them. In addition, since each contact has its own duration, we should take this factor into account as well. Motivated by these observations, we propose DAG, a decayed aggregation graph for modeling OSNs at a fine-grained level. By implementing DAG in different real scenarios, we show that DAG is efficient in characterizing the relationship between nodes and in improving the performance of mobile applications. We simultaneously prove that DAG achieves approximate space complexity as the binary graph.

Retention Benefit Based Intelligent Cache Replacement

The performance loss resulting from different cache misses is variable in modern systems for two reasons: 1) memory access latency is not uniform, and 2) the latency toleration ability of processor cores varies across different misses. Compared with parallel misses and store misses, isolated fetch and load misses are more costly. The variation of cache miss penalty suggests that the cache replacement policy should take it into account. To that end, first, we propose the notion of retention benefit. Retention benefits can evaluate not only the increment of processor stall cycles on cache misses, but also the reduction of processor stall cycles due to cache hits. Then, we propose Retention Benefit Based Replacement (RBR) which aims to maximize the aggregate retention benefits of blocks reserved in the cache. RBR keeps track of the total retention benefit for each block in the cache, and it preferentially evicts the block with the minimum total retention benefit on replacement. The evaluation shows that RBR can improve cache performance significantly in both single-core and multi-core environment while requiring a low storage overhead. It also outperforms other state-of-the-art techniques.

A "hitchhiker's" guide to fast and efficient data reconstruction in erasure-coded data centers

Erasure codes such as Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are being extensively deployed in data centers since they offer significantly higher reliability than data replication methods at much lower storage overheads. These codes however mandate much higher resources with respect to network bandwidth and disk IO during reconstruction of data that is missing or otherwise unavailable. Existing solutions to this problem either demand additional storage space or severely limit the choice of the system parameters. In this paper, we present "Hitchhiker", a new erasure-coded storage system that reduces both network traffic and disk IO by around 25% to 45% during reconstruction of missing or otherwise unavailable data, with no additional storage, the same fault tolerance, and arbitrary flexibility in the choice of parameters, as compared to RS-based systems. Hitchhiker 'rides' on top of RS codes, and is based on novel encoding and decoding techniques that will be presented in this paper. We have implemented Hitchhiker in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). When evaluating various metrics on the data-warehouse cluster in production at Facebook with real-time traffic and workloads, during reconstruction, we observe a 36% reduction in the computation time and a 32% reduction in the data read time, in addition to the 35% reduction in network traffic and disk IO. Hitchhiker can thus reduce the latency of degraded reads and perform faster recovery from failed or decommissioned machines.