Notion Of Security Research Articles

Embodied experiences of (in)security and crime perceptions among undergraduate women students in Tucson, Arizona

Drawing from trauma-informed interviews with women undergraduate students, this article examines the ripple effects of sexual violence on student (in)security and mobility. Campus sexual violence is exceedingly common, with 1 in 5 women experiencing sexual assault during college. Young women and women of color also experience the highest rates of sexual harassment and fear of sexual violence. Yet, it is still not well understood how such experiences collectively impact women students’ notions of security, spatial mobility, and independence. Focusing on a small, diverse set of women undergraduate students at the University of Arizona in the Southwest U.S., I analyze how perceptions of sexual violence impact behavior and safety strategies. I describe the variety of prevention and safety methods women undergraduates utilize and how they shoulder the burden of safety and care in lieu of university action. Findings suggest that participants often built their spatial behavior around avoiding ‘danger spots’ or places they feared, regardless of whether those were places they had ever experienced harassment or violence. Some students of color also found themselves at the crossroads of experiencing sexual harassment and racial microaggressions and expressed an emotional drain of straddling multiple cultural worlds. Findings further complicate notions that women’s fear of public space is ‘irrational’. This article builds on and extends work in geographies of fear to demonstrate how women students’ safety behavior in the U.S. is informed by harassment, perceived crime, and secondary trauma.

Threat Conceptions in Global Security Discourse: Analyzing the Speech Records of the United Nations Security Council, 1990–2019

Abstract Since the end of the Cold War, the notion of global security, and presumed threats to it, has undergone considerable expansion and diversification. This process has been led by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), where active deliberations concerning “threat(s) to the peace” have taken place among major international actors. Despite a sizable accumulation of scholarly arguments, however, the defining features of the structure and dynamics of the post-Cold War security discourse remain ambiguous. To address these ambiguities, this study investigates the entire body of Council deliberations over the past three decades. Based on an original dataset consisting of policy statements delivered at the UNSC, the study employs quantitative text analysis tools, including word embedding, to examine how council members have conceived the notion of security threat in terms of the various issues and entities discussed. It shows the security discourse at the UNSC to be highly stratified and reveals the persistent and pervasive influence of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which constitute the limited common grounds shared by the Council’s permanent members. These findings caution against the unconstrained use of certain theoretical constructs widely employed in other works, most notably, “securitization” and “interpretative community.”

HyperATL*: A Logic for Hyperproperties in Multi-Agent Systems

Hyperproperties are system properties that relate multiple computation paths in a system and are commonly used to, e.g., define information-flow policies. In this paper, we study a novel class of hyperproperties that allow reasoning about strategic abilities in multi-agent systems. We introduce HyperATL*, an extension of computation tree logic with path variables and strategy quantifiers. Our logic supports quantification over paths in a system - as is possible in hyperlogics such as HyperCTL* - but resolves the paths based on the strategic choices of a coalition of agents. This allows us to capture many previously studied (strategic) security notions in a unifying hyperlogic. Moreover, we show that HyperATL* is particularly useful for specifying asynchronous hyperproperties, i.e., hyperproperties where the execution speed on the different computation paths depends on the choices of a scheduler. We show that finite-state model checking of HyperATL* is decidable and present a model checking algorithm based on alternating automata. We establish that our algorithm is asymptotically optimal by proving matching lower bounds. We have implemented a prototype model checker for a fragment of HyperATL* that can check various security properties in small finite-state systems.

Attribute-Based Storage Supporting Secure Deduplication of Encrypted Data in Cloud

Abstract: Attribute-based encryption (ABE) has been widely used in cloud computing where a data provider outsources his/her encrypted data to a cloud service provider, and can share the data with users possessing specific credentials (or attributes). However, the standard ABE system does not support secure deduplication, which is crucial for eliminating duplicate copies of identical data in order to save storage space and network bandwidth. In this paper, we present an attribute-based storage system with secure deduplication in a hybrid cloud setting, where a private cloud is responsible for duplicate detection and a public cloud manages the storage. Compared with the prior data deduplication systems, our system has two advantages. First, it can be used to confidentially share data with users by specifying access policies rather than sharing decryption keys. Second, it achieves the standard notion of semantic security for data confidentiality while existing systems only achieve it by defining a weaker security notion. In addition, we put forth a methodology to modify a ciphertext over one access policy into ciphertexts of the same plaintext but under other access policies without revealing the underlying plaintext.

Abuse-resistant deniable encryption

Deniable encryption (DE) allows private communication over an insecure channel even under the coercion. That is, after an adversary forces communication participants to reveal their secret keys and randomness used during the communication, the message confidentiality can still be preserved. Since its introduction, a large body of studies have been made to improve the DE system in terms of efficiency, security definition and functionality, which is the focus of this paper. However, as far as we know, none of existing DE systems considers the abuse of deniability caused by malicious users, which is a crucial feature from the view of practical applications of DE. For instance, a malicious user (e.g., an employee who holds some sensitive documents and intends to sell these confidential contents for obtaining financial gain) can utilize a DE system to transmit the confidential content without the risk of being caught, which is extremely dangerous to the interests and security of his/her organization. In this paper, to mitigate this threat, we formally define the syntax and security notions of abuse-resistant deniable encryption, which restricts what users can deny. Then, we put forward a concrete construction of abuse-resistant DE scheme, and prove its security under the assumptions of indistinguishability obfuscation and one-way function. Compared with other related work, the proposed construction has advantages in terms of functionality and ciphertext rate simultaneously.

Non-Traditional Security Threats in 21st Century and its Socio-Political Impacts on Pakistan.

National Security is a concept that is intricately linked to a state’s social and political structures. It is a broad concept that is aimed at enhancing a state’s power and influence. One of the most crucial aspects of national security is the protection of a nation’s homeland, including its territories. A state’s ability to safeguard its national interests, economic concerns and maintain its international reputation is also critical in ensuring national security. This notion of security is not limited to external threats but also includes internal challenges that could threaten the state’s survival. In contrast, human security is centred on the safety and protection of individuals rather than the state’s territory. It emphasizes the safety and well-being of people over national interests. Human security is achieved through development and other non-military means, as opposed to the use of arms. The goal of this strategy is to protect everyone's security in all settings and aspects of their lives, including their residences, places of employment, streets, societies, and environments.

On Securing Cryptographic ICs against Scan-based Attacks: A Hamming Weight Distribution Perspective

Scan chain-based Design for Testability is the industry standard in use for testing manufacturing defects in the semiconductor industry to ensure the structural and functional correctness of chips. Fault coverage is significantly enhanced due to the higher observability and controllability of the internal latches. These ensuing benefits to testing, if misused, expose vulnerabilities that can be detrimental to the security aspects, especially in the context of crypto-chips that contain a secret key. Hence, it remains of paramount importance for a chip designer to secure crypto-chips against various scan attacks. A countermeasure is proposed in this article that preserves the secrecy of an embedded key in a cryptographic integrated circuit running an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) implementation. A novel design involving a hardware unit is illustrated that circumvents differential scan attacks by essentially performing bit flips deterministically, using a pre-computed mask value. This helps secure the chip while retaining full testability. The controller logic directly depends on a mask determination algorithm that can defend against any scan attack with 𝒪 theoretical complexity. Security analysis of our proposed defense procedure is performed in the framework of Discrete Event Systems (DES). The sequential scan circuit of an AES cryptosystem is modeled as a DES using Finite State Automata. A security notion, Opacity , is used to quantify and formally verify the security aspects of our controlled system, which shows that the entropy of the secret key is preserved. A case study is performed that shows to mitigate state-of-the-art differential scan attacks successfully at a nominal extra overhead of 1.78%.

Threshold Implementations in Software: Micro-architectural Leakages in Algorithms

This paper provides necessary properties to algorithmically secure firstorder maskings in scalar micro-architectures. The security notions of threshold implementations are adapted following micro-processor leakage effects which are known to the literature. The resulting notions, which are based on the placement of shares, are applied to a two-share randomness-free PRESENT cipher and Keccak-f. The assembly implementations are put on a RISC-V and an ARM Cortex-M4 core. All designs are validated in the glitch and transition extended probing model and their implementations via practical lab analysis.

Brazil in MINUSTAH: exporting a domestic understanding of civil-military relations to a UN peace operation

ABSTRACT Brazil led the military contingent of MINUSTAH during the 13 years of the mission and was also the largest contributor with troops for this mission. This paper argues that what has been described as the ‘Brazilian way’ of civil-military relations in that peacekeeping mission is illustrative of the Brazilian association between notions of security and development at home. The mandate for MINUSTAH is actually representative of Brazilian efforts to promote new paradigms in UN peacekeeping operations going beyond short missions in order to address the roots of the target country’s issues and ensure long-term progress. Nevertheless, if such discourse does hold merit in terms of the deeper approach to peacekeeping it encourages, this approach involves military actors beyond the security realm, into development activities, as visible during MINUSTAH. This paper describes the implications of uncoordinated military-led humanitarian initiatives and demonstrates that this security-development nexus, as it exists currently in Brazil and in the way it is exported by Brazil into peacekeeping operations like MINUSTAH, jeopardises the country’s capacity to build sustainable civilian institutions and mechanisms for longer-term recovery and development.

The security state in Europe: regulatory or positive?

ABSTRACT We challenge Kruck and Weiss’ argument about the regulatory security state on two counts. First, we contest the notion that the regulatory state is a viable alternative to the positive security state. While regulation and epistemic authority are increasingly important means of security provision, they remain critically dependent power resources and political authority that only the positive state provides. The regulatory security state is premised on the positive state and unviable without it. Second, the rise of the regulatory security state over the past three decades reflects highly specific historical conditions rather than a general trend. These conditions include unusually low geopolitical tensions in Europe and the strong regulatory bias of EU integration. Concepts matter: The wider the notion of security, the more relevant the regulatory security state becomes. It is an important reality but the war in Ukraine reminds us of the enduring centrality of the positive state.

Nonce‐misuse resilience of Romulus‐N and GIFT‐COFB

AbstractNonce‐misuse resilience (NMRL) security of Romulus‐N and GIFT‐COFB is analysed, the two finalists of NIST Lightweight Cryptography project for standardising lightweight authenticated encryption. NMRL, introduced by Ashur et al. at CRYPTO 2017, is a relaxed security notion from a stronger, nonce‐misuse resistance notion. The authors have proved that Romulus‐N and GIFT‐ COFB have nonce‐misuse resilience. For Romulus‐N, the perfect privacy (NMRL‐PRIV) and n/2‐bit authenticity (NMRL‐AUTH) with graceful degradation with respect to nonce repetition are showed. For GIFT‐COFB, n/4‐bit security for both NMRL‐PRIV and NMRL‐AUTH notions is showed.

Japan's Advocacy for Human Security in Global Politics: Case Study of Japan's Grant Assistance for Grass-Roots Human Security Projects (GGP) in the State of Sabah, Malaysia, 2000-2021.

After World War II, Japan became a major recipient of foreign aid from the USA. As Japan's economy improved in the 1960s, it played a significant role as a global aid donor in world politics through its Official Development Assistance (ODA). This commitment continued into the 1990s when Japan, as one of the leading proponents of the concept of human security, began providing humanitarian aid to more countries across the globe. To better understand the notion of human security in international politics, this paper examines Japan's endorsement of the concept in its foreign policy strategy. This paper provides an overview and critical assessment of Japan's Grant Assistance for Grass-Roots Human Security Projects (GGP) in the state of Sabah in East Malaysia from 2000 to 2021. This paper argues that different contexts and circumstances in the state of Sabah require further study, especially for understanding Japan's focus and concern in the area of basic human security needs, as enshrined in the GGP philosophy. Despite Japan's GGP objective as part of its foreign policy to promote human development, the execution of its foreign aid in Sabah does have issues. This paper concludes that the implementation of Japan's GGP necessitates greater inclusion, particularly for other vulnerable groups and underdeveloped areas in Sabah. Despite Japan's GGP objective as part of its foreign policy to promote human development, the execution of its foreign aid in Sabah does have issues. This paper concludes that the implementation of Japan's GGP necessitates greater inclusion, particularly for other vulnerable groups and underdeveloped areas in Sabah.

The final nail in the coffin of statistically-secure obfuscator

We present an elementary proof of a theorem of Goldwasser and Rothblum [10,11] that the existence of a perfect (or even “slightly” imperfect) statistically-secure obfuscator implies a collapse of the polynomial hierarchy. In fact, our proof gives rise to a more general, quantified version of the theorem exhibiting an (impossible) tradeoff between the correctness and the security of the obfuscator. We also extend the result to a relaxed notion of security.

European Integration in the Field of Regional Security Using the Example of NORDEFCO

The subject of the study is the integration processes of regional security in the European space, based on the research papers of B. Buzan and O. Weaver. The paper looks at different alliances of European countries with a view to achieving cooperation on point areas common to a particular region. The chosen topic is explored through the prism of the Copenhagen School of Security theories, especially those of the regional security complex and securitisation. One of the trends in contemporary international relations is regionalisation in the field of international security. An understanding of this process will therefore make it possible to anticipate the development of state policy towards intergovernmental organisations. The focus of the scholarly article is on analysing the functioning of the Nordic Defence Cooperation (NORDEFCO), as the association of the Nordic countries serves as a model for effective progressive integration in the Nordic region. The progress of the organisation is to broaden the notion of security for political action. It now includes threats and challenges not only of a military defence nature, but also of an economic, environmental, legal, social and ethno-political nature. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the identification and analysis of Nordic Defence Cooperation (NORDEFCO) in the context of a regional security subcomplex, namely in identifying further prospects for this integration group in enhancing the defence capabilities of its member states. NORDEFCO acted as a structural prototype for many European defence alliances. However, Nordic defence cooperation has not become an alternative to NATO in Northern Europe, as evidenced by Sweden and Finland's application to join the North Atlantic Alliance in 2022. Consequently, the Nordic states have not finally achieved autonomy in establishing their own security system in the region.

Whose security is it? Elitism and the global approach to maritime security in Africa

Africa’s marine environment and resources that lie beneath it are central to the continent’s sustainable development and actualising the ambitions set out by the African Union in its Agenda 2063, where the oceans are described as the frontier of Africa’s development. The continent’s maritime domain and resources are also attractive to foreign partners relying on its oceans to enhance their economic development and geostrategic interests. Serving the interests of all parties, especially the 38 coastal states and the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and land-linked countries on the continent that benefit from the maritime sector, comes with challenges, some of which manifest as threats to the sustainable resource extraction and safety of those that use the maritime domain. We explored the literature, policy documents and maritime security reports database, together with our experiences as African maritime governance and security experts, to critically examine maritime security in Africa and unravel how extra-regional actors have securitised maritime threats. We show how the selective framing of what constitutes threats and associated resourcing of responses to counter them, often dictated by foreign interests, is an elite project that undermines a holistic notion of maritime security that would benefit the African people.

HMACCE: Establishing Authenticated and Confidential Channel From Historical Data for Industrial Internet of Things

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a new paradigm for building intelligent industrial control systems, and how to establish a secure channel in IIoT for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is a critical problem because the devices in IIoT suffer from various attacks and may leak confidential information. Traditional authenticated and confidential channel establishment (ACCE) protocols neither apply for resource-constrained IIoT devices nor satisfy leakage resilience. In this paper, we introduce a new security notion: historical data based multi-factor ACCE (HMACCE) to address this issue and propose two HMACCE protocols. Our HMACCE protocols use three authentication factors, i.e., a symmetric secret key, historical data, and a set of secret tags associated with the historical data, to establish a secure communication channel between the client and the server. The key idea is to use the secret key managed by an IIoT edge device to quickly verify the relationship between the historical data and its associated tags stored on the server. Our HMACCE has the following remarkable features. First, it is lightweight and tailored for resource-constrained IIoT devices. Second, it is bounded historical tag leakage resilience, which means that if a small portion of the secret tags is leaked to an adversary, it will not affect its security with an overwhelming probability. Moreover, as a security enhancement service, our HMACCE can be easily integrated with legacy IIoT devices by running simple authenticated key exchange protocols.

Robust and Reusable Fuzzy Extractors from Non-Uniform Learning with燛rrors Problem

A fuzzy extractor can extract an almost uniform random string from a noisy source with enough entropy such as biometric data. To reproduce an identical key from repeated readings of biometric data, the fuzzy extractor generates a helper data and a random string from biometric data and uses the helper data to reproduce the random string from the second reading. In 2013, Fuller et al. proposed a computational fuzzy extractor based on the learning with errors problem. Their construction, however, can tolerate a sub-linear fraction of errors and has an inefficient decoding algorithm, which causes the reproducing time to increase significantly. In 2016, Canetti et al. proposed a fuzzy extractor with inputs from low-entropy distributions based on a strong primitive, which is called digital locker. However, their construction necessitates an excessive amount of storage space for the helper data, which is stored in authentication server. Based on these observations, we propose a new efficient computational fuzzy extractor with small size of helper data. Our scheme supports reusability and robustness, which are security notions that must be satisfied in order to use a fuzzy extractor as a secure authentication method in real life. Also, it conceals no information about the biometric data and thanks to the new decoding algorithm can tolerate linear errors. Based on the non-uniform learning with errors problem, we present a formal security proof for the proposed fuzzy extractor. Furthermore, we analyze the performance of our fuzzy extractor scheme and provide parameter sets that meet the security requirements. As a result of our implementation and analysis, we show that our scheme outperforms previous fuzzy extractor schemes in terms of the efficiency of the generation and reproduction algorithms, as well as the size of helper data.

Operationalizing Human Security: What Role for the Responsibility to Protect?

The concept of human security, whose origin could be traced back to the 1994 Human Development Report published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) represents an ambitious attempt to broaden the meaning of security and, perhaps most importantly, challenge the state-centric notion of national security. A resolution (A/RES/66/290) adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in September 2012 has, for the first time in UN history, formally recognized human security as an approach to ‘assist Member States in identifying and addressing widespread and cross-cutting challenges to the survival, livelihood and dignity of their people’. While the discussion of the human security concept continued within the UN, the advocacy of key UN member states for human security had been shifted to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Considering the fact that the potential role of the R2P to promote and operationalize human security has not been adequately explored, this article seeks to understand the positive potential role that R2P can play in operationalizing human security by exploring the relationship between the two. Acknowledging the efforts of Lloyd Axworthy, the former Canadian foreign minister, in situating ‘human security in the R2P era’, this article argues that R2P plays an important role in clarifying the scope and sharpening the focus of human security. This, therefore, can help strengthen the implementation of the human security concept.

Security analysis of public key encryption with filtered equality test

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>Public key encryption with equality test can provide a very simple add-on in which any one can directly perform testing over a pair of ciphertexts to check whether the underlying messages are identical or not without decryption. To restrict the such test power for different scenarios, that of delegated equality test is introduced to allow only the authenticated party to perform the test. In this paper, we focus on the security of public key encryption with filtered equality test (PKE-FET). The delegation to the party is only of a message set for designated testers in PKE-FET, which implies it cannot test any underlying message out of the set. We aim for investigating distinct security notions (static and adaptive security) with specific properties of the potential adversaries. Finally, we show the relationship between the security and complexity, and show the scheme of Huang et al. can reach adaptive security.</p>

Dynamic Volume-Hiding Encrypted Multi-Maps with Applications to Searchable Encryption

We study encrypted storage schemes where a client outsources data to an untrusted third-party server (such as a cloud storage provider) while maintaining the ability to privately query and dynamically update the data. We focus on encrypted multi-maps (EMMs), a structured encryption (STE) scheme that stores pairs of label and value tuples. EMMs allow queries on labels and return the associated value tuple. As responses are variable-length, EMMs are subject to volume leakage attacks introduced by Kellaris et al. [CCS'16]. To prevent these attacks, volume-hiding EMMs were introduced by Kamara and Moataz [Eurocrypt'19] that hide the label volumes (i.e., the value tuple lengths). As our main contribution, we present the first fully dynamic volume-hiding EMMs that are both asymptotically and concretely efficient. Furthermore, they are simultaneously forward and backward private which are the de-facto standard security notions for dynamic STE schemes. Additionally, we implement our schemes to showcase their concrete efficiency. Our experimental evaluations show that our constructions are able to add dynamicity with minimal to no additional cost compared to the prior best static volume-hiding schemes of Patel et al. [CCS'19].