Security Properties Research Articles

Register transfer level hardware design information flow modeling and security verification method

Information flow analysis can effectively model the security behavior and security properties of hardware design. However, the existing gate level information flow analysis methods cannot deal with large-scale designs due to computing power and verification effectiveness, and the register transfer level (RTL) information flow analysis methods require formal languages to rewrite hardware designs. This paper proposes a RTL hardware design information flow modeling and security verification method. Based on the RTL functional model, this method develops an information flow tracking logical model to model security behavior and security properties of RTL hardware designs from the perspective of information flow. This method can be integrated into EDA flows and uses EDA testing and verification tools to capture security property violations and detect security vulnerabilities based on non-interference security policy. The results on experiments with Trust-Hub hardware Trojan benchmarks show that the proposed method can effectively detect hardware Trojans.

Adaptor signature based on randomized EdDSA in blockchain

Adaptor signature, a new primitive that alleviates the scalability issue of blockchain to some extent, has been widely adopted in the off-chain payment channel and atomic swap. As an extension of standard digital signature, adaptor signature can bind the release of a complete digital signature with the exchange of a secret value. Existing constructions of adaptor signatures are mainly based on Schnorr or ECDSA signature algorithms, which suffer low signing efficiency and long signature length. In this paper, to address these issues, we propose a new construction of adaptor signature using randomized EdDSA, which has Schnorr-like structure with higher signing efficiency and shorter signature length. We prove the required security properties, including unforgeability, witness extractability and pre-signature adaptability, of the new adaptor signature scheme in the random oracle model. We conduct a comparative analysis with an ECDSA-based adaptor signature scheme to demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of our new proposal.

Platform and customer characteristics in purchasing from a recommerce platform: an empirical investigation of customer perceptions

ABSTRACT Although evidence supports the prevalence of collaborative and sustainable consumption online, limited research has examined this phenomenon. This study applied the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) framework to develop a model of recommerce customer behaviour. The model examines the effects of platform attributes of convenience, fairness, and security and customer characteristics of innovation and norms on attitudes toward sustainability and toward the recommerce platform. In turn, the association between customer attitude and repurchase intention is investigated. A partial least squares structural equation model is employed to evaluate the research model using survey questionnaire data. The results show that platform characteristics of fairness and convenience are key determinants of a positive attitude toward the recommerce platform, whereas customer personal norms are important precursors of attitude toward sustainable consumption. The effects of the two types of attitude on repurchase intention are identified. Furthermore, usage frequency influences the relationship between the recommerce experience and its outcome. Considering both platform and customer characteristics produces novel insights that elucidate the determinants of sustainable consumption behaviour.

Security of the Secp256k1 Elliptic Curve used in the Bitcoin Blockchain

The article delves into the intricate characteristics and security properties of the secp256k1 elliptic curve used for the generation of addresses in the Bitcoin blockchain. The Bitcoin blockchain is a decentralized digital ledger that records all transactions made with Bitcoin cryptocurrency. In this work, the secp256k1 elliptic curve and its parameters and the method of generating private and public keys using random numbers are described. While the private key allows for the signing of transactions to spend Bitcoin, the corresponding public key and address enable others to verify transactions and send funds to that specific address on the blockchain, ensuring security, authenticity, and privacy in the decentralized network. The attacks on the use of secp256k1 for generating the bitcoin addresses like the Brute force attack, twist attack, fault attacks, and side channel attacks in the implementation of the elliptic curve are discussed. By maintaining the security and integrity of secp256k1, we can ensure that cryptographic operations, such as digital signatures and key exchanges, remain uncompromised. If the curve's security were compromised, malicious users could potentially derive private keys from public keys, leading to unauthorized transactions, double-spending, or other malicious activities. The security of implementation can be enhanced by ensuring cryptographic libraries and software implementations that utilize secp256k1 undergo thorough testing and validation to ensure correct and secure operations. The important attacks on blockchain technology like the 51% attack, Sybil attack, Double Spending attack, and Smart Contract vulnerabilities are discussed. Through a comprehensive exploration, readers will gain insights into why this particular elliptic curve was chosen for use in Bitcoin's cryptographic protocols, highlighting its role in ensuring the robustness and integrity of the blockchain ecosystem.

Fake Indian Currency Detection

The proliferation of counterfeit currency poses a significant threat to both individuals and the national economy. While existing fake currency detection tools are primarily accessible to banks and large enterprises, everyday people and small businesses remain susceptible. Thus, this project aims to delve into the security features of Indian currency and develop a software solution leveraging advanced image processing and computer vision techniques to detect and neutralize counterfeit notes. Counterfeiting currency poses a genuine menace to both the populace's well-being and the nation's economic stability. Although counterfeit currency detection tools exist, their accessibility is typically confined to banking institutions and corporate entities, leaving ordinary citizens and small enterprises susceptible to fraud. Thus, this project endeavours to examine the diverse security attributes of Indian currency and subsequently craft a software-driven apparatus capable of discerning and nullifying counterfeit Indian currency through sophisticated image processing and computer vision methodologies. Notably, this currency authentication system will be meticulously crafted using the Python programming language within the Jupyter Notebook framework.

Light-HIDRA: Scalable and decentralized resource orchestration in Fog-IoT environments

With the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems, traditional resource orchestration mechanisms, executed on fog devices, encounter significant scalability, reliability and security challenges. To tackle these challenges, recent decentralized algorithms in Fog-IoT use Distributed Ledger Technologies to orchestrate resources and payments between peers. However, while distributed ledgers provide many desirable properties, their consensus mechanism introduces a performance bottleneck. This paper introduces Light-HIDRA, a consensus-less and decentralized resource orchestration system for Fog-IoT environments. At its core, Light-HIDRA uses Byzantine Reliable Broadcast (BRB) to coordinate actions without centralized control, therefore drastically reducing communication overhead and latency compared to consensus-based solutions. Light-HIDRA coordinates the scheduling and execution of workloads, and securely manages the payments that peers receive for dedicating resources to workloads. Light-HIDRA further increases performance and reduces overhead by grouping peers into distinct domains. We conduct an in-depth analysis of the protocol’s security properties, investigating its efficiency and robustness in diverse situations. We evaluate the performance of Light-HIDRA, highlighting its performance over HIDRA, a state-of-the-art baseline that uses smart contracts. Our experiments demonstrate that Light-HIDRA reduces the bandwidth usage by up to 57x, the latency of workload offloading by up to 142x, and shows superior throughput compared to HIDRA.

Antimicrobial Effect of Lippia citriodora Extract in Combination with Gallic Acid or Octyl Gallate on Bacteria from Meat.

Chicken meat and its derivatives are easily alterable. They are a nutritionally healthy food, and their consumption has seen a remarkable increase worldwide in recent years. At the same time, consumer demand for the use of natural products to control microbial growth is increasing. In this context, the antimicrobial capacity of a commercial extract of the lemon verbena (Lippia citriodora) plant, (LCE) was tested in binary combination with gallic acid or octyl gallate against two strains of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) of meat origin: Carnobacterium divergens ATCC 35677 and Leuconostoc carnosum ATCC 49367. First, the antimicrobial potential was evaluated by the checkerboard microdilution method at the optimal growth temperature of each and at 4 °C, pH 5.7 and 6.7, in culture medium. Octyl gallate was the most effective antimicrobial against the two bacteria under all study conditions. At 4 °C, the combination of LCE with octyl gallate had a similar antimicrobial effect on the two LAB, being bactericidal at pH 6.7. In chicken breast, this effective combination was tested in normal or modified atmosphere and refrigerated (4-8 °C) for 9 days. LCE + OG in modified atmosphere reduced the different microbial groups studied, including the lactic acid bacteria as the main microorganisms responsible for the spoilage of fresh meat. Further research could pave the way for the development of novel strategies contributing to the technological stability, security, and functional properties of chicken meat.

Information-flow interfaces

AbstractContract-based design is a promising methodology for taming the complexity of developing sophisticated systems. A formal contract distinguishes between assumptions, which are constraints that the designer of a component puts on the environments in which the component can be used safely, and guarantees, which are promises that the designer asks from the team that implements the component. A theory of formal contracts can be formalized as an interface theory, which supports the composition and refinement of both assumptions and guarantees. Although there is a rich landscape of contract-based design methods that address functional and extra-functional properties, we present the first interface theory designed to ensure system-wide security properties. Our framework provides a refinement relation and a composition operation that support both incremental design and independent implementability. We develop our theory for both stateless and stateful interfaces. Additionally, we introduce information-flow contracts where assumptions and guarantees are sets of flow relations. We use these contracts to illustrate how to enrich information-flow interfaces with a semantic view. We illustrate the applicability of our framework with two examples inspired by the automotive domain.

Unifying quantum verification and error-detection: theory and tools for optimisations

With the advent of cloud-based quantum computing, it has become vital to provide strong guarantees that computations delegated by clients to quantum service providers have been executed faithfully. Secure—blind and verifiable—delegated quantum computing (SDQC) has emerged as one of the key approaches to address this challenge, yet current protocols lack at least one of the following three ingredients: composability, noise-robustness and modularity. To tackle this question, our paper lays out the fundamental structure of SDQC protocols, namely mixing two components: the computation which the client would like the server to perform and tests that are designed to detect a server’s malicious behaviour. Using this abstraction, our main technical result is a set of sufficient conditions on these components which imply the security and noise-robustness of generic SDQC protocols in the composable Cryptography framework. This is done by establishing a correspondence between these security properties and the error-detection capabilities of the test computations. Changing the types of tests and how they are mixed with the client’s computation automatically yields new SDQC protocols with different security and noise-robustness capabilities. This approach thereby provides the desired modularity as our sufficient conditions on test computations simplify the steps required to prove the security of the protocols and allows to focus on the design and optimisation of test rounds to specific situations. We showcase this by systematising the search for improved SDQC protocols for bounded-error quantum polynomial-time ( BQP ) computations. The resulting protocols do not require more hardware on the server’s side than what is necessary to blindly delegate the computation without verification, and they outperform all previously known results.

MS-LW-TI: Primitive-Based First-Order Threshold Implementation for 4 × 4 S-boxes

Threshold implementation (TI) is a lightweight countermeasure against side-channel attacks when glitches happen. As to masking schemes, an S-box is the key part to protection. In this paper, we propose a general first-order lightweight TI scheme for 4 × 4 S-boxes and name it as MiniSat-lightweight-threshold implementation (MS-LW-TI). First, we use MiniSat to optimally decompose an S-box into the least number of three different logic gate operations, AND, OR, and XOR. Among these operations, we define two primitives and the extension of two primitives for TI design. Furthermore, we prove that the primitives and their extensions strictly comply with the security properties. Finally, we implement MS-LW-TI on Xilinx Spartan-6 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to show that the S-boxes of PRESENT, GIFT, and PICCOLO consume only 17, 15, and 13 look-up-tables (LUTs), 16, 9, and 16 flip-flops (FFs), 6, 5, and 6 slices, respectively. Compared with the existing lightweight TI design, our TI for PRESENT S-box has a 22%, 38%, and 25% reduction of LUTs, FFs, and slices to the design by Shahmirzadi and Moradi at IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (TCHES) 2021, and our TI for GIFT S-box has a 6%, 25%, and 28% reduction of LUTs, FFs, and slices to the design by Jati et al., which is the smallest.

Secure renting by living collectively? A relational exploration of home and homemaking in rental housing cooperatives

In many countries, rental housing is associated with insecure occupant rights and limited control for residents and homeownership is linked with ontological security. In the literature on homemaking, ontological security comprises a set of attributes, i.e., secure occupancy, autonomy and control, but these are often bundled, or treated jointly. In this paper we draw on the lived experiences of residents in Rental Housing Cooperatives (RHC) in Honduras and Australia, and ask how the experience of ontological security in RHC is shaped by its distinct characteristics? We argue that, if the experience of ontological security can be ‘unbundled’, wellbeing in rental housing, particularly for population groups increasingly locked out of homeownerships, can be advanced through housing policy innovation that enhances these, or specific, attributes of ontological security. Methodologically the paper draws on relational thinking, interview data (n = 15) and qualitative analysis of homemaking practices within RHC in Honduras and Australia. The paper utilises a four-quadrant qualitative assessment framework for evaluating occupants’ sense of security and autonomy/control, relative to their sense of home and simply being housed. Our results suggest that secure occupancy more fundamentally underpins a sense of home, than autonomy/control. Implications for rental policy and research are considered.

Realization of Authenticated One-Pass Key Establishment on RISC-V Micro-Controller for IoT Applications

Internet-of-things networks consist of multiple sensor devices spread over a wide area. In order to protect the data from unauthorized access and tampering, it is essential to ensure secure communication between the sensor devices and the central server. This security measure aims to guarantee authenticity, confidentiality, and data integrity. Unlike traditional computing systems, sensor node devices are often limited regarding memory and computing power. Lightweight communication protocols, such as LoRaWAN, were introduced to overcome these limitations. However, despite the lightweight feature, the protocol is vulnerable to different types of attacks. This proposal presents a highly secure key establishment protocol that combines two cryptography schemes: Elliptic Curve Qu–Vanstone and signcryption key encapsulation. The protocol provides a method to establish a secure channel that inherits the security properties of the two schemes. Also, it allows for fast rekeying with only one exchange message, significantly reducing the handshake complexity in low-bandwidth communication. In addition, the selected schemes complement each other and share the same mathematical operations in elliptic curve cryptography. Moreover, with the rise of a community-friendly platform like RISC-V, we implemented the protocol on a RISC-V system to evaluate its overheads regarding the cycle count and execution time.

Formal Analysis and Detection for ROS2 Communication Security Vulnerability

Robotic systems have been widely used in various industries, so the security of communication between robots and their components has become an issue that needs to be focused on. As a framework for developing robotic systems, the security of ROS2 (Robot Operating System 2) can directly affect the security of the upper-level robotic systems. Therefore, it is a worthwhile research topic to detect and analyze the security of ROS2. In this study, we adopted a formal approach to analyze the security of the communication mechanism of ROS2. First, we used a state transition system to model the potential vulnerabilities of ROS2 based on the ROS2 communication mechanism and the basic process of penetration testing. Secondly, we introduced a CIA model based on the established vulnerability model and used linear temporal logic to define its security properties. Then, we designed and implemented a vulnerability detection tool for ROS2 applications based on the vulnerability model and security properties. Finally, we experimentally tested some ROS2-based applications, and the results show that ROS2 has vulnerabilities without additional protection safeguards.

Trustworthy AI using Confidential Federated Learning

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

Land Tenure Policies and Property Rights Affecting Livestock Production in Bangladesh

Purpose: The aim of the study was to investigate land tenure policies and property rights affecting livestock production in Bangladesh. Methodology: This study adopted a desk methodology. A desk study research design is commonly known as secondary data collection. This is basically collecting data from existing resources preferably because of its low cost advantage as compared to a field research. Our current study looked into already published studies and reports as the data was easily accessed through online journals and libraries. Findings: The study revealed a significant influence of secure land tenure on livestock productivity, investment decisions, and sustainability. Secure property rights are consistently associated with higher levels of livestock productivity, increased investment in animal husbandry practices, and improved land management strategies among rural households. Moreover, tenure security facilitates long-term investments in livestock genetic improvement programs, leading to higher milk yields and improved household incomes among dairy farmers. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: Institutional Theory & Property Rights Theory may be used to anchor future studies on land tenure policies and property rights affecting livestock production in Bangladesh. Promote community-based natural resource management approaches that recognize customary land tenure systems. Empowering local communities to manage their grazing lands can enhance ecological sustainability, reduce conflicts, and improve livelihoods among pastoralist groups. Advocate for the legal recognition of customary land rights and indigenous knowledge systems in national land tenure policies. Acknowledging traditional tenure arrangements can strengthen tenure security, promote social equity, and enhance the resilience of livestock production systems.

A new three-factor authentication scheme using Chebyshev chaotic map for peer-to-peer Industrial Internet of Things

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is an emerging technology for smart manufacturing and productivity improvement. Due to the increasing complexity of manufacturing, devices with smart industrial sensors from several domains work together on the same job, raising serious security and privacy concerns about peer-to-peer (P2P) communication. Specifically, P2P secure communication should be focused on when it comes to high efficiency and security of information exchange between two industrial sensors. However, none of the existing schemes can resist physical attacks towards industrial sensors. To resolve the problem, we propose a new three-factor authentication and key agreement scheme named NTFAK for P2P IIoT communication using Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) and Chebyshev chaotic mapping, where PUF is used to replace the smart card factor in the traditional schemes. The unclonable property of PUF and its ability to securely identify a device by challenge-response can provide safety to physical attacks. Besides, the use of the Chebyshev chaotic map also can provide high computational efficiency while ensuring better security. The proposed scheme enables secure communication between any two industrial sensors, which can resist physical attacks and offer a smaller key size, faster computation, and higher efficiency for IIoT. The security of our scheme is formally proved by the random oracle model, and security properties are discussed to show our scheme resists various attacks. Moreover, experiments were implemented to prove the efficiency of our scheme. Specifically, the results show that NTFAK can improve the computation and communication overheads by 36.6% and 17.5% at least, compared to existing schemes, while also ensure a minimum time reduction of 30.4% in delay time. In terms of security and functionality features, NTFAK satisfies the proposed 14 properties, outperforming existing solutions.

An encrypted hiding scheme for 3D objects based on CGH and Henon mapping

A method is proposed to enhance the security of three-dimensional (3D) objects through computer-generated hologram (CGH) encryption and hiding. The process begins by encoding the 3D object using an iterative angular-spectrum layer-oriented method to create an optimized phase-only CGH. Next, the encrypted image is produced by modulating the phase-only CGH with a chaotic random phase mask (CRPM) generated through Henon mapping. Subsequently, a combination of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) is utilized to embed the encrypted data into a visually secure image, ensuring the encryption and concealment of 3D objects. During decryption, the accurate decryption procedure and keys must be applied to achieve the final reconstruction. The utilization of CGH in conjunction with CRPM effectively enhances the security of 3D objects, while the integration of DWT and SVD ensures the visual security properties of the encrypted data, providing a dual layer of protection for 3D objects. Experimental simulation results demonstrate that this approach achieves high-security encryption and concealment of 3D objects, ensuring high-quality decryption of 3D objects during the reconstruction process.

Blockchain-Enabled Utility Optimization for Supply Chain Finance: An Evolutionary Game and Smart Contract Based Approach

In recent years, blockchain technology has attracted substantial interest for its capability to transform supply chain management and finance. This paper employs evolutionary game theory to investigate the application of blockchain in mitigating financial risks within supply chains, taking into account the technology’s maturity and the risk preferences of financial institutions. By modeling interactions among financial institutions, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and core enterprises within the accounts receivable financing framework, this study evaluates blockchain’s impact on their decision-making and its efficacy in risk reduction. Our findings suggest the transformative potential of blockchain in mitigating financial risks, solving information asymmetry, and enhancing collaboration between financial entities and SMEs. Additionally, we integrate smart contracts into supply chain finance, proposing pragmatic procedures for their deployment in real-world contexts. Via a detailed examination of blockchain’s maturity and financial institutions’ risk preferences, this research demonstrates the primary determinants of strategic decisions in supply chain finance and underscores how blockchain technology fosters system stability using risk mitigation. Our innovative contribution lies in the design of smart contracts for the ARF process, rooted in blockchain’s core attributes of security, transparency, and immutability, thereby ensuring efficient operation and cost reduction in supply chain finance.

A model transformation based security policy automatic management framework for software-defined networking

Software-defined networking (SDN) has been utilized to enforce the security of traditional networks. However, the existing SDN-based security enforcement mechanisms rely heavily on the security policies containing the underlying information of data plane, such as MAC address, IP address or switch ports. These security policies need to be specifically developed by network operators and loaded into the control plane manually. With increasing the scale of underlying network, the existing security policy management mechanisms confront more and more challenges. The security policy transformation for SDN networks is to research how to transform the high-level security policy without containing the underlying information into the practical flow entries used by Openflow switches automatically, thereby implementing the automatic management of security policies. To achieve this objective, we propose a model transformation based security policy automatic management framework for software-defined networking in this paper. Leveraging its functional modules, the framework can solve the problems of how to find a connected path for each access control rule of security policy model (SPM) in data plane, how to transform the connected path into the system model of flow entries, as well as how to generate the practical flow entries according to the system model of flow entries. In order to validate the effectiveness and performance of framework, we implement the framework by leveraging POX controller and Mininet emulator. The experimental results illustrate the framework can transform SPM into practical flow entries, synchronously perceive the modifications caused by cutting down one connected path or changing SPM, and continuously keep the data plane holding the security properties defined by SPM at runtime.

Ethical Knowledge Sharing Leveraging Blockchain: An Overview

The knowledge that is acquired through a learning process has ethical concerns when shared, as there can be restrictions on the parties who can use the piece of knowledge, redistribution approaches protecting the creator's rights, privacy, and confidentiality concerns, accuracy and trustworthiness, openness and transparency, and informed consent. Blockchain structure encompasses a series of coupled blocks that are intrinsically linked with the conservation of authenticity, ensuring irrefutability, and the semi-anonymity of transactions. As pioneers in reviewing BC-based ethical Knowledge Sharing (KS), we categorize the model into 4 classes and critically evaluate the literature relative to knowledge-associated features, ethical knowledge-sharing aspects, BC-associated features, and network features. We heaped a commencing sample of 69 document references by selecting the literature for eligibility conditions pursued from intellectual resource search platforms, leveraging a profound and overly extended-period technique. We investigate and emphasize that, owing to innate security properties, blockchain can facilitate ethical KS in numerous ways, such as leveraging a dedicated consensus approach for ethical KS (Class 1), leveraging blockchain itself for knowledge storage and sharing due to its mutation-proof, non-tamperable, fault tolerance features (Class 2), ensuring the confidentiality of knowledge by leveraging additional encryption techniques on blockchain (Class 3), and leveraging smart contracts for attribute-based searching, knowledge fusion, access control, reward-driven KS, etc. (Class 4). Critical evaluation unveils that from BC-based ethical KS frameworks, 50% utilize smart contracts with blockchain for knowledge-based activities, 90% leverage progressive BC architecture, 6.7% leverage proof-of-knowledge consensus, 93.4% share propositional knowledge, and 70% share explicit knowledge. Moreover, accuracy, openness and transparency, privacy, trustworthiness, truthfulness, and confidentiality have been the dominant factors in ethical KS principles of interest. Finally, we examine the openings and hurdles of the model of blockchain-based ethical KS, then propose actions to diminish them, and afterward present future directions, implications, and limitations for the concept.