Although the fast development of quantum computers poses no immediate threat to currently deployed cryptography, NIST has started the post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standardization project in December 2016.
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Blockchains, a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) ledger system, can provide trusted consen- sus, computation, and immutable data between untrusted entities. The goal of blockchain privacy is to protect sender privacy, receiver privacy, and/or provide confidential transac- tions. Since Bitcoin, there are a number of research articles for blockchain privacy. Notable approaches are to use ring signatures [RST01] to achieve sender privacy and stealth addresses for receiver privacy (e.g., the Monero cryptocurrency).
Introduction
As the easiest and cheapest way of authenticating an end user, password-based authentication methods have been consistently employed by organizations and businesses as the default mechanism of restricting and monitoring access. The increased adoption of cloud applications and third-party services within an enterprise generally requires employees to keep track of a number of user names and passwords on a daily basis. The fact that employees need to remember multiple login credentials has incurred significant costs for an enterprise due to the increasing number of help desk calls for pass- word reset. Moreover, the current practice of using multiple user names and passwords in enterprises is also exposing the business to more opportunities for security breaches, as demonstrated by recent password leaks in big brands such as Apple, Adobe, and LinkedIn.
Abstract
With the emergence of the 3G (third-generation) networks for mobile communications, data security becomes even more important. Designing cryptosystems that meet both the power contraints and computing constraints of mobile units is very challenging. The GH-PKC reduces the size of the modulus and speeds up the computations of the same degree of security as existing cryptosystems. Our research focus is on software implementation of the GH-PKC and analysis on its performance over the existing cryptosystems.
Abstract
Current authentication technologies are commonly based asymmetric encryption techniques such as digital signatures. To be able to employ these techniques requires a significant amount of computing resources, which are uncommon to many lightweight mobile devices such as cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). It is therefore currently infeasible or uneconomical to implement mutual authentication services between these devices. A new protocol called “Controlled Proxy-Assisted Secure End-to-End Communication Protocol” was proposed by Professor Hung-Yu Lin to solve the problem. The goal of a Fourth Year Design Project at the University of Waterloo of Jimmy Choi, Kenneth Choi, Kenric Li, and Truman Ng supervised by Prof. Guang Gong, was to build a secure communication system that employs such proxy-assisted protocol as illustrated in figure four.
Abstract
We propose a new synchronous stream cipher, called WG (Welch-Gong) cipher. The cipher is based on WG transformations. The WG cipher has been designed to produce keystream with guaranteed randomness properties, i.e., balance, long period, large and exact linear complexity, three level additive autocorrelation, and ideal two level multiplicative autocorrelation. It is resistant to time/memory/data tradeoff attacks, algebraic attacks and correlation attacks. The cipher can be implemented with a small amount of hardware.
For details, please see the poster Sequences for Communication System (PDF).
Motivation
Recently many people in the media, industry, and academia are talking about ubiquitous computing and ad hoc networking, but it seems that everybody has a different understanding of the topic. Some people associate ad hoc networks with Personal Area Networks (PANs), as for instance wireless communications among PDA's, cellular phones, and laptops using the Bluetooth protocol, whereas others might imagine military applications, such as exploring enemy territory by the use of sensor networks. The number of applications are countless.
Introduction
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are innovative networks consisting of a large number of distributed, autonomous, low-power, low-cost, sensor nodes which cooperatively collect information through infrastructureless wireless networks, as illustrated in Figure one. There are numerous applications for wireless sensor networks, and security is vital for many of them. However, WSNs suffer from many constraints, including low computation capability, small memory, limited energy resources, susceptibility to physical capture, and the lack of infrastructure, all of which impose unique security challenges and make innovative approaches desirable.
The physical-layer security under the information-theoretic (perfect) security models can get exponentially close to perfect secrecy in theory. However, the information-theoretic security is an average-information measure. The system can be designed and tuned for a specific level of security¡ªe.g., with very high probability a block is secure, but it may not be able to guarantee security with probability one. So any deployment of a physical-layer security protocol in a classical system would be part of a ¡°layered security¡± solution where security is provided at a number of different layers, each with a specific goal in mind. The physical-layer security can provide an additional layer of security for wireless networks. We investigate a novel multiple input multiple output (MIMO) aided security scheme. By exploiting an extra dimension provided by MIMO systems for adding artificial noise to the transmission process, which let the attacker¡¯s signal be a degraded version of the legitimate receiver¡¯s signal, the physical-layer security is enhanced as a result. We also investigate a novel framework for Physical layer Assisted message Authentication (PAA) under public key infrastructure (PKI) in wireless communication networks.
Introduction
Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a technology for the automated identification of physical entities using radio frequency transmissions. Typically, RFID systems consist of RFID devices or so called tags, RFID readers or interrogators, and backend networks. An RFID tag is a simple and low-cost electronic device (transponder) that is attached to a physical object for wireless data transmission. It transmits data over the air in response to interrogation by an RFID reader. An RFID reader is a more powerful device (transceiver) that can queue data stored in tags. Multiple readers can then connect to a network that acts as a data processing subsystem and database. In the past ten years, RFID systems have gained popularity in many applications, such as supply chain management, library systems, e-passports, contactless cards (e.g., proximity cards, automated toll-payment transponders, and payment tokens), identification systems, and human implantation (such as medical-record indexing, and physical access control). Future applications could include smart appliances, shopping, and medication compliance monitoring. RFID is one of the most promising technologies in the field of ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Many new applications can be created by embedding an object with RFID tags. However, the rapid development of RFID systems raises serious privacy and security concerns that could prevent the benefits of RFID technology from being fully utilized.
Introduction
As cloud computing and mobile computing continue to become more widely adopted, there is an ever increasing demand for efficient transmission and storage of data. Compression is widely used in Internet-based information systems to satisfy these demands. At the same time, as our daily lives become ever more reliant upon this digital infrastructure, protecting the security and privacy of data becomes a pervasive necessity. Even when a system is built from secure cryptographic algorithms, the protection provided by these algorithms can be compromised at the system level when pre- or post-processing operations, such as compression, are used in conjunction with encryption and authentication. The two recent attacks CRIME and BREACH demonstrated that conventional techniques for combining compression and encryption are susceptible to "compression side-channel" attacks. The only effective remedy is to disable compression for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) and HTTPS communication, which almost 90 percent of web sites have done.
Motivation
Lightweight cryptography has been investigated in the literature for over a decade. Many symmetric key primitives such as block ciphers, stream ciphers, hash functions, and pseudorandom generators have been proposed. Recently, The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has put effort towards standardization for lightweight cryptographic algorithms. The goal of lightweight cryptography is to provide security and privacy in resource-constrained applications, embedded systems, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) including Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems, wireless sensor networks, and vehicle ad-hoc networks.
Introduction
A blockchain is a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) ledger system introduced for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency in 2008, and deployed for many other cryptocurrencies. Notable extensions include Ethereum smart contracts, Ripple’s consensus protocol, etc.. A blockchain, permissionless and permissioned, with its decentralized feature and immutable data makes it potentially applicable to numerous scenarios where value or data is transferred/shared, stored and processed. There are two fundamental challenge problems in blockchain technology. One is the scalability in consensus protocols of blockchain networks for updating the ledger which can resist to attacks on P2P network systems (e.g., Sybil attacks, routing attacks, etc.), and the second is how to provide a certain degree of sender/receiver and transaction privacy required for some applications (e.g., banking, heath care, and supply chain management applications), although transaction transparency is the powerhouse of trust in blockchains.
Introduction
The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is a world-wide collection of networks of physical objects, sensors, actuators, and computers. IoT devices are distinguished from conventional computers in both their structure and behaviour. They have limited memory and computational resources, are used in specific application domains, and use specialized network protocols. There is consensus that one) IoT will continue to grow by approximately 20 percent per year, and two) the greatest risks for IoT are security, scalability, and reliability.