Information Security Commons^™

Anonymity And Accountability In Secure Messaging, Erin Kenney

Dissertations

Encypted messaging has become more and more prevalent as time moves on, and its benefits in assuring privacy cannot be overstated, but it also brings along with it concerns on how to moderate platforms where all messages are hidden. Message Franking, followed by Traceback systems, addressed these concerns by allowing the sender of a message to be proven when reported, even for forwarded messages in the case of Traceback, however these systems damage the privacy guarantees that originally motivated encrypted messaging to begin with.

In practice, even without those concerns encrypted messaging alone is not enough to prevent the most …

Accuracy-Enabling Differential Privacy-Preserving Truth Discovery, Man Zhang, Xinghua Li, Yinbin Miao, Bin Luo, Siqi Ma, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Perturbation-based privacy-preserving truth discovery requires the Service Provider (SP) to calculate the truthful aggregation result from perturbed data of the Data Sources (DSs), which inevitably damages the aggregation accuracy due to perturbation noise added in the data. Thus, the existing works attempt to relieve the perturbation errors by reducing noise amounts or adjusting aggregation weights of DSs. However, the former sacrifices DSs’ privacy preservation and the latter has the limited accuracy recovery performance. Aiming at it, we propose an accuracy-enabling differential privacy-preserving truth discovery consisting of an independence-guaranteed data perturbation module and a progressive-private noise elimination module. Specifically, in the …

Leakage-Resilient Easily Deployable And Efficiently Searchable Encryption (Edese), Jiaming Yuan, Yingjiu Li, Jun Li, Daoyuan Wu, Jianting Ning, Yangguang Tian, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Easily Deployable and Efficiently Searchable Encryption (EDESE) is a cryptographic primitive designed for practical searchable applications, offering efficient search and easy deployment. However, it remains vulnerable to Leakage-Abuse attacks, allowing adversaries to exploit keyword-matching processes to extract sensitive information. To address these vulnerabilities, we introduce Leakage-Resilient EDESE (LR-EDESE) with k-indistinguishability and controlled leakage functions. We then propose Volume Leakage-Resilient EDESE (VLR-EDESE), a new scheme to protect against both query and document volume leakage. Our experimental results demonstrate that at k = 5000 (maximum security setting), VLR-EDESE incurs an overhead of 63× compared to the baseline EDESE without leakage protection, outperforming …

Simc 2.0: Improved Secure Ml Inference Against Malicious Clients, Guowen Xu, Xingshuo Han, Tianwei Zhang, Shengmin Xu, Jianting Ning, Xinyi Huang, Hongwei Li, Deng, Robert H.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we study the problem of secure ML inference against a malicious client and a semi-trusted server such that the client only learns the inference output while the server learns nothing. This problem is first formulated by Lehmkuhl et al. with a solution (MUSE, Usenix Security’21), whose performance is then substantially improved by Chandran et al.'s work (SIMC, USENIX Security’22). However, there still exists a nontrivial gap in these efforts towards practicality, giving the challenges of overhead reduction and secure inference acceleration in an all-round way. Based on this, we propose SIMC 2.0, which complies with the underlying …

Whisper: Proximity-Based Authentication For Securely Sharing Secrets, Charles A. Vogel

Computer Science Senior Theses

Cryptography offers a wide arsenal of encryption methods to enable secure communication between two
devices that have already exchanged a shared secret. Existing techniques for exchanging a shared secret,
however, are often vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, require special hardware for out-of-band com-
munications, or require a pre-existing Internet connection. With the constantly increasing prevalence of
Internet of Things (IoT) devices sharing sensitive information via wireless networks, the need for a method
to establish secure communication is more pressing than ever.
With this context, we present Whisper, a novel technique that combines elements of digital commu-
nication theory, cryptography, and probability …

Leveraging Finite-Precision Errors In Chaotic Systems For Enhanced Image Encryption, B. M. El-Den, Saad Aldosary, Haitham Khaled, Tarek M. Hassan, Walid Raslan

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This research explores the application of chaotic systems in generating pseudo-random numbers for encryption protocols, offering a novel perspective on addressing the challenges posed by limited computer precision in cryptographic applications. Chaotic systems, while promising for encryption, often suffer from degradation in their chaotic properties when implemented on computers with finite precision. Previous studies have primarily aimed to mitigate this issue, with limited consideration of harnessing finite-precision errors as a potential source of randomness. In this study, we propose an innovative encryption method that leverages finite-precision errors within chaotic systems. The algorithm generates a keystream based on lower bound error …

Soci+: An Enhanced Toolkit For Secure Outsourced Computation On Integers, Bowen Zhao, Weiquan Deng, Xiaoguo Li, Ximeng Liu, Qingqi Pei, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Secure outsourced computation is critical for cloud computing to safeguard data confidentiality and ensure data usability. Recently, secure outsourced computation schemes following a twin-server architecture based on partially homomorphic cryptosystems have received increasing attention. The Secure Outsourced Computation on Integers (SOCI) [1] toolkit is the state-of-the-art among these schemes which can perform secure computation on integers without requiring the costly bootstrapping operation as in fully homomorphic encryption; however, SOCI suffers from relatively large computation and communication overhead. In this paper, we propose SOCI+ which significantly improves the performance of SOCI. Specifically, SOCI+ employs a novel (2,2)-threshold Paillier cryptosystem with fast …

Closing The Gap: Leveraging Aes-Ni To Balance Adversarial Advantage And Honest User Performance In Argon2i, Nicholas Harrell, Nathaniel Krakauer

CERIAS Technical Reports

The challenge of providing data privacy and integrity while maintaining efficient performance for honest users is a persistent concern in cryptography. Attackers exploit advances in parallel hardware and custom circuit hardware to gain an advantage over regular users. One such method is the use of Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) to optimize key derivation function (KDF) algorithms, giving adversaries a significant advantage in password guessing and recovery attacks. Other examples include using graphical processing units (GPUs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). We propose a focused approach to close the gap between adversarial advantage and honest user performance by leveraging the …

Privacy-Preserving Bloom Filter-Based Keyword Search Over Large Encrypted Cloud Data, Yanrong Liang, Jianfeng Ma, Yinbin Miao, Da Kuang, Xiangdong Meng, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To achieve the search over encrypted data in cloud server, Searchable Encryption (SE) has attracted extensive attention from both academic and industrial fields. The existing Bloom filter-based SE schemes can achieve similarity search, but will generally incur high false positive rates, and even leak the privacy of values in Bloom filters (BF). To solve the above problems, we first propose a basic Privacy-preserving Bloom filter-based Keyword Search scheme using the Circular Shift and Coalesce-Bloom Filter (CSC-BF) and Symmetric-key Hidden Vector Encryption (SHVE) technology (namely PBKS), which can achieve effective search while protecting the values in BFs. Then, we design a …

Making The Transition To Post-Quantum Cryptography, J. Simon Richard

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

Without intervention, quantum computing could threaten the security of a large portion of our internet in the near future. However, solutions exist. This paper, which is intended for a general audience, provides a wider context for our current state of quantum-preparedness amid the transition from classical cryptosystems to post-quantum cryptosystems—cryptographic algorithms that can resist the attacks of quantum computers. It will also submit a possible way forward inspired by the actions taken around the globe to prevent the millennium (or Y2K) bug.

An Optimized And Scalable Blockchain-Based Distributed Learning Platform For Consumer Iot, Zhaocheng Wang, Xueying Liu, Xinming Shao, Abdullah Alghamdi, Md. Shirajum Munir, Sujit Biswas

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

Consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) manufacturers seek customer feedback to enhance their products and services, creating a smart ecosystem, like a smart home. Due to security and privacy concerns, blockchain-based federated learning (BCFL) ecosystems can let CIoT manufacturers update their machine learning (ML) models using end-user data. Federated learning (FL) uses privacy-preserving ML techniques to forecast customers' needs and consumption habits, and blockchain replaces the centralized aggregator to safeguard the ecosystem. However, blockchain technology (BCT) struggles with scalability and quick ledger expansion. In BCFL, local model generation and secure aggregation are other issues. This research introduces a novel architecture, emphasizing …

Classifying World War Ii Era Ciphers With Machine Learning, Brooke Dalton

Master's Projects

We examine whether machine learning and deep learning techniques can classify World War II era ciphers when only ciphertext is provided. Among the ciphers considered are Enigma, M-209, Sigaba, Purple, and Typex. For our machine learning models, we test a variety of features including the raw ciphertext letter sequence, histograms, and n-grams. The classification is approached in two scenarios. The first scenario considers fixed plaintext encrypted with fixed keys and the second scenario considers random plaintext encrypted with fixed keys. The results show that histograms are the best feature and classic machine learning methods are more appropriate for this kind …

Ranked Keyword Search Over Encrypted Cloud Data Through Machine Learning Method, Yinbin Miao, Wei Zheng, Xiaohua Jia, Ximeng Liu, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ranked keyword search over encrypted data has been extensively studied in cloud computing as it enables data users to find the most relevant results quickly. However, existing ranked multi-keyword search solutions cannot achieve efficient ciphertext search and dynamic updates with forward security simultaneously. To solve the above problems, we first present a basic Machine Learning-based Ranked Keyword Search (ML-RKS) scheme in the static setting by using the k-means clustering algorithm and a balanced binary tree. ML-RKS reduces the search complexity without sacrificing the search accuracy, but is still vulnerable to forward security threats when applied in the dynamic setting. Then, …

Secure Authentication Scheme Based On Numerical Series Cryptography For Internet Of Things, Dr Khaled Nagaty, Maha Aladin, Abeer Hamdy Dr.

Computer Science

The rapid advancement of cellular networks and wireless networks has laid a solid basis for the Internet of Things. IoT has evolved into a unique standard that allows diverse physical devices to collaborate with one another. A service provider gives a variety of services that may be accessed via smart apps anywhere, at any time, and from any location over the Internet. Because of the public environment of mobile communication and the Internet, these services are highly vulnerable to a several malicious attacks, such as unauthorized disclosure by hostile attackers. As a result, the best option for overcoming these vulnerabilities …

The History Of The Enigma Machine, Jenna Siobhan Parkinson

History Publications

The history of the Enigma machine begins with the invention of the rotor-based cipher machine in 1915. Various models for rotor-based cipher machines were developed somewhat simultaneously in different parts of the world. However, the first documented rotor machine was developed by Dutch naval officers in 1915. Nonetheless, the Enigma machine was officially invented following the end of World War I by Arthur Scherbius in 1918 (Faint, 2016).

Differentiated Security Architecture For Secure And Efficient Infotainment Data Communication In Iov Networks, Jiani Fan, Lwin Khin Shar, Jiale Guo, Wenzhuo Yang, Dusit Niyato, Kwok-Yan Lam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper aims to provide differentiated security protection for infotainment data commu- nication in Internet-of-Vehicle (IoV) networks. The IoV is a network of vehicles that uses various sensors, software, built-in hardware, and communication technologies to enable information exchange between pedestrians, cars, and urban infrastructure. Negligence on the security of infotainment data commu- nication in IoV networks can unintentionally open an easy access point for social engineering attacks. The attacker can spread false information about traffic conditions, mislead drivers in their directions, and interfere with traffic management. Such attacks can also cause distractions to the driver, which has a potential implication …

Soci: A Toolkit For Secure Outsourced Computation On Integers, Bowen Zhao, Jiaming Yuan, Ximeng Liu, Yongdong Wu, Hwee Hwa Pang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Secure outsourced computation is a key technique for protecting data security and privacy in the cloud. Although fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables computations over encrypted data, it suffers from high computation costs in order to support an unlimited number of arithmetic operations. Recently, secure computations based on interactions of multiple computation servers and partially homomorphic encryption (PHE) were proposed in the literature, which enable an unbound number of addition and multiplication operations on encrypted data more efficiently than FHE and do not add any noise to encrypted data; however, these existing solutions are either limited in functionalities (e.g., computation on …

Witness-Authenticated Key Exchange, Kelsey G. Melissaris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation we investigate Witness-Authenticated Key Exchange (WAKE), a key agreement protocol in which each party is authenticated through knowledge of a witness to an arbitrary NP statement. We provide both game-based and universally composable definitions. Thereby, this thesis presents solutions for the most flexible and general method of authentication for group key exchange, providing simple constructions from (succinct) signatures of knowledge (SOK) and a two round UC-secure protocol.

After a discussion of flaws in previous definitions for WAKE we supply a new and improved game-based definition along with the first definition for witness-authenticated key exchange between groups of …

On The Cryptographic Deniability Of The Signal Protocol, Nihal Vatandas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Offline deniability is the ability to a posteriori deny having participated in a particular communication session. This property has been widely assumed for the Signal messaging application, yet no formal proof has appeared in the literature. In this work, we present the first formal study of the offline deniability of the Signal protocol. Our analysis shows that building a deniability proof for Signal is non-trivial and requires strong assumptions on the underlying mathematical groups where the protocol is run.

To do so, we study various implicitly authenticated key exchange protocols, including MQV, HMQV, and 3DH/X3DH, the latter being the core …

Formal Verification Applications For The Treekem Continuous Group Key Agreement Protocol, Alexander J. Washburn

Theses and Dissertations

The features of Secure Group Messaging, the security guarantees of Message Layer Security, and the TreeKEM protocol designed to satisfy these guarantees and features are explored. A motivation and methodology for verification via explicit model checking is presented. Subsequently, a translation of the TreeKEM protocol into a Promela reference model is described, examining the nuances explicit model checking brings. Finally the results of the formal verification methods are discussed.

Challenges And Opportunities For Next-Generation Manufacturing In Space, Kip Nieman, A. F. Leonard, Katie Tyrell, Dominic Messina, Rebecca Lopez, Helen Durand

Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Faculty Research Publications

With commercial space travel now a reality, the idea that people might spend time on other planets in the future seems to have greater potential. To make this possible, however, there needs to be flexible means for manufacturing in space to enable tooling or resources to be created when needed to handle unexpected situations. Next-generation manufacturing paradigms offer significant potential for the kind of flexibility that might be needed; however, they can result in increases in computation time compared to traditional control methods that could make many of the computing resources already available on earth attractive for use. Furthermore, resilience …

Performance Improvements In Inner Product Encryption, Serena Riback

Honors Scholar Theses

Consider a database that contains thousands of entries of the iris biometric. Each entry identifies an individual, so it is especially important that it remains secure. However, searching for entries among an encrypted database proves to be a security problem - how should one search encrypted data without leaking any information to a potential attacker? The proximity searchable encryption scheme, as discussed in the work by Cachet et al., uses the notions of inner product encryption developed by Kim et al.. In this paper, we will focus on the efficiency of these schemes. Specifically, how the symmetry of the bilinear …

Passing Time And Syncing Secrets: Demonstrating Covert Channel Vulnerabilities In Precision Time Protocol (Ptp), Aron J. Smith-Donovan

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

Covert channels use steganographic approaches to transfer secret digital communications; when applied to network protocols, these strategies can facilitate undetectable data exfiltration and insertion attacks. Because covert channel techniques are protocol- and implementation-specific, individual case studies are necessary to assess for vulnerabilities under different conditions. While several investigations have been published evaluating covert channel potential in infrastructure- and manufacturing-based contexts, no existing research explores Precision Time Protocol (PTP), a time synchronization protocol commonly used in industrial control systems. This study aims to fill this gap by demonstrating the feasibility of a covert channel-based attack on a PTP-enabled network.

Shieldfl: Mitigating Model Poisoning Attacks In Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning, Zhuoran Ma, Jianfeng Ma, Yinbin Miao, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning (PPFL) is an emerging secure distributed learning paradigm that aggregates user-trained local gradients into a federated model through a cryptographic protocol. Unfortunately, PPFL is vulnerable to model poisoning attacks launched by a Byzantine adversary, who crafts malicious local gradients to harm the accuracy of the federated model. To resist model poisoning attacks, existing defense strategies focus on identifying suspicious local gradients over plaintexts. However, the Byzantine adversary submits encrypted poisonous gradients to circumvent existing defense strategies in PPFL, resulting in encrypted model poisoning. To address the issue, in this paper we design a privacy-preserving defense strategy using …

Provably Weak Instances Of Plwe Revisited, Again, Katherine Mendel

CSB and SJU Distinguished Thesis

Learning with Errors has emerged as a promising possibility for postquantum cryptography. Variants known as RLWE and PLWE have been shown to be more efficient, but the increased structure can leave them vulnerable to attacks for certain instantiations. This work aims to identify specific cases where proposed cryptographic schemes based on PLWE work particularly poorly under a specific attack.

Optimal Eavesdropping In Quantum Cryptography, Atanu Acharyya Dr.

Doctoral Theses

Quantum key distribution (QKD) has raised some promise for more secured communication than its classical counterpart. It allows the legitimate parties to detect eavesdropping which introduces error in the channel. If disturbed, there are ways to distill a secure key within some threshold error-rate. The amount of information gained by an attacker is generally quantified by (Shannon) mutual information. Knowing the maximum amount of information that an intruder can gain is important for post-processing purposes, and we mainly focus on that side in the thesis. Renyi information is also useful especially when post-processing is considered. The scope of this thesis …

Post-Quantum Secure Identity-Based Encryption Scheme Using Random Integer Lattices For Iot-Enabled Ai Applications, Dharminder Dharminder, Ashok Kumar Das, Sourav Saha, Basudeb Bera, Athanasios V. Vasilakos

VMASC Publications

Identity-based encryption is an important cryptographic system that is employed to ensure confidentiality of a message in communication. This article presents a provably secure identity based encryption based on post quantum security assumption. The security of the proposed encryption is based on the hard problem, namely Learning with Errors on integer lattices. This construction is anonymous and produces pseudo random ciphers. Both public-key size and ciphertext-size have been reduced in the proposed encryption as compared to those for other relevant schemes without compromising the security. Next, we incorporate the constructed identity based encryption (IBE) for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, …

A Blockchain-Based Self-Tallying Voting Protocol In Decentralized Iot, Yannan Li, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang, Yong Yu, Dongxi Liu, Xiaojiang Du, Mohsen Guizani

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing explosive growth and has gained extensive attention from academia and industry in recent years. However, most of the existing IoT infrastructures are centralized, which may cause the issues of unscalability and single-point-of-failure. Consequently, decentralized IoT has been proposed by taking advantage of the emerging technology called blockchain. Voting systems are widely adopted in IoT, for example a leader election in wireless sensor networks. Self-tallying voting systems are alternatives to unsuitable, traditional centralized voting systems in decentralized IoT. Unfortunately, self-tallying voting systems inherently suffer from fairness issues, such as adaptive and abortive issues caused …

Novel Secure Outsourcing Of Modular Inversion For Arbitrary And Variable Modulus, Chengliang Tian, Jia Yu, Hanlin Zhang, Haiyang Xue, Cong Wang, Kui Ren

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In cryptography and algorithmic number theory, modular inversion is viewed as one of the most common and time-consuming operations. It is hard to be directly accomplished on resource-constrained clients (e.g., mobile devices and IC cards) since modular inversion involves a great amount of operations on large numbers in practice. To address the above problem, this paper proposes a novel unimodular matrix transformation technique to realize secure outsourcing of modular inversion. This technique makes our algorithm achieve several amazing properties. First, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first secure outsourcing computation algorithm that supports arbitrary and variable modulus, …

An Adaptive Cryptosystem On A Finite Field, Awnon Bhowmik, Unnikrishnan Menon

Publications and Research

Owing to mathematical theory and computational power evolution, modern cryptosystems demand ingenious trapdoor functions as their foundation to extend the gap between an enthusiastic interceptor and sensitive information. This paper introduces an adaptive block encryption scheme. This system is based on product, exponent, and modulo operation on a finite field. At the heart of this algorithm lies an innovative and robust trapdoor function that operates in the Galois Field and is responsible for the superior speed and security offered by it. Prime number theorem plays a fundamental role in this system, to keep unwelcome adversaries at bay. This is a …