TECHNOLOGY: JAVA
DOMAIN: Network Security
| S. No. | IEEE TITLE | ABSTRACT | IEEE YEAR |
| 1 | A Novel Class of Robust Covert Channels Using Out-of-Order Packets
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Covert channels are usually used to circumvent security policies and allow information leakage without being observed. In this paper, we propose a novel covert channel technique using the packet reordering phenomenon as a host for carrying secret communications. Packet reordering is a common phenomenon on the Internet. Moreover, it is handled transparently from the user and application-level processes. This makes it an attractive medium to exploit for sending hidden signals to receivers by dynamically manipulating packet order in a network flow. In our approach, specific permutations of successive packets are selected to enhance the reliability of the channel, while the frequency distribution of their usage is tuned to increase stealthiness by imitating real Internet traffic. It is very expensive for the adversary to discover the covert channel due to the tremendous overhead to buffer and sort the packets among huge amount of background traffic. A simple tool is implemented to demonstrate this new channel. We studied extensively the robustness and capabilities of our proposed channel using both simulation and experimentation over large varieties of traffic characteristics. The reliability and capacity of this technique have shown promising results. We also investigated a practical mechanism for distorting and potentially preventing similar novel channels. | 2017 |
| 2 | Optimized Identity-Based Encryption from Bilinear Pairing for Lightweight Devices | Lightweight devices such as smart cards and RFID tags have a very limited hardware resource, which could be too weak to cope with asymmetric-key cryptography. It would be desirable if the cryptographic algorithm could be optimized in order to better use hardware resources. In this paper, we demonstrate how identity-based encryption algorithms from bilinear pairing can be optimized so that hardware resources can be saved. We notice that the identity-based encryption algorithms from bilinear pairing in the literature must perform both elliptic curve group operations and multiplicative group operations, which consume a lot of hardware resources. We manage to eliminate the need of multiplicative group operations for encryption. This is a significant discovery since the hardware structure can be simplified for implementing pairing-based cryptography. Our experimental results show that our encryption algorithm saves up to 47 percent memory (27,239 RAM bits) in FPGA implementation. | 2017 |
| 3 | Efficient and Confidentiality-Preserving Content Based Publish/Subscribe with Prefiltering | Content-based publish/subscribe provides a loosely-coupled and expressive form of communication for large-scale distributed systems. Confidentiality is a major challenge for publish/subscribe middleware deployed over multiple administrative domains. Encrypted matching allows confidentiality-preserving content-based filtering but has high performance overheads. It may also prevent the use of classical optimizations based on subscriptions containment. We propose a support mechanism that reduces the cost of encrypted matching, in the form of a prefiltering operator using Bloom filters and simple randomization techniques. This operator greatly reduces the amount of encrypted subscriptions that must be matched against incoming encrypted publications. It leverages subscription containment information when available, but also ensures that containment confidentiality is preserved otherwise. We propose containment obfuscation techniques and provide a rigorous security analysis of the information leaked by Bloom filters in this case. We conduct a thorough experimental evaluation of prefiltering under a large variety of workloads. Our results indicate that prefiltering is successful at reducing the space of subscriptions to be tested in all cases. We show that while there is a tradeoff between prefiltering efficiency and information leakage when using containment obfuscation, it is practically possible to obtain good prefiltering performance while securing the technique against potential leakages. | 2017 |
| 4 | An Efficient Lattice Based Multi-Stage Secret Sharing Scheme | In this paper, we construct a lattice based ðt; nÞ threshold multi-stage secret sharing (MSSS) scheme according to Ajtai’s construction for one-way functions. In an MSSS scheme, the authorized subsets of participants can recover a subset of secrets at each stage while other secrets remain undisclosed. In this paper, each secret is a vector from a t-dimensional lattice and the basis of each lattice is kept private. A t-subset of n participants can recover the secret(s) using their assigned shares. Using a lattice based one-way function, even after some secrets are revealed, the computational security of the unrecovered secrets is provided against quantum computers. The scheme is multi-use in the sense that to share a new set of secrets, it is sufficient to renew some public information such that a new share distribution is no longer required. Furthermore, the scheme is verifiable meaning that the participants can verify the shares received from the dealer and the recovered secrets from the combiner, using public information. | 2017 |
| 5 | Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Min and kth Min Computations in Mobile Sensing Systems | Protecting the privacy of mobile phone user participants is extremely important for mobile phone sensing applications. In this paper, we study how an aggregator can expeditiously compute the minimum value or the kth minimum value of all users’ data without knowing them.We construct two secure protocols using probabilistic coding schemes and a cipher system that allows homomorphic bitwise XOR computations for our problems. Following the standard cryptographic security definition in the semi-honest model, we formally prove our protocols’ security. The protocols proposed by us can support time-series data and need not to assume the aggregator is trusted. Moreover, different from existing protocols that are based on secure arithmetic sum computations, our protocols are based on secure bitwise XOR computations, thus are more efficient. | 2017 |
| 6 | My Privacy My Decision: Control of Photo Sharing on Online Social Networks | Photo sharing is an attractive feature which popularizes online social networks (OSNs). Unfortunately, it may leak users’ privacy if they are allowed to post, comment, and tag a photo freely. In this paper, we attempt to address this issue and study the scenario when a user shares a photo containing individuals other than himself/herself (termed co-photo for short). To prevent possible privacy leakage of a photo, we design a mechanism to enable each individual in a photo be aware of the posting activity and participate in the decision making on the photo posting. For this purpose, we need an efficient facial recognition (FR) system that can recognize everyone in the photo. However, more demanding privacy setting may limit the number of the photos publicly available to train the FR system. To deal with this dilemma, our mechanism attempts to utilize users’ private photos to design a personalized FR system specifically trained to differentiate possible photo co-owners without leaking their privacy. We also develop a distributed consensus-based method to reduce the computational complexity and protect the private training set. We show that our system is superior to other possible approaches in terms of recognition ratio and efficiency. Our mechanism is implemented as a proof of concept Android application on Facebook’s platform | 2017 |
| 7 | Secure and Private Data Aggregation for Energy Consumption Scheduling in Smart Grids | The recent proposed solutions for demand side energy management leverage the two-way communication infrastructure provided by modern smart-meters and sharing the usage information with the other users. In this paper, we first highlight the privacy and security issues involved in the distributed demand management protocols. We propose a novel protocol to share required information among users providing privacy, confidentiality, and integrity. We also propose a new clustering-based, distributed multi-party computation (MPC) protocol. Through simulation experiments we demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed solution. The existing solutions typically usually thwart selfish and malicious behavior of consumers by deploying billing mechanisms based on total consumption during a few time slots. However, the billing is typically based on the total usage in each time slot in smart grids. In the second part of this paper, we formally prove that under the per-slot based charging policy, users have incentive to deviate from the proposed protocols. We also propose a protocol to identify untruthful users in these networks. Finally, considering a repeated interaction among honest and dishonest users, we derive the conditions under which the smart grid can enforce cooperation among users and prevents dishonest declaration of consumption. | 2017 |
| 8 | Using Virtual Machine Allocation Policies to Defend against Co-Resident Attacks in Cloud Computing | Cloud computing enables users to consume various IT resources in an on-demand manner, and with low management overhead. However, customers can face new security risks when they use cloud computing platforms. In this paper, we focus on one such threat—the co-resident attack, where malicious users build side channels and extract private information from virtual machines co-located on the same server. Previous works mainly attempt to address the problem by eliminating side channels. However, most of these methods are not suitable for immediate deployment due to the required modifications to current cloud platforms. We choose to solve the problem from a different perspective, by studying how to improve the virtual machine allocation policy, so that it is difficult for attackers to co-locate with their targets. Specifically, we (1) define security metrics for assessing the attack; (2) model these metrics, and compare the difficulty of achieving co-residence under three commonly used policies; (3) design a new policy that not only mitigates the threat of attack, but also satisfies the requirements for workload balance and low power consumption; and (4) implement, test, and prove the effectiveness of the policy on the popular open-source platform OpenStack. | 2017 |