Journal Description
Cryptography
Cryptography
is an international, scientific, peer-reviewed, open access journal on cryptography published quarterly online by MDPI.
- Open Access— free for readers, with article processing charges (APC) paid by authors or their institutions.
- High Visibility: indexed within Scopus, ESCI (Web of Science), dblp, and other databases.
- Journal Rank: CiteScore - Q2 (Applied Mathematics)
- Rapid Publication: manuscripts are peer-reviewed and a first decision is provided to authors approximately 22 days after submission; acceptance to publication is undertaken in 2.9 days (median values for papers published in this journal in the second half of 2023).
- Recognition of Reviewers: reviewers who provide timely, thorough peer-review reports receive vouchers entitling them to a discount on the APC of their next publication in any MDPI journal, in appreciation of the work done.
Impact Factor:
1.6 (2022);
5-Year Impact Factor:
2.4 (2022)
Latest Articles
An Engineered Minimal-Set Stimulus for Periodic Information Leakage Fault Detection on a RISC-V Microprocessor
Cryptography 2024, 8(2), 16; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography8020016 - 22 Apr 2024
Abstract
Recent evaluations of counter-based periodic testing strategies for fault detection in Microprocessor (μP) have shown that only a small set of counters is needed to provide complete coverage of severe faults. Severe faults are defined as faults that leak sensitive information,
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Recent evaluations of counter-based periodic testing strategies for fault detection in Microprocessor (μP) have shown that only a small set of counters is needed to provide complete coverage of severe faults. Severe faults are defined as faults that leak sensitive information, e.g., an encryption key on the output of a serial port. Alternatively, fault detection can be accomplished by executing instructions that periodically test the control and functional units of the μP. In this paper, we propose a fault detection method that utilizes an ’engineered’ executable program combined with a small set of strategically placed counters in pursuit of a hardware Periodic Built-In-Self-Test (PBIST). We analyze two distinct methods for generating such a binary; the first uses an Automatic Test Generation Pattern (ATPG)-based methodology, and the second uses a process whereby existing counter-based node-monitoring infrastructure is utilized. We show that complete fault coverage of all leakage faults is possible using relatively small binaries with low latency to fault detection and by utilizing only a few strategically placed counters in the μP.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers in Hardware Security II)
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Investigating CRYSTALS-Kyber Vulnerabilities: Attack Analysis and Mitigation
by
Maksim Iavich and Tamari Kuchukhidze
Cryptography 2024, 8(2), 15; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography8020015 - 19 Apr 2024
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Significant advancements have been achieved in the field of quantum computing in recent years. If somebody ever creates a sufficiently strong quantum computer, many of the public-key cryptosystems in use today might be compromised. Kyber is a post-quantum encryption technique that depends on
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Significant advancements have been achieved in the field of quantum computing in recent years. If somebody ever creates a sufficiently strong quantum computer, many of the public-key cryptosystems in use today might be compromised. Kyber is a post-quantum encryption technique that depends on lattice problem hardness, and it was recently standardized. Despite extensive testing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), new investigations have demonstrated the effectiveness of CRYSTALS-Kyber attacks and their applicability in non-controlled environments. We investigated CRYSTALS-Kyber’s susceptibility to side-channel attacks. In the reference implementation of Kyber512, additional functions can be compromised by employing the selected ciphertext. The implementation of the selected ciphertext allows the attacks to succeed. Real-time recovery of the entire secret key is possible for all assaults.
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Analysis of Biometric-Based Cryptographic Key Exchange Protocols—BAKE and BRAKE
by
Maksymilian Gorski and Wojciech Wodo
Cryptography 2024, 8(2), 14; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography8020014 - 06 Apr 2024
Abstract
Biometric authentication methods offer high-quality mechanisms to confirm the identity of individuals in security systems commonly used in the modern world, such as physical access control, online banking, or mobile device unlocking. They also find their application in cryptographic solutions, which allow the
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Biometric authentication methods offer high-quality mechanisms to confirm the identity of individuals in security systems commonly used in the modern world, such as physical access control, online banking, or mobile device unlocking. They also find their application in cryptographic solutions, which allow the biometrically authenticated exchange of cryptographic keys between users and services on the internet, despite the fuzziness of biometric data. Such solutions are BAKE (biometrics-authenticated key exchange) and BRAKE (biometric-resilient authenticated key exchange) protocols, upon which our work is based. However, the direct application of fuzzy biometrics in cryptography, which relies heavily on the accuracy of single-bit secret values, is not trivial. Therefore, this paper is devoted to analyzing the security of this idea and the feasibility of implementing biometric AKE (authenticated key exchange) protocols, with an emphasis on the BRAKE protocol. As the results of our analysis, we discuss BRAKE’s limitations and vulnerabilities, which need to be appropriately addressed to implement the protocol in modern systems.
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(This article belongs to the Topic Trends and Prospects in Security, Encryption and Encoding)
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Detour-RS: Reroute Attack Vulnerability Assessment with Awareness of the Layout and Resource
by
Minyan Gao, Liton Kumar Biswas, Navid Asadi and Domenic Forte
Cryptography 2024, 8(2), 13; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography8020013 - 06 Apr 2024
Abstract
Recent decades have witnessed a remarkable pace of innovation and performance improvements in integrated circuits (ICs), which have become indispensable in an array of critical applications ranging from military infrastructure to personal healthcare. Meanwhile, recent developments have brought physical security to the forefront
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Recent decades have witnessed a remarkable pace of innovation and performance improvements in integrated circuits (ICs), which have become indispensable in an array of critical applications ranging from military infrastructure to personal healthcare. Meanwhile, recent developments have brought physical security to the forefront of concern, particularly considering the valuable assets handled and stored within ICs. Among the various invasive attack vectors, micro-probing attacks have risen as a particularly menacing threat. These attacks leverage advanced focused ion beam (FIB) systems to enable post-silicon secret eavesdropping and circuit modifications with minimal traceability. As an evolved variant of micro-probing attacks, reroute attacks possess the ability to actively disable built-in shielding measures, granting access to the security-sensitive signals concealed beneath. To address and counter these emerging challenges, we introduce a layout-level framework known as Detour-RS. This framework is designed to automatically assess potential vulnerabilities, offering a systematic approach to identifying and mitigating exploitable weaknesses. Specifically, we employed a combination of linear and nonlinear programming-based approaches to identify the layout-aware attack costs in reroute attempts given specific target assets. The experimental results indicate that shielded designs outperform non-shielded structures against reroute attacks. Furthermore, among the two-layer shield configurations, the orthogonal layout exhibits better performance compared to the parallel arrangement. Furthermore, we explore both independent and dependent scenarios, where the latter accounts for potential interference among circuit edit locations. Notably, our results demonstrate a substantial near 50% increase in attack cost when employing the more realistic dependent estimation approach. In addition, we also propose time and gas consumption metrics to evaluate the resource consumption of the attackers, which provides a perspective for evaluating reroute attack efforts. We have collected the results for different categories of target assets and also the average resource consumption for each via, required during FIB reroute attack.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers in Hardware Security II)
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A Survey of Consortium Blockchain and Its Applications
by
Xiaotong Chen, Songlin He, Linfu Sun, Yangxin Zheng and Chase Q. Wu
Cryptography 2024, 8(2), 12; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography8020012 - 22 Mar 2024
Abstract
Blockchain is a revolutionary technology that has reshaped the trust model among mutually distrustful peers in a distributed network. While blockchain is well-known for its initial usage in a public manner, such as the cryptocurrency of Bitcoin, consortium blockchain, which requires authentication of
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Blockchain is a revolutionary technology that has reshaped the trust model among mutually distrustful peers in a distributed network. While blockchain is well-known for its initial usage in a public manner, such as the cryptocurrency of Bitcoin, consortium blockchain, which requires authentication of all involved participants, has also been widely adopted in various domains. Nevertheless, there is a lack of comprehensive study of consortium blockchain in terms of its architecture design, consensus mechanisms, comparative performance, etc. In this study, we aim to fill this gap by surveying the most popular consortium blockchain platforms and assessing their core designs in a layered fashion. Particularly, Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) state machine replication (SMR) is introduced to act as a basic computational model of consortium blockchain. Then the consortium blockchain is split into the hardware layer, layer-0 (network layer), layer-I (data layer, consensus layer and contract layer), layer-II protocols, and application layer. Each layer is presented with closely related discussion and analysis. Furthermore, with the extraction of the core functionalities, i.e., robust storage and guaranteed execution, that a consortium blockchain can provide, several typical consortium blockchain-empowered decentralized application scenarios are introduced. With these thorough studies and analyses, this work aims to systematize the knowledge dispersed in the consortium blockchain, highlight the unsolved challenges, and also indicate the propitious avenues of future work.
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(This article belongs to the Section Blockchain Security)
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Lookup Table-Based Design of Scalar Multiplication for Elliptic Curve Cryptography
by
Yan-Duan Ning, Yan-Haw Chen, Cheng-Sin Shih and Shao-I Chu
Cryptography 2024, 8(1), 11; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography8010011 - 18 Mar 2024
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This paper is aimed at using a lookup table method to improve the scalar multiplication performance of elliptic curve cryptography. The lookup table must be divided into two polynomials and requires two iterations of point doubling operation, for which negation operations are needed.
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This paper is aimed at using a lookup table method to improve the scalar multiplication performance of elliptic curve cryptography. The lookup table must be divided into two polynomials and requires two iterations of point doubling operation, for which negation operations are needed. It is well known that an inversion operation requires a lot of multiplication time. The advantage of this paper is that we are able to reduce one inverse element calculation for this problem and also improve the basic operations of finite fields through segmentation methods. If the normal basis method is used in the design of the inverse element operation, it must be converted to the normal basis through the standard basis. However, the conversion process requires a lot of matrix operations. Though the anti-element operation has good speed performance, it also increases the computational complexity. Using number theory and grouping methods will greatly improve the performance of inverse element operations. With application of the two-time point doubling operation in the hardware implementation, the developed approach reduces the computing time by 48% as compared with the conventional approach. The computational time of the scalar multiplication using the presented method is further improved by 67% over the traditional algorithm with only an area increase of 12%. Finally, the proposed lookup table-based technique can be utilized for software and hardware implementation, as the developed arithmetic operations are simple and are consistent in their execution.
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E-Coin-Based Priced Oblivious Transfer with a Fast Item Retrieval
by
Francesc Sebé and Sergi Simón
Cryptography 2024, 8(1), 10; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography8010010 - 13 Mar 2024
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Priced oblivious transfer (POT) is a cryptographic protocol designed for privacy-preserving e-commerce of digital content. It involves two parties: the merchant, who provides a set of priced items as input, and a customer, who acquires one of them. After the protocol has run,
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Priced oblivious transfer (POT) is a cryptographic protocol designed for privacy-preserving e-commerce of digital content. It involves two parties: the merchant, who provides a set of priced items as input, and a customer, who acquires one of them. After the protocol has run, the customer obtains the item they chose, while the merchant cannot determine which one. Moreover, the protocol guarantees that the customer gets the content only if they have paid the price established by the merchant. In a recent paper, the authors proposed a POT system where the payments employed e-coin transactions. The strong point of the proposal was the absence of zero-knowledge proofs required in preceding systems to guarantee the correctness of payments. In this paper, we propose a novel e-coin-based POT system with a fast item retrieval procedure whose running time does not depend on the number of items for sale. This is an improvement over the aforementioned existing proposal whose execution time becomes prohibitively long when the catalog is extensive. The use of zero-knowledge proofs is neither required.
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NLU-V: A Family of Instruction Set Extensions for Efficient Symmetric Cryptography on RISC-V
by
Hakan Uzuner and Elif Bilge Kavun
Cryptography 2024, 8(1), 9; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography8010009 - 29 Feb 2024
Abstract
Cryptographic primitives nowadays are not only implemented in high-performance systems but also in small-scale systems, which are increasingly powered by open-source processors, such as RISC-V. In this work, we leverage RISC-V’s modular base instruction set and architecture to propose a generic instruction set
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Cryptographic primitives nowadays are not only implemented in high-performance systems but also in small-scale systems, which are increasingly powered by open-source processors, such as RISC-V. In this work, we leverage RISC-V’s modular base instruction set and architecture to propose a generic instruction set extension (ISE) for symmetric cryptography. We adapt the work from Engels et al. in ARITH’13, the non-linear/linear instruction set extension (NLU), which presents a generic hardware/software co-design solution for efficient symmetric crypto implementations through a hardware unit extending the 8-bit AVR instruction set. These new instructions realize non-linear and linear layers, which are widely used to implement the block ciphers in symmetric cryptography. Our proposal modifies and extends the NLU instructions to a 32-bit RISC-V architecture; hence, we call the proposed ISE ‘NLU-V’. The proposed architecture is integrated into the open-source RISC-V implementation ‘Icicle’ and synthesized on a Xilinx Kintex-7 XC7K160T FPGA. The area overhead for the proposed NLU-V ISE is 1088 slice registers and 4520 LUTs. As case studies, the PRESENT and AES block ciphers are implemented using the new ISE on RISC-V in assembly. Our evaluation metric to showcase the performance gain, Z ‘time-area-product (TAP)’ (the execution time in clock cycles times code memory consumption), reflects the impact of the proposed family of instructions on the performance of the cipher implementations. The simulations show that the NLU-V achieves 89% gain for PRESENT and 68% gain for AES. Further, the NLU-V requires 44% less lines of code for the PRESENT and 23% less for the AES implementation.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers in Hardware Security II)
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FPGA-Based Acceleration of K-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm on Fully Homomorphic Encrypted Data
by
Sagarika Behera and Jhansi Rani Prathuri
Cryptography 2024, 8(1), 8; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography8010008 - 27 Feb 2024
Abstract
The suggested solution in this work makes use of the parallel processing capability of FPGA to enhance the efficiency of the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) algorithm on encrypted data. The suggested technique was assessed utilizing the breast cancer datasets and the findings indicate that
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The suggested solution in this work makes use of the parallel processing capability of FPGA to enhance the efficiency of the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) algorithm on encrypted data. The suggested technique was assessed utilizing the breast cancer datasets and the findings indicate that the FPGA-based acceleration method provides significant performance improvements over software implementation. The Cheon–Kim–Kim–Song (CKKS) homomorphic encryption scheme is used for the computation of ciphertext. After extensive simulation in Python and implementation in FPGA, it was found that the proposed architecture brings down the computational time of KNN on ciphertext to a realistic value in the order of the KNN classification algorithm over plaintext. For the FPGA implementation, we used the Intel Agilex7 FPGA (AGFB014R24B2E2V) development board and validated the speed of computation, latency, throughput, and logic utilization. It was observed that the KNN on encrypted data has a computational time of 41.72 ms which is 80 times slower than the KNN on plaintext whose computational time is of 0.518 ms. The main computation time for CKKS FHE schemes is 41.72 ms. With our architecture, we were able to reduce the calculation time of the CKKS-based KNN to 0.85 ms by using 32 parallel encryption hardware and reaching 300 MHz speed.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Applied Cryptography and Machine Learning for Security and Privacy Protection of Critical Infrastructures)
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Threats, Attacks, and Cryptography Frameworks of Cybersecurity in Critical Infrastructures
by
Kyriaki Tsantikidou and Nicolas Sklavos
Cryptography 2024, 8(1), 7; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography8010007 - 25 Feb 2024
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Critical Infrastructures (CIs), such as healthcare facilities, power grids, transportation systems, and financial institutions, are vital components of a functioning society, with the economy and safety being dependent on them. Nevertheless, they have become increasingly vulnerable to cyber threats and attacks in recent
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Critical Infrastructures (CIs), such as healthcare facilities, power grids, transportation systems, and financial institutions, are vital components of a functioning society, with the economy and safety being dependent on them. Nevertheless, they have become increasingly vulnerable to cyber threats and attacks in recent years. The main reason is their inability to quickly adapt to technological changes, employ updated cryptographic frameworks, and implement a thoroughly secure architecture based on their characteristics. In this study, the unique complexities of these systems are highlighted. Various verified cyberattacks that were executed against CIs in recent years are analyzed. Moreover, the general framework of CIs is demonstrated together with the employed technologies and cryptographic primitives. A thorough architecture of said technologies is developed to better understand the targeted components and easily identify potentially hidden threats. Afterwards, threat, adversary, and attack models that target critical systems and services are designed. The purpose is a better comprehension of the systems’ vulnerabilities, attack structures, motives, and targets for assisting CIs’ designers in creating secure frameworks and mechanisms, with the ability to mitigate such threats. Lastly, security controls and cryptography frameworks are demonstrated together with efficient mitigation architectures and implementations from the research community.
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Privacy-Preserving Multi-Party Cross-Chain Transaction Protocols
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Chang Chen, Guoyu Yang, Zhihao Li, Fuan Xiao, Qi Chen and Jin Li
Cryptography 2024, 8(1), 6; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography8010006 - 04 Feb 2024
Abstract
Cross-chain transaction technologies have greatly promoted the scalability of cryptocurrencies, which then facilitates the development of Metaverse applications. However, existing solutions rely heavily on centralized middleware (notary) or smart contracts. These schemes lack privacy considerations, and users’ cross-chain transactions are easy to master
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Cross-chain transaction technologies have greatly promoted the scalability of cryptocurrencies, which then facilitates the development of Metaverse applications. However, existing solutions rely heavily on centralized middleware (notary) or smart contracts. These schemes lack privacy considerations, and users’ cross-chain transactions are easy to master by other parties. Some signature-based payment schemes have good privacy but do not support multi-party cross-chain protocols or rely heavily on some time assumptions. The uncertainty of user behavior makes it difficult to design a secure multi-party cross-chain protocol. To solve these problems, we investigate how to design a secure multi-party cross-chain transaction protocol with offline tolerance. We propose a new signature algorithm called the pre-adaptor signature scheme, an extension of the adaptor signature scheme. The pre-adaptor signature scheme combines the multi-signature and adaptor signature schemes, which can realize the secret transmission channel between multiple parties. To provide offline tolerance, we encode our protocol into the P2SH script. Our protocol provides better privacy due to no dependence on smart contracts. The performance evaluation was conducted with ten participants. For each participant of our cross-chain protocol, the initialization and execution process can be performed in 3 milliseconds and with 6 k bytes of communication overhead at most. The cost increases linearly with the increase in the number of participants.
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(This article belongs to the Section Blockchain Security)
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Pervasive User Data Collection from Cyberspace: Privacy Concerns and Countermeasures
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Yinhao Jiang, Mir Ali Rezazadeh Baee, Leonie Ruth Simpson, Praveen Gauravaram, Josef Pieprzyk, Tanveer Zia, Zhen Zhao and Zung Le
Cryptography 2024, 8(1), 5; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography8010005 - 31 Jan 2024
Abstract
The increasing use of technologies, particularly computing and communication paradigms, has significantly influenced our daily lives. Interconnecting devices and networks provides convenient platforms for information exchange and facilitates pervasive user data collection. This new environment presents serious privacy challenges. User activities can be
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The increasing use of technologies, particularly computing and communication paradigms, has significantly influenced our daily lives. Interconnecting devices and networks provides convenient platforms for information exchange and facilitates pervasive user data collection. This new environment presents serious privacy challenges. User activities can be continuously monitored in both digital and physical realms. Gathered data can be aggregated and analysed, revealing aspects of user behaviour that may not be apparent from a single data point. The very items that facilitate connectivity simultaneously increase the risk of privacy breaches. The data gathered to provide services can also be used for monitoring and surveillance. This paper discerns three novel categories of privacy concerns relating to pervasive user data collection: privacy and user activity in cyberspace, privacy in personal cyber–physical systems, and privacy in proactive user-driven data collection. We emphasise the primary challenges, ranging from identity tracking in browsing histories to intricate issues in opportunistic networks, situating each within practical, real-world scenarios. Furthermore, we assess the effectiveness of current countermeasures, investigating their strengths and limitations. This paper explores the challenges in preserving privacy in user interactions with dynamic interconnected systems and suggests countermeasures to mitigate identified privacy risks.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Information Security and Privacy)
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Cryptanalysis of Two Conditional Privacy Preserving Authentication Schemes for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks
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Ahmad Mohamad Kabil, Heba Aslan and Marianne Azer
Cryptography 2024, 8(1), 4; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography8010004 - 24 Jan 2024
Abstract
Conditional Privacy Preserving Authentication (CPPA) schemes are an effective way of securing communications in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), as well as ensuring user privacy and accountability. Cryptanalysis plays a crucial role in pointing out the vulnerabilities in existing schemes to enable the
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Conditional Privacy Preserving Authentication (CPPA) schemes are an effective way of securing communications in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), as well as ensuring user privacy and accountability. Cryptanalysis plays a crucial role in pointing out the vulnerabilities in existing schemes to enable the development of more resilient ones. In 2019, Zhang proposed a CPPA scheme for VANET security (PA-CRT), based on identity batch verification (IBV) and Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT). In this paper, we cryptanalyze Zhang’s scheme and point out its vulnerability to impersonation and repudiation attacks. In 2023, Zhang’s scheme was cryptanalyzed by Tao; however, we point out flaws in Tao’s cryptanalysis due to invalid assumptions; hence, we propose countermeasures to Tao’s attacks. Furthermore, in 2021, Xiong proposed a Certificateless Aggregate Signature (CLAS) scheme which is also cryptanalyzed in this paper. Finally, we analyze the causes and countermeasures by pointing out the vulnerabilities in each scheme that enabled us to launch successful attacks and proposing changes that would fortify these schemes against similar attacks in the future.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Authentication, Authorization and Privacy for Securing Smart Communications)
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Novel and Efficient Privacy-Preserving Continuous Authentication
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Ahmed Fraz Baig, Sigurd Eskeland and Bian Yang
Cryptography 2024, 8(1), 3; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography8010003 - 24 Jan 2024
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Continuous authentication enhances security by re-verifying a user’s validity during the active session. It utilizes data about users’ behavioral actions and contextual information to authenticate them continuously. Such data contain information about user-sensitive attributes such as gender, age, contextual information, and may also
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Continuous authentication enhances security by re-verifying a user’s validity during the active session. It utilizes data about users’ behavioral actions and contextual information to authenticate them continuously. Such data contain information about user-sensitive attributes such as gender, age, contextual information, and may also provide information about the user’s emotional states. The collection and processing of sensitive data cause privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose two efficient protocols that enable privacy-preserving continuous authentication. The contribution is to prevent the disclosure of user-sensitive attributes using partial homomorphic cryptographic primitives and reveal only the aggregated result without the explicit use of decryption. The protocols complete an authentication decision in a single unidirectional transmission and have very low communication and computation costs with no degradation in biometric performance.
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Locking-Enabled Security Analysis of Cryptographic Circuits
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Devanshi Upadhyaya, Maël Gay and Ilia Polian
Cryptography 2024, 8(1), 2; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography8010002 - 05 Jan 2024
Abstract
Hardware implementations of cryptographic primitives require protection against physical attacks and supply chain threats. This raises the question of secure composability of different attack countermeasures, i.e., whether protecting a circuit against one threat can make it more vulnerable against a different threat. In
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Hardware implementations of cryptographic primitives require protection against physical attacks and supply chain threats. This raises the question of secure composability of different attack countermeasures, i.e., whether protecting a circuit against one threat can make it more vulnerable against a different threat. In this article, we study the consequences of applying logic locking, a popular design-for-trust solution against intellectual property piracy and overproduction, to cryptographic circuits. We show that the ability to unlock the circuit incorrectly gives the adversary new powerful attack options. We introduce LEDFA (locking-enabled differential fault analysis) and demonstrate for several ciphers and families of locking schemes that fault attacks become possible (or consistently easier) for incorrectly unlocked circuits. In several cases, logic locking has made circuit implementations prone to classical algebraic attacks with no fault injection needed altogether. We refer to this “zero-fault” version of LEDFA by the term LEDA, investigate its success factors in-depth and propose a countermeasure to protect the logic-locked implementations against LEDA. We also perform test vector leakage assessment (TVLA) of incorrectly unlocked AES implementations to show the effects of logic locking regarding side-channel leakage. Our results indicate that logic locking is not safe to use in cryptographic circuits, making them less rather than more secure.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers in Hardware Security II)
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Residue Number System (RNS) and Power Distribution Network Topology-Based Mitigation of Power Side-Channel Attacks
by
Ravikumar Selvam and Akhilesh Tyagi
Cryptography 2024, 8(1), 1; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography8010001 (registering DOI) - 21 Dec 2023
Abstract
Over the past decade, significant research has been performed on power side-channel mitigation techniques. Logic families based on secret sharing schemes, such as t-private logic, that serve to secure cryptographic implementations against power side-channel attacks represent one such countermeasure. These mitigation techniques
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Over the past decade, significant research has been performed on power side-channel mitigation techniques. Logic families based on secret sharing schemes, such as t-private logic, that serve to secure cryptographic implementations against power side-channel attacks represent one such countermeasure. These mitigation techniques are applicable at various design abstraction levels—algorithm, architecture, logic, physical, and gate levels. One research question is when can the two mitigation techniques from different design abstraction levels be employed together gainfully? We explore this notion of the orthogonality of two mitigation techniques with respect to the RNS secure logic, a logic level power side-channel mitigation technique, and power distribution network (PDN), with the decoupling capacitance, a mitigation technique at physical level. Machine learning (ML) algorithms are employed to measure the effectiveness of power side-channel attacks in terms of the success rate of the adversary. The RNS protected LED block cipher round function is implemented as the test circuit in both tree-style and grid-style PDN using the FreePDK 45 nm technology library. The results show that the success rate of an unsecured base design 68.96% for naive Bayes, 67.44% with linear discriminant analysis, 67.51% for quadratic discriminant analysis, and 66.58% for support vector machine. It is reduced to a success rate of 19.68% for naive Bayes, 19.62% with linear discriminant analysis, 19.10% for quadratic discriminant analysis, and 10.54% in support vector machine. Grid-type PDN shows a slightly better reduction in success rate compared to the tree-style PDN.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers in Hardware Security II)
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One-to-Many Simultaneous Secure Quantum Information Transmission
by
Theodore Andronikos and Alla Sirokofskich
Cryptography 2023, 7(4), 64; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography7040064 - 16 Dec 2023
Cited by 1
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This paper presents a new quantum protocol designed to transmit information from one source to many recipients simultaneously. The proposed protocol, which is based on the phenomenon of entanglement, is completely distributed and is provably information-theoretically secure. Numerous existing quantum protocols guarantee secure
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This paper presents a new quantum protocol designed to transmit information from one source to many recipients simultaneously. The proposed protocol, which is based on the phenomenon of entanglement, is completely distributed and is provably information-theoretically secure. Numerous existing quantum protocols guarantee secure information communication between two parties but are not amenable to generalization in situations where the source must transmit information to two or more recipients. Hence, they must be executed sequentially two or more times to achieve the desired goal. The main novelty of the new protocol is its extensibility and generality to situations involving one party that must simultaneously communicate different, in general, messages to an arbitrary number of spatially distributed parties. This is achieved in the special way employed to encode the transmitted information in the entangled state of the system, one of the distinguishing features compared with previous protocols. This protocol can prove expedient whenever an information broker, say, Alice, must communicate distinct secret messages to her agents, all in different geographical locations, in one go. Due to its relative complexity compared with similar cryptographic protocols, as it involves communication among n parties and relies on tuples, we provide an extensive and detailed security analysis so as to prove that it is information-theoretically secure. Finally, in terms of its implementation, the prevalent characteristics of the proposed protocol are its uniformity and simplicity, because it only requires CNOT and Hadamard gates and the local quantum circuits are identical for all information recipients.
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Practical Certificate-Less Infrastructure with Application in TLS
by
Li Duan, Yong Li and Lijun Liao
Cryptography 2023, 7(4), 63; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography7040063 - 14 Dec 2023
Abstract
We propose highly efficient certificate-less (CL) protocols for the infrastructure used by authenticated key exchange (AKE). The construction is based on elliptic curves (EC) without pairing, which means it can be easily supported by most industrial cryptography libraries on constrained devices. Compared with
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We propose highly efficient certificate-less (CL) protocols for the infrastructure used by authenticated key exchange (AKE). The construction is based on elliptic curves (EC) without pairing, which means it can be easily supported by most industrial cryptography libraries on constrained devices. Compared with other pairing-free CL solutions, the new CL-AKE protocol enjoys the least number of scalar multiplications over EC groups. We use a unified game-based model to formalize the security of each protocol, while most previous works only assess the security against a list of attacks, provide informal theorems without proper modeling, or use separate models for protocols in different stages. We also present an efficient integration of the core protocols into the TLS cipher suites and a stand-alone implementation for constrained devices. The performance is evaluated on constrained devices in real-world settings, which further confirms the efficiency of our proposal.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Information Security and Privacy)
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A Publicly Verifiable E-Voting System Based on Biometrics
by
Jinhui Liu, Tianyi Han, Maolin Tan, Bo Tang, Wei Hu and Yong Yu
Cryptography 2023, 7(4), 62; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography7040062 - 28 Nov 2023
Abstract
Voters use traditional paper ballots, a method limited by the factors of time and space, to ensure their voting rights are exercised; this method requires a lot of manpower and resources. Duplicate voting problems may also occur, meaning the transparency and reliability of
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Voters use traditional paper ballots, a method limited by the factors of time and space, to ensure their voting rights are exercised; this method requires a lot of manpower and resources. Duplicate voting problems may also occur, meaning the transparency and reliability of the voting results cannot be guaranteed. With the rapid developments in science and technology, E-voting system technology is being adopted more frequently in election activities. However, E-voting systems still cannot address the verifiability of the election process; the results of a given election and the credibility of the host organization will be questioned if the election’s verifiability cannot be ensured. Elections may also pose a series of problems related to privacy, security, and so on. To address these issues, this paper presents a public, and verifiable E-voting system with hidden statistics; this system is based on commitment, zk-SNARKs, and machine learning. The system can deal with a large number of candidates, complex voting methods, and result functions in counting both hidden and public votes and can satisfy the requirements of verifiability, privacy, security, and intelligence. Our security analysis shows that our scheme achieves privacy, hidden vote counting and verifiability. Our performance evaluation demonstrates that our system has reasonable applications in real scenarios.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Applied Cryptography and Machine Learning for Security and Privacy Protection of Critical Infrastructures)
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Open AccessArticle
Garbled Circuits Reimagined: Logic Synthesis Unleashes Efficient Secure Computation
by
Mingfei Yu, Dewmini Sudara Marakkalage and Giovanni De Micheli
Cryptography 2023, 7(4), 61; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography7040061 - 23 Nov 2023
Abstract
Garbled circuit (GC) is one of the few promising protocols to realize general-purpose secure computation. The target computation is represented by a Boolean circuit that is subsequently transformed into a network of encrypted tables for execution. The need for distributing GCs among parties,
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Garbled circuit (GC) is one of the few promising protocols to realize general-purpose secure computation. The target computation is represented by a Boolean circuit that is subsequently transformed into a network of encrypted tables for execution. The need for distributing GCs among parties, however, requires excessive data communication, called garbling cost, which bottlenecks system performance. Due to the zero garbling cost of XOR operations, existing works reduce garbling cost by representing the target computation as the XOR-AND graph (XAG) with minimal structural multiplicative complexity (MC). Starting with a thorough study of the cipher-text efficiency of different types of logic primitives, for the first time, we propose XOR-OneHot graph (X1G) as a suitable logic representation for the generation of low-cost GCs. Our contribution includes (a) an exact algorithm to synthesize garbling-cost-optimal X1G implementations for small-scale functions and (b) a set of logic optimization algorithms customized for X1Gs, which together form a robust optimization flow that delivers high-quality X1Gs for practical functions. The effectiveness of the proposals is evidenced by comprehensive evaluations: compared with the state of the art, 7.34%, 26.14%, 13.51%, and 4.34% reductions in garbling costs are achieved on average for the involved benchmark suites, respectively, with reasonable runtime overheads.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers in Hardware Security II)
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