Nowadays, online cloud storage networks can be accessed by third parties. Businesses that host large data centers buy or rent storage space from individuals who need to store their data. According to customer needs, data hub operators visualise the data and expose the cloud storage for storing data. Tangibly, the resources may wander around numerous servers. Data resilience is a prior need for all storage methods. For routines in a distributed data center, distributed removable code is appropriate. A safe cloud cache solution, AES-UCODR, is proposed to decrease I/O overheads for multi-block updates in proxy re-encryption systems. Its competence is evaluated using the real-world finance sector.

With the development of Industrial Internet identification analysis, various encryption methods have been widely used in identification analysis to ensure the security of identification encoding and data. However, the past encryption methods failed to consider the problem of encryption efficiency in the case of high concurrency, so it will reduce the identification resolution efficiency and increase the computational pressure of secondary nodes when applying these methods to the identification analysis. In this paper, in order to improve the efficiency of identification analysis under the premise of ensuring information security, a safe and efficient analytical encryption method for industrial Internet identification based on Secure Hash Algorithm 256 (SHA-256), and Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) is presented. Firstly, by replacing the secret key in the identification encoding encryption with the SHA-256 function, the number of secret keys is reduced, which is beneficial to improve the efficiency of identification analysis. Secondly, by replacing the large prime number of the RSA encryption algorithm with multiple small prime numbers, the generation speed of RSA key pair is improved, which is conducive to reduce the computation of secondary nodes. Finally, by assigning a unique RSA private key to the identification code during the identification registration phase, SHA-256 and RSA are associated, the number of key exchanges is reduced during the encryption process, which is conducive to improve the security of encryption. The experiment verifies that the proposed method can improve security of encryption and efficiency of identification analysis, by comparing the complexity of ciphertext cracking and the identification security analysis time between the traditional encryption method and this method.

Mobile devices are an inseparable part of our lives. They have made it possible to access all the information and services anywhere at any time. Almost all of the organizations try to provide a mobile device-based solution to its users. However, this convenience has arisen the risk of losing personal information and has increased the threat to security. It has been observed recently that some of the mobile device manufacturers and mobile apps developers have lost the private information of their users to hackers. It has risen a great concern among mobile device users about their personal information. Android and iOS are the major operating systems for mobile devices and share over 99% of the mobile device market. This research aims to conduct a comparative analysis of the security of the components in the Android and iOS operating systems. It analyses the security from several perspectives such as memory randomization, application sandboxing, isolation, encryption, built-in antivirus, and data storage. From the analysis, it is evident that iOS is more secure than Android operating system. However, this security comes with a cost of losing the freedom.

With the advent of cloud storage services many users tend to store their data in the cloud to save storage cost. However, this has lead to many security concerns, and one of the most important ones is ensuring data integrity. Public verification schemes are able to employ a third party auditor to perform data auditing on behalf of the user. But most public verification schemes are vulnerable to procrastinating auditors who may not perform auditing on time. These schemes do not have fair arbitration also, i.e. they lack a way to punish the malicious Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and compensate user whose data has been corrupted. On the other hand, CSP might be storing redundant data that could increase the storage cost for the CSP and computational cost of data auditing for the user. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-based public auditing and deduplication scheme with a fair arbitration system against procrastinating auditors. The key idea requires auditors to record each verification using smart contract and store the result into a Blockchain as a transaction. Our scheme can detect and punish the procrastinating auditors and compensate users in the case of any data loss. Additionally, our scheme can detect and delete duplicate data that improve storage utilization and reduce the computational cost of data verification. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that our scheme is provably secure and does not incur overhead compared to the existing public auditing techniques while offering an additional feature of verifying the auditor’s performance.

Cooperative secure computing based on the relationship between numerical value and numerical interval is not only the basic problems of secure multiparty computing but also the core problems of cooperative secure computing. It is of substantial theoretical and practical significance for information security in relation to scientific computing to continuously investigate and construct solutions to such problems. Based on the Goldwasser-Micali homomorphic encryption scheme, this paper propose the Morton rule, according to the characteristics of the interval, a double-length vector is constructed to participate in the exclusive-or operation, and an efficient cooperative decision-making solution for integer and integer interval security is designed. This solution can solve more basic problems in cooperative security computation after suitable transformations. A theoretical analysis shows that this solution is safe and efficient. Finally, applications that are based on these protocols are presented.

While 5G Edge Computing along with IoT technology has transformed the future of healthcare data transmission, it presents security vulnerabilities and risks when transmitting patients' confidential information. Currently, there are very few reliable security solutions available for healthcare data that routes through SDN routers in 5G Edge Computing. These solutions do not provide cryptographic security from IoT sensor devices. In this paper, we studied how 5G edge computing integrated with IoT network helps healthcare data transmission for remote medical treatment, explored security risks associated with unsecured data transmission, and finally proposed a cryptographic end-to-end security solution initiated at IoT sensor devices and routed through SDN routers. Our proposed solution with cryptographic security initiated at IoT sensor goes through SDN control plane and data plane in 5G edge computing and provides an end-to-end secured communication from IoT device to doctor's office. A prototype built with two-layer encrypted communication has been lab tested with promising results. This analysis will help future security implementation for eHealth in 5G and beyond networks.

IoT technology is finding new applications every day and everywhere in our daily lives. With that, come new use cases with new challenges in terms of device and data security. One of such challenges arises from the fact that many IoT devices/nodes are no longer being deployed on owners' premises, but rather on public or private property other than the owner's. With potential physical access to the IoT node, adversaries can launch many attacks that circumvent conventional protection methods. In this paper, we propose Secure SoC (SecSoC), a secure system-on-chip architecture that mitigates such attacks. This include logical memory dump attacks, bus snooping attacks, and compromised operating systems. SecSoC relies on two main mechanisms, (1) providing security extensions to the compute engine that runs the user application without changing its instruction set, (2) adding a security management unit (SMU) that provide HW security primitives for encryption, hashing, random number generators, and secrets store (keys, certificates, etc.). SecSoC ensures that no secret or sensitive data can leave the SoC IC in plaintext. SecSoC is being implemented in Bluespec System V erilog. The experimental results will reveal the area, power, and cycle time overhead of these security extensions. Overall performance (total execution time) will also be evaluated using IoT benchmarks.

Random numbers are essential for communications security, as they are widely employed as secret keys and other critical parameters of cryptographic algorithms. The Linux random number generator (LRNG) is the most popular open-source software-based random number generator (RNG). The security of LRNG is influenced by the overall design, especially the quality of entropy sources. Therefore, it is necessary to assess and quantify the quality of the entropy sources which contribute the main randomness to RNGs. In this paper, we perform an empirical study on the quality of entropy sources in LRNG with Linux kernel 5.6, and provide the following two findings. We first analyze two important entropy sources: jiffies and cycles, and propose a method to predict jiffies by cycles with high accuracy. The results indicate that, the jiffies can be correctly predicted thus contain almost no entropy in the condition of knowing cycles. The other important finding is the failure of interrupt cycles during system boot. The lower bits of cycles caused by interrupts contain little entropy, which is contrary to our traditional cognition that lower bits have more entropy. We believe these findings are of great significance to improve the efficiency and security of the RNG design on software platforms.

In the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), lightweight block ciphers are of vital importance. Due to the nature of the devices involved, traditional security solutions can add overhead and perhaps inhibit the application's objective due to resource limits. Lightweight cryptography is a novel suite of ciphers that aims to provide hardware-constrained devices with a high level of security while maintaining a low physical cost and high performance. In this paper, we are going to evaluate the performance of some of the recently proposed lightweight block ciphers (GIFT-COFB, Romulus, and TinyJAMBU) on the Arduino Due. We analyze data on each algorithm's performance using four metrics: average encryption and decryption execution time; throughput; power consumption; and memory utilization. Among our chosen ciphers, we find that TinyJAMBU and GIFT-COFB are excellent choices for resource-constrained IoT devices.

Lightweight cryptography is a novel diversion from conventional cryptography that targets internet-of-things (IoT) platform due to resource constraints. In comparison, it offers smaller cryptographic primitives such as shorter key sizes, block sizes and lesser energy drainage. The main focus can be seen in algorithm developments in this emerging subject. Thus, verification is carried out based upon theoretical (mathematical) proofs mostly. Among the few available side-channel analysis studies found in literature, the highest percentage is taken by power attacks. PRESENT is a promising lightweight block cipher to be included in IoT devices in the near future. Thus, the emphasis of this paper is on lightweight cryptology, and our investigation shows unavailability of a correlation electromagnetic analysis (CEMA) of it. Hence, in an effort to fill in this research gap, we opted to investigate the capabilities of CEMA against the PRESENT algorithm. This work aims to determine the probability of secret key leakage with a minimum number of electromagnetic (EM) waveforms possible. The process initially started from a simple EM analysis (SEMA) and gradually enhanced up to a CEMA. This paper presents our methodology in attack modelling, current results that indicate a probability of leaking seven bytes of the key and upcoming plans for optimisation. In addition, introductions to lightweight cryptanalysis and theories of EMA are also included.

This paper explores high throughput architectures for the substitution modules, which are an integral component of encryption algorithms. The security algorithms chosen belong to the category of lightweight crypto-primitives suitable for pervasive computing. The focus of this work is on the implementation of encryption algorithms on hardware platforms to improve speed and facilitate optimization in the area and power consumption of the design. In this work, the architecture for the encryption algorithms' substitution box (S-box) is modified using switching circuits (i.e., MUX-based) along with a logic generator and included in the overall cipher design. The modified architectures exhibit high throughput and consume less energy in comparison to the state-of-the-art designs. The percentage increase in throughput or maximum frequency differs according to the chosen algorithms discussed elaborately in this paper. The evaluation of various metrics specific to the design are executed at RFID-specific frequency so that they can be deployed in an IoT environment. The designs are mainly simulated and compared on Nexys4 DDR FPGA platform, along with a few other FPGAs, to meet similar design and implementation environments for a fair comparison. The application of the proposed S-box modification is explored for the healthcare scenario with promising results.

Scan-based test methodology is one of the most popular test techniques in VLSI circuits. This methodology increases the testability which in turn improves the fault coverage. For this purpose, the technique uses a chain of scan cells. This becomes a source of attack for an attacker who can observe / control the internal states and use the information for malicious purposes. Hence, security becomes the main concern in the Integrated Circuit (IC) domain since scan chains are the main reason for leakage of confidential information during testing phase. These leakages will help attackers in reverse engineering. Measures against such attacks have to be taken by encrypting the data which flows through the scan chains. Lightweight ciphers can be used for scan chain encryption. In this work, encryption of scan data is done for ISCAS-89 benchmarks and the performance and security properties are evaluated. Lightweight stream and block ciphers are used to perform scan encryption. A comparative analysis between the two techniques is performed in par with the functions related to design cost and security properties.

In recent years, the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) has increased rapidly in different areas. Due to many IoT applications, many limitations have emerged such as power consumption and limited resources. The security of connected devices is becoming more and more a primary need for the reliability of systems. Among other things, power consumption remains an essential constraint with a major impact on the quality of the encryption system. For these, several lightweight cryptography algorithms were proposed and developed. The PRESENT algorithm is one of the lightweight block cipher algorithms that has been proposed for a highly restrictive application. In this paper, we have proposed an efficient hardware serial architecture that uses 16 bits for data path encryption. It uses fewer FPGA resources and achieves higher throughput compared to other existing hardware applications.

True Random Number Generator (TRNG) is an important hardware security primitive for system security. TRNGs are capable of providing random bits for initialization vectors in encryption engines, for padding and nonces in authentication protocols and for seeds to pseudo random number generators (PRNG). A TRNG needs to meet the same statistical quality standards as a physical unclonable function (PUF) with regard to randomness and uniqueness, and therefore one can envision a unified architecture for both functions. In this paper, we investigate a FPGA implementation of a TRNG using the Shift-register Reconvergent-Fanout (SiRF) PUF. The SiRF PUF measures path delays as a source of entropy within a engineered logic gate netlist. The delays are measured at high precision using a time-to-digital converter, and then processed into a random bitstring using a series of linear-time mathematical operations. The SiRF PUF algorithm that is used for key generation is reused for the TRNG, with simplifications that improve the bit generation rate of the algorithm. This enables the TRNG to leverage both fixed PUF-based entropy and random noise sources, and makes the TRNG resilient to temperature-voltage attacks. TRNG bitstrings generated from a programmable logic implementation of the SiRF PUF-TRNG on a set of FPGAs are evaluated using statistical testing tools.

The robustness of the encryption systems in all of their types depends on the key generation. Thus, an encryption system can be said robust if the generated key(s) are very complex and random which prevent attackers or other analytical tools to break the encryption system. This paper proposed an enhanced key generation based on iris image as biometric, to be implemented dynamically in both of authentication process and data encryption. The captured iris image during the authentication process will be stored in a cloud server to be used in the next login to decrypt data. While in the current login, the previously stored iris image in the cloud server would be used to decrypt data in the current session. The results showed that the generated key meets the required randomness for several NIST tests that is reasonable for one use. The strength of the proposed approach produced unrepeated keys for encryption and each key will be used once. The weakness of the produced key may be enhanced to become more random.

Plaintext transmission is the major way of communication in the existing security and stability control (SSC) system of power grid. Such type of communication is easy to be invaded, camouflaged and hijacked by a third party, leading to a serious threat to the safe and stable operation of power system. Focusing on the communication security in SSC system, the authors use asymmetric encryption algorithm to encrypt communication messages, to generate random numbers through random noise of electrical quantities, and then use them to generate key pairs needed for encryption, at the same time put forward a set of key management mechanism for engineering application. In addition, the field engineering test is performed to verify that the proposed encryption method and management mechanism can effectively improve the communication in SSC system while ensuring the high-speed and reliable communication.

In the era of big data, information security is faced with many threats, among which memory data security of intelligent devices is an important link. Attackers can read the memory of specific devices, and then steal secrets, alter data, affect the operation of intelligent devices, and bring security threats. Data security is usually protected by encryption algorithm for device ciphertext conversion, so the safe generation and use of key becomes particularly important. In this paper, based on the advantages of SRAM PUF, such as real-time generation, power failure and disappearance, safety and reliability, a key generation unit is designed and implemented. BCH code is used as the error correction algorithm to generate 128-bit stable key, which provides a guarantee for the safe storage of intelligent devices.

Ransomware uses encryption methods to make data inaccessible to legitimate users. To date a wide range of ransomware families have been developed and deployed, causing immense damage to governments, corporations, and private users. As these cyberthreats multiply, researchers have proposed a range of ransom ware detection and classification schemes. Most of these methods use advanced machine learning techniques to process and analyze real-world ransomware binaries and action sequences. Hence this paper presents a survey of this critical space and classifies existing solutions into several categories, i.e., including network-based, host-based, forensic characterization, and authorship attribution. Key facilities and tools for ransomware analysis are also presented along with open challenges.

The outsourcing of databases is very popular among IT companies and industries. It acts as a solution for businesses to ensure availability of the data for their users. The solution of outsourcing the database is to encrypt the data in a form where the database service provider can perform relational operations over the encrypted database. At the same time, the associated security risk of data leakage prevents many potential industries from deploying it. In this paper, we present a secure outsourcing database search scheme (BASDB) with the use of a smart contract for search operation over index of encrypted database and storing encrypted relational database in the cloud. Our proposed scheme BASDB is a simple and practical solution for effective search on encrypted relations and is well resistant to information leakage against attacks like search and access pattern leakage.

Databases are at the heart of modern applications and any threats to them can seriously endanger the safety and functionality of applications relying on the services offered by a DBMS. It is therefore pertinent to identify key risks to the secure operation of a database system. This paper identifies the key risks, namely, SQL injection, weak audit trails, access management issues and issues with encryption. A malicious actor can get help from any of these issues. It can compromise integrity, availability and confidentiality of the data present in database systems. The paper also identifies various means and ways to defend against these issues and remedy them. This paper then proceeds to identify from the literature, the potential solutions to these ameliorate the threat from these vulnerabilities. It proposes the usage of encryption to protect the data from being breached and leveraging encrypted databases such as CryptoDB. Better access control norms are suggested to prevent unauthorized access, modification and deletion of the data. The paper also recommends ways to prevent SQL injection attacks through techniques such as prepared statements.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly evolving, allowing physical items to share information and coordinate with other nodes, increasing IoT’s value and being widely applied to various applications. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is usually used in IoT applications to automate item identification by establishing symmetrical communication between the tag device and the reader. Because RFID reading data is typically in plain text, a security mechanism is required to ensure that the reading results from this RFID data remain confidential. Researchers propose a lightweight encryption algorithm framework for IoT-based RFID applications to address this security issue. Furthermore, this research assesses the implementation of lightweight encryption algorithms, such as Grain v1 and Espresso, as two systems scenarios. The Grain v1 encryption is the final eSTREAM project that accepts an 80-bit key, 64-bit IV, and has a 160-bit internal state with limited application. In contrast, the Espresso algorithm has been implemented in various applications such as 5G wireless communication. Furthermore, this paper tested the performance of each encryption algorithm in the microcontroller and inspected the network performance in an IoT system.

Secured data transmission between one to many authorized users is achieved through Broadcast Encryption (BE). In BE, the source transmits encrypted data to multiple registered users who already have their decrypting keys. The Untrustworthy users, known as Traitors, can give out their secret keys to a hacker to form a pirate decoding system to decrypt the original message on the sly. The process of detecting the traitors is known as Traitor Tracing in cryptography. This paper presents a new Black Box Tracing method that is fully collusion resistant and it is designated as Traitor Tracing in Broadcast Encryption using Vector Keys (TTBE-VK). The proposed method uses integer vectors in the finite field Zp as encryption/decryption/tracing keys, reducing the computational cost compared to the existing methods.

Smart phones have become the preferred way for Chinese Internet users currently. The mobile phone traffic is large from the operating system. These traffic is mainly generated by the services. In the context of the universal encryption of the traffic, classification identification of mobile encryption services can effectively reduce the difficulty of analytical difficulty due to mobile terminals and operating system diversity, and can more accurately identify user access targets, and then enhance service quality and network security management. The existing mobile encryption service classification methods have two shortcomings in feature selection: First, the DL model is used as a black box, and the features of large dimensions are not distinguished as input of classification model, which resulting in sharp increase in calculation complexity, and the actual application is limited. Second, the existing feature selection method is insufficient to use the time and space associated information of traffic, resulting in less robustness and low accuracy of the classification. In this paper, we propose a feature enhancement method based on adjacent flow contextual features and evaluate the Apple encryption service traffic collected from the real world. Based on 5 DL classification models, the refined classification accuracy of Apple services is significantly improved. Our work can provide an effective solution for the fine management of mobile encryption services.

A long-standing open question in computational learning theory is to prove NP-hardness of learning efficient programs, the setting of which is in between proper learning and improper learning. Ko (COLT’90, SICOMP’91) explicitly raised this open question and demonstrated its difficulty by proving that there exists no relativizing proof of NP-hardness of learning programs. In this paper, we overcome Ko’s relativization barrier and prove NP-hardness of learning programs under randomized polynomial-time many-one reductions. Our result is provably non-relativizing, and comes somewhat close to the parameter range of improper learning: We observe that mildly improving our inapproximability factor is sufficient to exclude Heuristica, i.e., show the equivalence between average-case and worst-case complexities of N P. We also make progress on another long-standing open question of showing NP-hardness of the Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP). We prove NP-hardness of the partial function variant of MCSP as well as other meta-computational problems, such as the problems MKTP* and MINKT* of computing the time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity of a given partial string, under randomized polynomial-time reductions. Our proofs are algorithmic information (a.k. a. Kolmogorov complexity) theoretic. We utilize black-box pseudorandom generator constructions, such as the Nisan-Wigderson generator, as a one-time encryption scheme secure against a program which “does not know” a random function. Our key technical contribution is to quantify the “knowledge” of a program by using conditional Kolmogorov complexity and show that no small program can know many random functions.

Verifiable Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption (VDSSE) enables users to securely outsource databases (document sets) to cloud servers and perform searches and updates. The verifiability property prevents users from accepting incorrect search results returned by a malicious server. However, we discover that the community currently only focuses on preventing malicious behavior from the server but ignores incorrect updates from the client, which are very likely to happen since there is no record on the client to check. Indeed most existing VDSSE schemes are not sufficient to tolerate incorrect updates from the client. For instance, deleting a nonexistent keyword-identifier pair can break their correctness and soundness. In this paper, we demonstrate the vulnerabilities of a type of existing VDSSE schemes that fail them to ensure correctness and soundness properties on incorrect updates. We propose an efficient fault-tolerant solution that can consider any DSSE scheme as a black-box and make them into a fault-tolerant VDSSE in the malicious model. Forward privacy is an important property of DSSE that prevents the server from linking an update operation to previous search queries. Our approach can also make any forward secure DSSE scheme into a fault-tolerant VDSSE without breaking the forward security guarantee. In this work, we take FAST [1] (TDSC 2020), a forward secure DSSE, as an example, implement a prototype of our solution, and evaluate its performance. Even when compared with the previous fastest forward private construction that does not support fault tolerance, the experiments show that our construction saves 9× client storage and has better search and update efficiency.