Confusion and Diffusion are two properties of a secure cipher, identified by Claude Shannon. Confusion refers to making the relationship between the ciphertext and the symmetric key as complex and involved as possible. We try to achieve more confusion by creating a ciphertext of different length for a given plaintext when key is changed. As per our knowledge, all the existing symmetric encryption techniques will generate cipher text of same length for a given plaintext with different keys. The technique we are implementing here, will create ciphertext with different length for a given plaintext if we change the appropriate values in the key. This symmetric encryption technique will also possibly make the recovery of key very hard for the attacker.

The mobile technology is being developed very fast and it is a general situation where people can fetch or edit files via the Internet by mobile devices such as notebooks, smart phones, and so on. Due to possible possession of various devices of a user, it may be inconvenient for him to synchronize a file such that he cannot edit the same file via his devices easily. Recently, the cloud technology is becoming more and more popular and there are some new business models launched. One of them is a storage platform Dropbox which can synchronize users' files in their own devices and also allow users to share their files to others. However, Dropbox was indicated that the privacy of the files has not been protected well. Many encryption schemes have been proposed in the literature, but most of them do not support the property of secret file sharing when deploying them in cloud environment. Even though some schemes support the property, they can only provide a file owner to share all of his files with others. In some situations, the file owner may want to ensure that the receiver cannot decrypt the ciphertext until a specified time arrives. The existing encryption schemes cannot achieve these goals simultaneously. Hence, in order to cope with these problems, we propose a timed-release proxy conditional re-encryption scheme for cloud computing. Not only are users¡¦ files stored safely but also each user can freely share a desired file with another user. Furthermore, the receiver cannot obtain any information of the file until the chosen time arrives. Finally, we also demonstrate the security of our proposed scheme via formal proofs.

The Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a promising approach for future Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) implementation. The data transmission is wireless primarily in the VANET system. The secure data transmission in VANET attracts research attention without any doubt. The Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) provides an encrypted access control mechanism for broadcasting messages in VANET. The user’s attributes stand for its current property. However, if we apply vehicle location as the attribute, this attribute has to keep up-to-date with the vehicle’s movement. It is not easy for current CP-ABE algorithms because whenever one attribute changes, the entire private key, which is based on all the attributes, must be changed. In this thesis, we apply fading function to realize the “dynamic attribute” feature in CP-ABE. The dynamic attribute allows the user to update each attribute separately, and fading function gives each attribute a valid period. We introduce the dynamic attribute feature to three different CP-ABE algorithms. Then we design a VANET system that applies the CP-ABE with dynamic attribute feature. We evaluate the processing time of three different CP-ABE algorithms. We apply two different pairing curves for different security requirements. Our results show that the introduction of fading function does not cause significant extra time cost to current CP-ABE algorithms. The fading function causes extra 0.2ms on average for each attribute that participates in encryption and decryption. The sum-up time for encryption and decryption is between 100ms to 200ms when there are ten attributes participating in encryption and decryption. / VANET är ett lovande tillvägagångssätt för framtida genomförande av ITS. Dataöverföringen är i första hand trådlös i VANET-systemet. Den säkra dataöverföringen i VANET är utan tvekan föremål för forskningens uppmärksamhet. CP-ABE ger en krypterad åtkomstkontrollmekanism för sändning av meddelanden i VANET. Användarens attribut står för dennes aktuella egenskaper. Men om vi använder fordonets position som attribut måste detta attribut hålla sig uppdaterat med fordonets rörelse. Det är inte lätt för de nuvarande CP-ABE-algoritmerna eftersom hela den privata nyckeln, som är baserad på alla attribut, måste ändras när ett attribut ändras. I den här avhandlingen tillämpar vi fading-funktionen för att realisera funktionen ”dynamiskt attribut” i CP-ABE. Det dynamiska attributet gör det möjligt för användaren att uppdatera varje attribut separat, och fading-funktionen ger varje attribut en giltighetstid. Vi inför den dynamiska attributfunktionen i tre olika CP-ABE-algoritmer. Därefter utformar vi ett VANET-system som tillämpar CP-ABE med dynamisk attributfunktion. Vi utvärderar tidsåtgången för tre olika CP-ABE-algoritmer. Vi tillämpar två olika parningskurvor för olika säkerhetskrav. Våra resultat visar att införandet av fading-funktionen inte orsakar någon betydande tidsåtgång för de nuvarande CP-ABE-algoritmerna. Fading-funktionen orsakar i genomsnitt 0,2 ms extra för varje attribut som deltar i kryptering och dekryptering. Den sammanlagda tiden för kryptering och dekryptering är mellan 100 och 200 ms när tio attribut deltar i kryptering och dekryptering.

Attribute-based encryption is a promising cryptographic primitive that allows users to encrypt data according to specific policies on the credentials of the recipients. For example, a user might want to store data in a public server such that only subscribers with credentials of specific forms are allowed to access them. Encrypting the data once for each party is not only impractical but also raises important privacy issues. Therefore, it would be beneficial to be able to encrypt only once for all desired parties. This is achievable by attribute-based encryption schemes, which come into several types and are applicable to a wide range of settings. Several attribute-based encryption schemes have been proposed and studied with a wide range of characteristics. For example, initial constructions proved to be significantly more challenging than constructing traditional public-key encryption systems and they imposed restrictions on the expressiveness of the Boolean formulas used during encryption. For several proposed schemes the total number of attributes was fixed during setup, while others allowed any string to be used as attribute ("large universe" constructions), but with considerable weaker security guarantees. Furthermore, these first constructions, although polynomial time, were impractical for wide deployment. This thesis is motivated by two main goals for ABE schemes: robustness and efficiency. For robustness, we propose a novel construction that achieves strong security guarantees and at the same time augments the capabilities of previous schemes. More specifically, we adapt existing techniques to achieve leakage-resilient ABE schemes with augmented robustness features making no compromises on security. For the second direction, our goal is to create practical schemes with as many features as possible, such as "large universe" and multi-authority settings. We showcase these claims with working implementations, benchmarks, and comparisons to previous constructions. Finally, these constructions lead us to new directions that we propose and intend to investigate further. / text

This thesis is focused on a relatively new branch of computer security called Cryptovirology. It uses cryptography and its principles in conjunction with designing and writing malicious codes (e.g. computer viruses, trojan horses, worms). Techniques such as viral propagation through computer networks, capabilities of current viruses and similar threats are described. Beside cryptography and computer viruses, design of the cryptovirus and methods of a cryptoviral extortion attack along with their related potential are also analyzed below in this paper. As a proof of the concept in the given area of cryptovirology, a demonstrational computer program was written. The program was implemented with the respect to the satisfaction of the essentials set to the cryptovirus.

To the field of cryptography, quantum mechanics is a game changer. The exploitation of quantum mechanical properties through the manipulation of quantum information, the information encoded in the state of quantum systems, would allow many protocols in use today to be broken as well as lead to the expansion of cryptography to new protocols. In this thesis, quantum encryption, i.e. encryption schemes for quantum data, is defined, along with several definitions of security, broadly divisible into semantic security and ciphertext indistinguishability, which are proven equivalent, in analogy to the foundational result by Goldwasser and Micali. Private- and public-key quantum encryption schemes are also constructed from quantum-secure cryptographic primitives, and their security is proven. Most of the results are in the joint paper Computational Security of Quantum Encryption, to appear in the 9th International Conference on Information Theoretic Security (ICITS2016).

A vast number of online services is based on users contributing their personal information. Examples are manifold, including social networks, electronic commerce, sharing websites, lodging platforms, and genealogy. In all cases user privacy depends on a collective trust upon all involved intermediaries, like service providers, operators, administrators or even help desk staff. A single adversarial party in the whole chain of trust voids user privacy. Even more, the number of intermediaries is ever growing. Thus, user privacy must be preserved at every time and stage, independent of the intrinsic goals any involved party. Furthermore, next to these new services, traditional offline analytic systems are replaced by online services run in large data centers. Centralized processing of electronic medical records, genomic data or other health-related information is anticipated due to advances in medical research, better analytic results based on large amounts of medical information and lowered costs. In these scenarios privacy is of utmost concern due to the large amount of personal information contained within the centralized data. We focus on the challenge of privacy-preserving processing on genomic data, specifically comparing genomic sequences. The problem that arises is how to efficiently compare private sequences of two parties while preserving confidentiality of the compared data. It follows that the privacy of the data owner must be preserved, which means that as little information as possible must be leaked to any party participating in the comparison. Leakage can happen at several points during a comparison. The secured inputs for the comparing party might leak some information about the original input, or the output might leak information about the inputs. In the latter case, results of several comparisons can be combined to infer information about the confidential input of the party under observation. Genomic sequences serve as a use-case, but the proposed solutions are more general and can be applied to the generic field of privacy-preserving comparison of sequences. The solution should be efficient such that performing a comparison yields runtimes linear in the length of the input sequences and thus producing acceptable costs for a typical use-case. To tackle the problem of efficient, privacy-preserving sequence comparisons, we propose a framework consisting of three main parts. a) The basic protocol presents an efficient sequence comparison algorithm, which transforms a sequence into a set representation, allowing to approximate distance measures over input sequences using distance measures over sets. The sets are then represented by an efficient data structure - the Bloom filter -, which allows evaluation of certain set operations without storing the actual elements of the possibly large set. This representation yields low distortion for comparing similar sequences. Operations upon the set representation are carried out using efficient, partially homomorphic cryptographic systems for data confidentiality of the inputs. The output can be adjusted to either return the actual approximated distance or the result of an in-range check of the approximated distance. b) Building upon this efficient basic protocol we introduce the first mechanism to reduce the success of inference attacks by detecting and rejecting similar queries in a privacy-preserving way. This is achieved by generating generalized commitments for inputs. This generalization is done by treating inputs as messages received from a noise channel, upon which error-correction from coding theory is applied. This way similar inputs are defined as inputs having a hamming distance of their generalized inputs below a certain predefined threshold. We present a protocol to perform a zero-knowledge proof to assess if the generalized input is indeed a generalization of the actual input. Furthermore, we generalize a very efficient inference attack on privacy-preserving sequence comparison protocols and use it to evaluate our inference-control mechanism. c) The third part of the framework lightens the computational load of the client taking part in the comparison protocol by presenting a compression mechanism for partially homomorphic cryptographic schemes. It reduces the transmission and storage overhead induced by the semantically secure homomorphic encryption schemes, as well as encryption latency. The compression is achieved by constructing an asymmetric stream cipher such that the generated ciphertext can be converted into a ciphertext of an associated homomorphic encryption scheme without revealing any information about the plaintext. This is the first compression scheme available for partially homomorphic encryption schemes. Compression of ciphertexts of fully homomorphic encryption schemes are several orders of magnitude slower at the conversion from the transmission ciphertext to the homomorphically encrypted ciphertext. Indeed our compression scheme achieves optimal conversion performance. It further allows to generate keystreams offline and thus supports offloading to trusted devices. This way transmission-, storage- and power-efficiency is improved. We give security proofs for all relevant parts of the proposed protocols and algorithms to evaluate their security. A performance evaluation of the core components demonstrates the practicability of our proposed solutions including a theoretical analysis and practical experiments to show the accuracy as well as efficiency of approximations and probabilistic algorithms. Several variations and configurations to detect similar inputs are studied during an in-depth discussion of the inference-control mechanism. A human mitochondrial genome database is used for the practical evaluation to compare genomic sequences and detect similar inputs as described by the use-case. In summary we show that it is indeed possible to construct an efficient and privacy-preserving (genomic) sequences comparison, while being able to control the amount of information that leaves the comparison. To the best of our knowledge we also contribute to the field by proposing the first efficient privacy-preserving inference detection and control mechanism, as well as the first ciphertext compression system for partially homomorphic cryptographic systems.

本文深入探討許多基於公開金鑰密碼和通行碼的密文運算方案。首先第一個主題是「公開金鑰密碼」，從其基本架構和安全定義開始，透過文獻探討逐步地討論公開金鑰密碼學的各項特性、以及討論公開金鑰密碼中兩個常見的密文運算：同態加密系統和可交換性加密系統。同態運算是針對同一把公鑰加密的不同密文間的運算：兩個以同一把公鑰加密的密文可以在不解密的前提下進行運算，進而成為另一個合法密文。這個密文運算的結果等同於兩個明文做運算後再以該公鑰加密。可交換性加密系統是一個容許重複的加密系統：已用甲方公鑰加密的密文可以再度用乙方公鑰再加密，進而之成一個多收件者的密文。第一個主題圍繞著這兩個密文運算的技巧討論相關的加密方案。接下來第二個研究的的主題是「基於公開金鑰密碼之密文相等性驗證」，「密文相等性驗證」是密文運算中一個基礎但重要的功能，經授權的測試者可以在不解密密文的前提下，驗證兩個加密後的訊息是否相等。此外，除了相等或不相等之外，測試者無法得知密文中的其他訊息。「基於公開金鑰密碼之密文相等性驗證」相當於在「公開金鑰密碼」的基礎上，再加上「授權」和「密文相等性驗證」的功能。其中「授權」的範圍和「授權」的設計，直接影響到該方案的實用性及安全性，本文提出三個關於「授權」的主題：「單一密文授權」、「相容性授權」和「語意安全授權」。第三個研究主題是「 可搜尋式加密系統」， 常被應用於以下情境：使用者一個檔案及數個「關鍵字」進行加密，然後儲存在雲端伺服器上。當使用者想要對加密檔案進行關鍵字搜尋時，他可以自訂幾個想搜尋的「關鍵字」並對雲端伺服器發出搜尋要求。在收到搜尋要求後，雖然關鍵字都是加密儲存，仍可利用「可搜尋式加密」技巧將符合關鍵字搜尋的檔案傳回給收件者。整個過程中檔案和關鍵字都被加密保護，伺服器無法得知其儲存及搜尋內容。本文提出兩個「 可搜尋式加密系統」，分別是「子集合式多關鍵字可搜尋式加密系統」和「基於通行碼的可搜尋式加密系統」 。 / This dissertation addresses the research about ciphertext computation skills over public key encryption and password-authenticated cryptosystems. The first topic is related to the public key encryption, the framework and security notions for public key encryption are revised; and two common ciphertext-computable public key encryptions including homomorphic encryption and commutative encryption are following discussed. The homomorphic encryption denotes computations over ciphertexts encrypted using the same public key. The homomorphic operation over ciphertexts may be equal to the encryption of a new message computed between two original messages. In terms of commutative encryption, it stands for a repeated encryption system that Alice’s ciphertext can be duplicated encrypted using Bob’s public key. A dual-receiver ciphertext will appear after the commutative encryption. Following, based on the public key encryption, the second topic focuses on the public key encryption with equality test schemes, the basic and fundamental ciphertext computation. Briefly, the user-authorized testers are able to verify the equivalence between messages hidden in ciphertexts after they acquire trapdoors from ciphertext receivers; and the ciphertexts were never decrypted in the whole equality testing process. The scope and architecture of the authorization directly influence the application and security for equality test schemes. Three authorizations including “cipher-bound authorization”, “compatible authorization” and “semantic secure authorization” will be proposed. The third topic is keyword search. It works in the following scenario: a user outsources encrypted files and encrypted keywords on a cloud file storage system; then, when needed, the user is able to request a search query to the file server, which is corresponding to some encrypted keywords. Although files and keywords are encrypted, the server is still able to verify the match-up and return related files to the user. Two researches about keyword search are proposed: the subset multi-keyword search based on public key encryption, and the password-authenticated keyword search.