The Internet of Things will include many resource-constrained lightweight wireless sensing devices, hungry for energy, bandwidth and compute cycles. The sheer amount of devices involved will require new solutions to handle issues such as identification and power provisioning. First, to simplify identity management, device identification is moving from symmetric-key solutions to public-key solutions. Second, to avoid the endless swapping of batteries, passively-powered energy harvesting solutions are preferred. In this contribution, we analyze some of the feasible solutions from this challenging design space. We have built an autonomous, energy-harvesting sensor node which includes a micro-controller, RF-unit, and energy harvester. We use it to analyze the computation and communication energy requirements for Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) with different security levels. The implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) on small microcontrollers is challenging. Most of the earlier literature has considered optimizing the performance of ECC (with respect to cycle count and software footprint) on a given architecture. This thesis addresses a different aspect of the resource-constrained ECC implementation wherein the most suitable architecture parameters are identified for any given application profile. At the high level, an application profile for an ECC-based lightweight device, such as wireless sensor node or RFID tag, is defined by the required security level, signature generation latency and the available energy/power budget. The target architecture parameters of interest include core-voltage, core-frequency, and/or the need for hardware acceleration. We present a methodology to derive and optimize the architecture parameters starting from the application requirements. We demonstrate our methodology on a MSP430F5438A microcontroller, and present the energy/architecture design space for 80-bit and 128-bit security-levels, for prime field curves secp160r1 and nistp256. Our results show that energy cost per authentication is minimized if a microcontroller is operated at the maximum possible frequency. This is because the energy consumed by leakage (i.e., static power dissipation) becomes proportionally less important as the runtime of the application decreases. Hence, in a given energy harvesting method, it is always better to wait as long as possible before initiating ECC computations which are completed at the highest frequency when sufficient energy is available. / Master of Science

The MiniCA project is proposed and developed to address growing demand for inexpensive access to security features such as privacy, strong authentication, and digital signatures. These features are integral to public-key encryption technologies. The audience for whom the software project is intended includes, technical staff requiring certificates for use in SSL applications (i.e. a secure web-site) at California State University, San Bernardino.

In this paper, new software and hardware designs for the NTRU Public Key Cryptosystem are proposed. The first design attempts to improve NTRU's polynomial multiplication through applying techniques from the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) to the convolution algorithm. Although the application of CRT shows promise for the creation of the inverse polynomials in the setup procedure, it does not provide any benefits to the procedures that are critical to the performance of NTRU (public key creation, encryption, and decryption). This research has identified that this is due to the small coefficients of one of the operands, which can be a common misunderstanding. The second design focuses on improving the performance of the polynomial multiplications within NTRU's key creation, encryption, and decryption procedures through hardware. This design exploits the inherent parallelism within a polynomial multiplication to make scalability possible. The advantage scalability provides is that it allows the user to customize the design for low and high power applications. In addition, the support for arbitrary precision allows the user to meet the desired security level. The third design utilizes the Montgomery Multiplication algorithm to develop an unified architecture that can perform a modular multiplication for GF(p) and GF(2^k) and a polynomial multiplication for NTRU. The unified design only requires an additional 10 gates in order for the Montgomery Multiplier core to compute the polynomial multiplication for NTRU. However, this added support for NTRU presents some restrictions on the supported lengths of the moduli and on the chosen value for the residue for the GF(p) and GF(2^k) cases. Despite these restrictions, this unified architecture is now capable of supporting public key operations for the majority of Public-Key Cryptosystems.

Les schémas de Chiffrement Complètement Homomorphe (FHE) permettent de manipuler des données chiffrées avec grande flexibilité : ils rendent possible l'évaluation de fonctions à travers les couches de chiffrement. Depuis la découverte du premier schéma FHE en 2009 par Craig Gentry, maintes recherches ont été effectuées pour améliorer l'efficacité, atteindre des nouveaux niveaux de sécurité, et trouver des applications et liens avec d'autres domaines de la cryptographie. Dans cette thèse, nous avons étudié en détail ce type de schémas. Nos contributions font état d'une nouvelle attaque de récuperation des clés au premier schéma FHE, et d'une nouvelle notion de sécurité en structures hierarchiques, évitant une forme de trahison entre les usagers tout en gardant la flexibilité FHE. Enfin, on décrit aussi des implémentations informatiques. Cette recherche a été effectuée au sein du Laboratoire de Mathématiques de Versailles avec le Prof. Louis Goubin. / Fully Homomorphic Encryption schemes allow public processing of encrypted data. Since the groundbreaking discovery of the first FHE scheme in 2009 by Craig Gentry, an impressive amount of research has been conducted to improve efficiency, achieve new levels of security, and describe real applications and connections to other areas of cryptography. In this Dissertation, we first give a detailed account on research these past years. Our contributions include a key-recovery attack on the ideal lattices FHE scheme and a new conception of hierarchic encryption, avoiding at some extent betrayal between users while maintaining the flexibility of FHE. We also describe some implementations. This research was done in the Laboratoire de Mathématiques de Versailles, under supervision of Prof. Louis Goubin.

The emerging Blockchain technology has the potential to shift the traditional centralized systems to become more flexible, efficient and decentralized. An important area to apply this capability is supply chain. Supply chain visibility and transparency has become an important aspect of a successful supply chain platform as it becomes more complex than ever before. The complexity comes from the number of participants involved and the intricate roles and relations among them. This puts more pressure on the system and the customers in terms of system availability and tamper-resistant data. This thesis presents a private and permisioned application that uses Blockchain and aims to automate the shipping processes among different participants in the supply chain ecosystem. Data in this private ledger is governed with the participants’ invocation of their smart contracts. These smart contracts are designed to satisfy the participants’ different roles in the supply chain. Moreover, this thesis discusses the performance measurements of this application results in terms of the transaction throughput, transaction average latency and resource utilization. / Graduate

We live in an age when our most private information is becoming exceedingly difficult to keep private. Cryptology allows for the creation of encryptive barriers that protect this information. Though the information is protected, it is not entirely inaccessible. A recipient may be able to access the information by decoding the message. This possible threat has encouraged cryptologists to evolve and complicate their encrypting methods so that future information can remain safe and become more difficult to decode. There are various methods of encryption that demonstrate how cryptology continues to evolve through time. These methods revolve around different areas of mathematics such as arithmetic, number theory, and probability. Another concern that has brought cryptology into everyday use and necessity is user authentication. How does one or a machine know that a user is who they say they are? Living in the age where most of our information is sent and accepted through computers, it is crucial that our information is kept safe, and in the appropriate care.

Counterfeit products, especially in the pharmaceutical sector, have plagued the international community for decades. To combat this problem, many anti-counterfeiting approaches have been proposed. They use either Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) or Near Field Communication (NFC) physical tags affixed to the products. Current anti-counterfeiting approaches detect two counterfeiting attacks: (1) modifications to a product's tag details, such as changing the expiration date; and (2) cloning of a genuine product's details to reuse on counterfeit products. In addition, these anti-counterfeiting approaches track-and-trace the physical locations of products as the products flow through supply chains. Existing approaches suffer from two main drawbacks. They cannot detect tag reapplication attacks, wherein a counterfeiter removes a legitimate tag from a genuine product and reapplies it to a counterfeit or expired product. Second, most existing approaches typically rely on a central server to authenticate products. This is not scalable and creates tremendous processing burden on the server, since significant volumes of products flood through the supply chain's nodes. In addition, centralized supply chains require substantial data storage to store authentication records for all products. Moreover, as with centralized systems, traditional supply chains inherently have the problem of a single-point of failure. The thesis of this dissertation is that a robust, scalable, counterfeiting-resistant supply chain that addresses the above drawbacks and can be simultaneously achieved by (i) using a combination of NFC tags on products and a distributed ledger such as blockchain for reapplication-proof, decentralized, and transparent product authentication (ii) a novel game-theoretical consensus protocol for enforcing true decentralization, and enhancing the protocol's security and performance. In this dissertation, we first propose a new Tag Reapplication Detection (TRD) system to detect reapplication attacks using low-cost NFC tags and public key cryptography. To detect reapplication attacks, TRD tracks the number of times a tag has been read in the supply chain using a 'central' authentication server. Second, leveraging the blockchain technology, we propose the Block-Supply Chain, a transformation of TRD into a decentralized supply chain. In this chain, each node maintains a blockchain (distributed public ledger) per product. This blockchain comprises chained blocks, where each is an authentication event. The Block-Supply Chain can detect tag reapplication attacks and can replace the centralized supply chain design, thus overcoming the centralization issues. One of the fundamental characteristics of blockchain technology is the consensus protocol. Consensus protocols ensure that all nodes in the blockchain network agree on the validity of a block to be included in the public ledger. The first and most popular of the existing consensus protocols is Proof of Work (PoW). However, PoW requires massive computational effort, resulting in high energy and computing resources consumption. Alternatively, Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocols, such as Tendermint, were adapted in blockchain technology to be efficient and easy to implement. Nevertheless, not all of BFT protocols guarantee true decentralization, and they are mostly based on fixed-validators. BFT fixed-validators protocols typically rely on fixed, static validators responsible for validating all newly proposed blocks. This opens the door for adversaries to launch several attacks on these validators, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and Eclipse attacks. In contrast, a truly decentralized protocol ensures that variable sets of anonymous validators execute the blocks' validations. Building on this observation, we propose the TrueBFT, a truly decentralized BFT-based consensus protocol that does not require PoW and randomly employs a different set of validators on each block's proposal. TrueBFT is designed for permissioned blockchains (in such blockchains, the participants who can transact on the blockchain are limited, and each participant is required to have permission to join the system). Our simulations show that TrueBFT offers remarkable performance with a satisfactory level of security compared to the state-of-the-art protocol Tendermint. Another issue with current consensus protocols, particularly the BFT, is that the majority of them do not take the number of employed validators into consideration. The number of validators in a blockchain network influences its security and performance substantially. In response, we integrate a game theoretical model into TrueBFT that analyzes the risk likelihood of each proposer (i.e., the node that creates and proposes the new block). Consequently, each time a new block is proposed, the 'number of validators' becomes proportional to the risk likelihood block's proposer. Additionally, the game model reinforces the honest behavior of the validators by rewarding honest validators and punishing dishonest ones. Together, TRD, Block-Supply Chain, and the game-theoretical TrueBFT consensus protocol enable robust, scalable, decentralized anti-counterfeiting supply chain that is resistant to tag reapplication attacks, as well as attacks to consensus protocols such as DDoS and Eclipse attacks.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 130-140) and index.

M. Tech. Electrical Engineering. / Proposes a public-key encryption scheme based on Qi hyperchaos, which is considered much better than chaos and other hyperchaos in terms of pseudo-randomness. In an environment where digital information is being extensively used, a cat map based hyperchaotic system is proposed. This map is used to design the public key encryption scheme that uses private keys, public keys and shared private keys. This encryption is tested successfully on text messages and images. The application of the hyperchaos-based scheme on a web server client platform concludes this work. MATLAB is used for simulation. PHP, HTML, and C are used in the development of the web form and the chat application.

Esta dissertação apresenta o desenvolvimento de um novo algoritmo de criptografia de chave pública. Este algoritmo apresenta duas características que o tornam único, e que foram tomadas como guia para a sua concepção. A primeira característica é que ele é semanticamente seguro. Isto significa que nenhum adversário limitado polinomialmente consegue obter qualquer informação parcial sobre o conteúdo que foi cifrado, nem mesmo decidir se duas cifrações distintas correspondem ou não a um mesmo conteúdo. A segunda característica é que ele depende, para qualquer tamanho de texto claro, de uma única premissa de segurança: que o logaritmo no grupo formado pelos pontos de uma curva elíptica de ordem prima seja computacionalmente intratável. Isto é obtido garantindo-se que todas as diferentes partes do algoritmo sejam redutíveis a este problema. É apresentada também uma forma simples de estendê-lo a fim de que ele apresente segurança contra atacantes ativos, em especial, contra ataques de texto cifrado adaptativos. Para tanto, e a fim de manter a premissa de que a segurança do algoritmo seja unicamente dependente do logaritmo elíptico, é apresentada uma nova função de resumo criptográfico (hash) cuja segurança é baseada no mesmo problema. / This dissertation presents the development of a new public key algorithm. This algorithm has two key features, which were taken to be a goal from the start. The first feature is that it is semantically secure. That means that no polynomially bounded adversary can extract any partial information about the plaintext from the ciphertext, not even decide if two different ciphertexts correspond to the same plaintext. The second feature of the algorithm is that it depends on only one security assumption: that it is computationally unfeasible to calculate the logarithm on the group formed by the points of a prime order elliptic curve. That is achieved by ensuring that all parts of the algorithm are reducible to that problem. Also, it is presented a way to extend the algorithm so that it the resists attacks of an active adversary, in special, against an adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack. In order to do that, and attain to the assumption that only the assumption of the logarithm is necessary, it is introduced a new hash function with strength based of the same problem.