M.Com. (Informatics) / Cyber issues are global phenomena in a world of inter-related systems, and as such, the discussion on cybersecurity frameworks, policies and strategies inevitably requires reference to, and benchmarking with regional, continental and global trends and solutions. This, in the context of the effects of globalisation on developing countries, with specific reference to areas such as Africa as a developing continent with regard to the protection of its cyberspace. More drastic measures, such as the utilization of cyber warfare techniques and pre-emptive cyber strike-teams in addition to traditional cybersecurity mechanisms as an essential part of a national security effort to protect cyberspace has become more prevalent within the developed worlds. Likewise, developing nations need to gear themselves in a structured, coordinated and responsible way in order to do their part to secure their own environments. Cyberspace is a dynamic global environment with cyber related issues being a global concern. Although countries generally regulate their own cyber environment through policy; cross-border cyber issues are difficult to resolve and the lack of international cyber laws impede cybersecurity efforts. Cybercrime and the management of cross-border cyber incidents are becoming a growing national security concern as the lack of effective controls leave critical infrastructure and the cyber-connected environment vulnerable to attack. Some developing countries are on track with the maturity of their cybersecurity initiatives, but appropriate cybersecurity frameworks for many developing countries require careful consideration, especially due to the lack of resources, infrastructure and local technology development capabilities.

Consider a scenario where a server S shares a symmetric key kU with each user U. Building on a 2-party solution of Bohli et al., we describe an authenticated 3-party key establishment which remains secure if a computational Bilinear Diffie Hellman problem is hard or the server is uncorrupted. If the BDH assumption holds during a protocol execution, but is invalidated later, entity authentication and integrity of the protocol are still guaranteed. Key establishment protocols based on hardness assumptions, such as discrete logarithm problem (DLP) and integer factorization problem (IFP) are vulnerable to quantum computer attacks, whereas the protocols based on other hardness assumptions, such as conjugacy search problem and decomposition search problem can resist such attacks. The existing protocols based on the hardness assumptions which can resist quantum computer attacks are only passively secure. Compilers are used to convert a passively secure protocol to an actively secure protoc ol. Compilers involve some tools such as, signature scheme and a collision-resistant hash function. If there are only passively secure protocols but not a signature scheme based on same assumption then the application of existing compilers requires the use of such tools based on different assumptions. But the introduction of new tools, based on different assumptions, makes the new actively secure protocol rely on more than one hardness assumptions. We offer an approach to derive an actively secure two-party protocol from a passively secure two-party protocol without introducing further hardness assumptions. This serves as a useful formal tool to transform any basic algebric method of public key cryptography to the real world applicaticable cryptographic scheme. In a recent preprint, Vivek et al. propose a compiler to transform a passively secure 3-party key establishment to a passively secure group key establishment. To achieve active security, they apply this compiler to Joux's / protoc ol and apply a construction by Katz and Yung, resulting in a 3-round group key establishment. In this reserach, we show how Joux's protocol can be extended to an actively secure group key establishment with two rounds. The resulting solution is in the standard model, builds on a bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption and offers forward security as well as strong entity authentication. If strong entity authentication is not required, then one half of the participants does not have to send any message in the second round, which may be of interest for scenarios where communication efficiency is a main concern. / by Kashi Neupane. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2012. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

The aim of this work is to investigate a security model in which we allow an adversary to have access to functions of the secret key. In recent years, significant progress has been made in understanding the security of encryption schemes in the presence of key-dependent plaintexts or messages (known as KDM). Here, we motivate and explore the security of a setting, where an adversary against a message authentication code (MAC) or signature scheme can access signatures on key-dependent messages. We propose a way to formalize the security of message authentication schemes in the presence of key-dependent MACs (KD-EUF) and of signature schemes in the presence of key-dependent signatures (KDS). An attack on a message recognition protocol involving a MAC is presented. It turns out that the situation is quite different from key-dependent encryption: To achieve KD-EUF-security or KDS-security under non-adaptive chosen message attacks, the use of a stateful signing algorithm is inevitable even in the random oracle model. After discussing the connection between key-dependent signing and forward security, we describe a compiler which lifts any EUF-CMA secure one-time signature scheme to a forward secure signature scheme offering KDS-CMA security. Then, we discuss how aggregate signatures can be used to combine the signatures in the certificate chain used in the compiler. A natural question arises about how to combine the security definitions of KDM and KDS to come up with a signcryption scheme that is secure. We also offer a connection with Leakage-Resilient Signatures, which take into account side-channel attacks. Lastly, we present some open problems for future research. / by Madeline Gonzalez. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Neste trabalho, é proposto um esquema de cifragem e decifragem baseado em uma nova técnica de contraste de fase. Esta nova técnica, denominada \"técnica de contraste de fase de ordem zero\", transforma a modulação de fase para intensidade sem a necessidade de uma placa de alteração de fase (dot dielétrico de fase) no plano de Fourier de um correlator óptico 4f. Um processo de codificação, que não utiliza qualquer cálculo iterativo, é aplicado diretamente em uma imagem em níveis de cinza para gerar uma distribuição de fase. Em seguida, um processo de cifragem é realizado através da multiplicação da distribuição de fase por uma distribuição de fase aleatória. A vantagem deste método é o fácil esquema para recuperar a informação em níveis de cinza a partir da máscara de fase decifrada. A máscara de fase cifrada e a chave do sistema foram implementadas em SLMs (Spatial Light Modulators) do tipo LCTV (Liquid Crystal TV). As formas de codificação da imagem em níveis de cinza para gerar as máscaras de fase também foram investigadas. Como resultado, foram implementados dois tipos de EODs (Elementos Ópticos Difrativos) de fase. Um deles funciona no modo de transmissão, o outro, no modo de reflexão. Resultados experimentais mostram a aplicação da técnica de contraste de fase de ordem zero na visualização da informação codificada, tanto em SLM quanto em EODs de fase, e na verificação de padrões cifrados. / In this work, an encryption and decryption scheme based on a new phase contrast technique is proposed. This new technique, called the zero order phase contrast technique, transforma the phase modulation to intensity without the necessity of a phase-changing plate (phase dielectric dot) on the Fourier plane of a 4f optical correlator. A codification process, which does not use any iterative calculation, is applied directly in a gray level image to generate a phase distribution. After this, an encryption process is applied multiplying the phase distribution by a random phase distribution. The advantage of this method is the easy scheme to recover the gray level information from the decryption phase mask. The encrypted phase mask and the key of the system were implemented on Spatial Light Modulators of the kind LCTV. The encoding ways were investigated to generate the phase masks from gray level image, by implementing two kinds of phase Diffractive Optical Elements, operating in transmission and reflection modes. Experimental results show the successfully application of the zero order phase contrast technique in the visualization of encoded information both in Spatial Light Modulators and in phase only Diffractive Optical Elements as well as in the verification of encrypted patterns.

This thesis looks at the problem of discovering nearby friends and nearby places of interest in a privacy-preserving way using location-based services on mobile devices (e.g., smartphones). First, we propose a privacy-preserving protocol for the discovery of nearby friends. In this scenario, Alice wants to verify whether any of her friends are close to her or not. This should be done without disclosing any information about Alice to her friends and also any of the other parties’ information to Alice. We also demonstrate that our approach can be efficiently applied to other similar problems; in particular, we use it to provide a solution to the socialist millionaires' problem. Second, we propose a privacy-preserving protocol for discovering nearby places of interest. In this scenario, the proposed protocol allows Alice to learn whether there is any place that she is looking for near her. However, the location-based service (LBS) that tries to help Alice to find nearby places does not learn Alice’s location. Alice can send a request to the LBS database to retrieve nearby places of interest (POIs) without the database learning what Alice fetched by using private information retrieval (PIR). Our approach reduces the client side computational overhead by applying the grid square system and the POI types ideas to block-based PIR schemes to make it suitable for LBS smartphone applications. We also show our second approach is flexible and can support all types of block-based PIR schemes. As an item of independent interest, we also propose the idea of adding a machine learning algorithm to our nearby friends’ Android application to estimate the validity of a user's claimed location to prevent users from sending a fake location to the LBS application.

<div>Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are aircrafts without a human pilot aboard. The flight of drones can be controlled with a remote control by an operator located at the ground station, or fully autonomously by onboard computers. Drones are mostly found in the military. However, over the recent years, they have attracted the interest of industry and civilian sectors. <br></div><div>With the recent advance of sensor and embedded device technologies, various sensors will be embedded in city infrastructure to monitor various city-related information. In this context, drones can be effectively utilized in many safety-critical applications for collecting data from sensors on the ground and transmitting configuration instructions or task requests to these sensors.</div><div> <br></div><div>However, drones, like many networked devices, are vulnerable to cyber and physical attacks.<br></div><div>Challenges for secure drone applications can be divided in four aspects: 1) securing communication between drones and sensors, 2) securing sensor localization when drones locate sensors, 3) providing secure drone platforms to protect sensitive data against physical capture attacks and detect modifications to drone software, and 4) protecting secret keys in drones under white-box attack environments.<br></div><div> <br></div><div>To address the first challenge, a suite of cryptographic protocols is proposed. The protocols are based on certificateless cryptography and support authenticated key agreement, non-repudiation and user revocation. To minimize the energy required by a drone, a dual channel strategy is introduced.<br></div><div>To address the second challenge, a drone positioning strategy and a technique that can filter out malicious location references are proposed.<br></div><div>The third challenge is addressed by a solution integrating techniques for software-based attestation and data encryption.<br></div><div>For attestation, free memory spaces are filled with pseudo-random numbers, which are also utilized to encrypt data collected by the drone like a stream cipher.<br></div>A dynamic white-box encryption scheme is proposed to address the fourth challenge. Short secret key are converted into large look-up tables and the tables are periodically shuffled by a shuffling mechanism which is secure against white-box attackers.

<div> <div> <div> <p>Organizations today collect and aggregate huge amounts of data from individuals under various scenarios and for different purposes. Such aggregation of individuals’ data when combined with techniques of data analytics allows organizations to make informed decisions and predictions. But in many situations, different portions of the data associated with individuals are collected and curated by different organizations. To derive more accurate conclusions and predictions, those organization may want to conduct the analysis based on their joint data, which cannot be simply accomplished by each organization exchanging its own data with other organizations due to the sensitive nature of data. Developing approaches for collaborative privacy-preserving data analytics, however, is a nontrivial task. At least two major challenges have to be addressed. The first challenge is that the security of the data possessed by each organization should always be properly protected during and after the collaborative analysis process, whereas the second challenge is the high computational complexity usually accompanied by cryptographic primitives used to build such privacy-preserving protocols. </p><p><br></p><p> </p><div> <div> <div> <p>In this dissertation, based on widely adopted primitives in cryptography, we address the aforementioned challenges by developing techniques for data analytics that not only allow multiple mutually distrustful parties to perform data analysis on their joint data in a privacy-preserving manner, but also reduce the time required to complete the analysis. More specifically, using three common data analytics tasks as concrete examples, we show how to construct the respective privacy-preserving protocols under two different scenarios: (1) the protocols are executed by a collaborative process only involving the participating parties; (2) the protocols are outsourced to some service providers in the cloud. Two types of optimization for improving the efficiency of those protocols are also investigated. The first type allows each participating party access to a statistically controlled leakage so as to reduce the amount of required computation, while the second type utilizes the parallelism that could be incorporated into the task and pushes some computation to the offline phase to reduce the time needed for each participating party without any additional leakage. Extensive experiments are also conducted on real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed techniques.<br></p> <p> </p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div>

Le champ du traitement des images et des vidéos attire l'attention depuis les deux dernières décennies. Ce champ couvre maintenant un spectre énorme d'applications comme la TV 3D, la télé-surveillance, la vision par ordinateur, l'imagerie médicale, la compression, la transmission, etc. En ce début de vingt et unième siècle nous sommes témoins d'une révolution importante. Les largeurs de bande des réseaux, les capacités de mémoire et les capacités de calcul ont été fortement augmentés durant cette période. Un client peut avoir un débit de plus de 100~mbps tandis qu'un autre peut utiliser une ligne à 56~kbps. Simultanément, un client peut avoir un poste de travail puissant, tandis que d'autres peuvent avoir juste un téléphone mobile. Au milieu de ces extrêmes, il y a des milliers de clients avec des capacités et des besoins très variables. De plus, les préférences d'un client doivent s'adapter à sa capacité, par exemple un client handicapé par sa largeur de bande peut être plus intéressé par une visualisation en temps réel sans interruption que d'avoir une haute résolution. Pour y faire face, des architectures hiérarchiques de codeurs vidéo ont été introduites afin de comprimer une seule fois, et de décomprimer de différentes manières. Comme la DCT n'a pas la fonctionnalité de multi-résolution, une architecture vidéo hiérarchique est conçue pour faire face aux défis des largeurs de bande et des puissances de traitement hétérogènes. Avec l'inondation des contenus numériques, qui peuvent être facilement copiés et modifiés, le besoin de la protection des contenus vidéo a pris plus d'importance. La protection de vidéos peut être réalisée avec l'aide de trois technologies : le tatouage de méta-données et l'insertion de droits d'auteur, le cryptage pour limiter l'accès aux personnes autorisées et la prise des empreintes digitales active pour le traçage de traître. L'idée principale dans notre travail est de développer des technologies de protection transparentes à l'utilisateur. Cela doit aboutir ainsi à un codeur vidéo modifié qui sera capable de coder et d'avoir un flux de données protégé. Puisque le contenu multimédia hiérarchique a déjà commencé à voir le jour, algorithmes pour la protection indépendante de couches d 'amélioration sont également proposées. / Field of image and video processing has got lot of attention during the last two decades. This field now covers a vast spectrum of applications like 3D TV, tele-surveillance, computer vision, medical imaging, compression, transmission and much more. Of particular interest is the revolution being witnessed by the first decade of twenty-first century. Network bandwidths, memory capacities and computing efficiencies have got revolutionized during this period. One client may have a 100~mbps connection whereas the other may be using a 56~kbps dial up modem. Simultaneously, one client may have a powerful workstation while others may have just a smart-phone. In between these extremes, there may be thousands of clients with varying capabilities and needs. Moreover, the preferences of a client may adapt to his capacity, e.g. a client handicapped by bandwidth may be more interested in real-time visualization without interruption than in high resolution. To cope with it, scalable architectures of video codecs have been introduced to 'compress once, decompress many ways' paradigm. Since DCT lacks the multi-resolution functionality, a scalable video architecture is designed to cope with challenges of heterogeneous nature of bandwidth and processing power. With the inundation of digital content, which can be easily copied and modified, the need for protection of video content has got attention. Video protection can be materialized with help of three technologies: watermarking for meta data and copyright insertion, encryption to restrict access to authorized persons, and active fingerprinting for traitor tracing. The main idea in our work is to make the protection technology transparent to the user. This would thus result in a modified video codec which will be capable of encoding and playing a protected bitstream. Since scalable multimedia content has already started coming to the market, algorithms for independent protection of enhancement layers are also proposed.

Reticulados têm sido aplicados de diferentes maneiras em criptografia. Inicialmente utilizados para a destruição de criptossistemas, eles foram posteriormente aplicados na construção de novos esquemas, incluindo criptossistemas assimétricos, esquemas de assinatura cega e os primeiros métodos para encriptação completamente homomórfica. Contudo, seu desempenho ainda é proibitivamente lenta em muitos casos. Neste trabalho, expandimos técnicas originalmente desenvolvidas para encriptação homomórfica, tornando-as mais genéricas e aplicando-as no esquema GGH-YK-M, um esquema de encriptação de chave pública, e no esquema LMSV, a única construção homomórfica que não sucumbiu a ataques de recuperação de chaves IND-CCA1 até o momento. Em nossos testes, reduzimos o tamanho das chaves do GGH-YK-M em uma ordem de complexidade, especificamente, de O(n2 lg n) para O(n lg n), onde n é um parâmetro público do esquema. A nova técnica também atinge processamento mais rápido em todas as operações envolvidas em um criptossistema assimétrico, isto é, geração de chaves, encriptação e decriptação. A melhora mais significativa é na geração de chaves, que se torna mais de 3 ordens de magnitude mais rápida que resultados anteriores, enquanto a encriptação se torna por volta de 2 ordens de magnitude mais rápida. Para decriptação, nossa implementação é dez vezes mais rápida que a literatura. Também mostramos que é possível aumentar a segurança do esquema LMSV contra os ataques quânticos de recuperação de chaves recentemente publicados pela agência britânica GCHQ. Isso é feito através da adoção de reticulados não-ciclotômicos baseados em anéis polinomiais irredutíveis quase-circulantes. Em nossa implementação, o desempenho da encriptação é virtualmente idêntico, e a decriptação torna-se ligeiramente inferior, um pequeno preço a se pagar pelo aumento de segurança. A geração de chaves, porém, é muito mais lenta, devido à necessidade de se utilizar um método mais genérico e caro. A existência de métodos dedicados altamente eficientes para a geração de chaves nesta variante mais segura do LMSV permanece como um problema em aberto. / Lattices have been applied in many different ways in cryptography. Firstly used for the destruction of cryptosystems, they were later applied in the construction of new schemes, including asymmetric cryptosystems, blind signature schemes and the first methods for fully homomorphic encryption. Nonetheless, performance is still prohibitively slow in many cases. In this work, we expand techniques originally devised for homomorphic encryption, making them more general and applying them to the GGH-YK-M cryptosystem, a lattice-based public-key cryptosystem, and to the LMSV scheme, the only known homomorphic scheme that has not succumbed to INDCCA1 key recovery attacks to this date. In our tests, we reduce public key bandwidth occupation of GGH-YK-M by an order of complexity, specifically, from O(n2 lg n) down to O(n lg n) bits, where n is a public parameter of the scheme. The new technique also attains faster processing in all operations involved in an asymmetric cryptosystem, that is, key generation, encryption, and decryption. The most significant improvement in performance is in key generation, which becomes more than 3 orders of magnitude faster than previous results, while encryption becomes about 2 orders of magnitude faster. For decryption, our implementation is ten times faster than the literature. We also show that it is possible to improve security of LMSV against the quantum key recovery attacks recently published by British GCHQ.We do so by adopting non-cyclotomic lattices based on nearly-circulant irreducible polynomial rings. In our implementation, performance of encryption remains virtually the same, and decryption becomes slightly worse, a small price to pay for the improved security. Key generation, however, is much slower, due to the fact that it is necessary to use a more generic and expensive method. The existence of highly effcient dedicated methods for key generation of this secure variant of LMSV remains as an open problem.

Finite elds of the form F2m play an important role in coding theory and cryptography. We show that the choice of how to represent the elements of these elds can have a signi cant impact on the resource requirements for quantum arithmetic. In particular, we show how the Gaussian normal basis representations and \ghost-bit basis" representations can be used to implement inverters with a quantum circuit of depth O(mlog(m)). To the best of our knowledge, this is the rst construction with subquadratic depth reported in the literature. Our quantum circuit for the computation of multiplicative inverses is based on the Itoh-Tsujii algorithm which exploits the property that, in a normal basis representation, squaring corresponds to a permutation of the coe cients. We give resource estimates for the resulting quantum circuit for inversion over binary elds F2m based on an elementary gate set that is useful for fault-tolerant implementation. Elliptic curves over nite elds F2m play a prominent role in modern cryptography. Published quantum algorithms dealing with such curves build on a short Weierstrass form in combination with a ne or projective coordinates. In this thesis we show that changing the curve representation allows a substantial reduction in the number of T-gates needed to implement the curve arithmetic. As a tool, we present a quantum circuit for computing multiplicative inverses in F2m in depth O(mlogm) using a polynomial basis representation, which may be of independent interest. Finally, we change our focus from the design of circuits which aim at attacking computational assumptions on asymmetric cryptographic algorithms to the design of a circuit attacking a symmetric cryptographic algorithm. We consider a block cipher, SERPENT, and our design of a quantum circuit implementing this cipher to be used for a key attack using Grover's algorithm as in [18]. This quantum circuit is essential for understanding the complexity of Grover's algorithm. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection