Biometric data offer a potential source of high-entropy, secret information that can be used in cryptographic protocols provided two issues are addressed: (1) biometric data are not uniformly distributed; and (2) they are not exactly reproducible. Recent work, most notably that of Dodis, Reyzin, and Smith, has shown how these obstacles may be overcome by allowing some auxiliary public information to be reliably sent from a server to the human user. Subsequent work of Boyen has shown how to extend these techniques, in the random oracle model, to enable unidirectional authentication from the user to the server without the assumption of a reliable communication channel.

We show two efficient techniques enabling the use of biometric data to achieve mutual authentication or authenticated key exchange over a completely insecure (i.e., adversarially controlled) channel. In addition to achieving stronger security guarantees than the work of Boyen, we improve upon his solution in a number of other respects: we tolerate a broader class of errors and, in one case, improve upon the parameters of his solution and give a proof of security in the standard model.

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Secure remote authentication using biometric data

The telecare medicine information system enables or supports health-care delivery services. In recent years, the increased availability of lower-cost telecommunications systems and custom made physiological monitoring devices for patients have made it possible to bring the advantages of telemedicine directly into the patient's home. These systems are moving towards an environment where automated patient medical records and electronically interconnected telecare facilities are prevalent. A secure authentication scheme will thus be needed to safeguard data integrity, confidentiality, and availability. Many schemes based on cryptography have been proposed for the goals. However, much of the schemes are vulnerable to various attacks, and are neither efficient, nor user friendly. Specially, in terms of efficiency, some schemes need the exponential computation resulting in high time cost. Therefore, we propose a novel authentication scheme that is added the pre-computing idea within the communication process to avoid the time-consuming exponential computations. Finally, it is shown to be more secure and practical for telecare medicine environments.

A Secure Authentication Scheme for Telecare Medicine Information Systems

Encrypting data on client-side before uploading it to a cloud storage is essential for protecting users' privacy. However client-side encryption is at odds with the standard practice of deduplication. Reconciling client-side encryption with cross-user deduplication is an active research topic. We present the first secure cross-user deduplication scheme that supports client-side encryption without requiring any additional independent servers. Interestingly, the scheme is based on using a PAKE (password authenticated key exchange) protocol. We demonstrate that our scheme provides better security guarantees than previous efforts. We show both the effectiveness and the efficiency of our scheme, via simulations using realistic datasets and an implementation.

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Secure Deduplication of Encrypted Data without Additional Independent Servers

We present a non-malleable commitment scheme that retains its security properties even when concurrently executed a polynomial number of times. That is, a man-in-the-middle adversary who is simultaneously participating in multiple concurrent commitment phases of our scheme, both as a sender and as a receiver cannot make the values he commits to depend on the values he receives commitments to. Our result is achieved without assuming an a-priori bound on the number of executions and without relying on any set-up assumptions. Our construction relies on the existence of standard collision resistant hash functions and only requires a constant number of communication rounds.

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Concurrent non-malleable commitments

We study the question of basing symmetric key cryptography on weak secrets. In this setting, Alice and Bob share an n-bit secret W, which might not be uniformly random, but the adversary has at least k bits of uncertainty about it (formalized using conditional min-entropy). Since standard symmetric-key primitives require uniformly random secret keys, we would like to construct an authenticated key agreement protocol in which Alice and Bob use W to agree on a nearly uniform key R, by communicating over a public channel controlled by an active adversary Eve. We study this question in the information theoretic setting where the attacker is computationally unbounded. We show that single-round (i.e. one message) protocols do not work when k ≤ n/2, and require poor parameters even when n/2

/pdf/non-malleable-extractors-and-symmetric-key-cryptography-from-51ckcvi5ct.pdf

Non-malleable extractors and symmetric key cryptography from weak secrets

We propose and realize a definition of security for password-based key exchange within the framework of universally composable (UC) security, thus providing security guarantees under arbitrary composition with other protocols. In addition, our definition captures some aspects of the problem that were not adequately addressed by most prior notions. For instance, it does not assume any underlying probability distribution on passwords, nor does it assume independence between passwords chosen by different parties. We also formulate a definition of password-based secure channels, and show that such a definition is achievable given password-based key exchange.

Our protocol realizing the new definition of password-based key exchange is in the common reference string model and relies on standard number-theoretic assumptions. The components of our protocol can be instantiated to give a relatively efficient solution which is conceivably usable in practice. We also show that it is impossible to satisfy our definition in the “plain” model (e.g., without a common reference string).

/pdf/universally-composable-password-based-key-exchange-4nq14bkkgm.pdf

Universally composable password-based key exchange

We propose and realize a definition of security for password-based key exchange within the framework of universal composability (UC), thus providing security guarantees under arbitrary composition with other protocols. In addition, our definition captures some aspects of the problem that were not adequately addressed by most prior notions. For instance, our definition does not assume any underlying probability distribution on passwords, nor does it assume independence between passwords chosen by different parties. We also formulate a definition of password-based secure channels, and show how to realize such channels given any passwordbased key exchange protocol. The password-based key exchange protocol shown here is in the common reference string model and relies on standard number-theoretic assumptions. The components of our protocol can be instantiated to give a relatively efficient solution which is conceivably usable in practice. We also show that it is impossible to satisfy our definition in the “plain” model (e.g., without a common reference string).

/pdf/universally-composable-password-based-key-exchange-1aom2omjys.pdf

Phil Mackenzie

Papers

Universally composable password-based key exchange

Universally Composable Password-Based Key Exchange.