We give a provable-security treatment for the key-wrap problem, providing definitions, constructions, and proofs. We suggest that key-wrap's goal is security in the sense of deterministic authenticated-encryption (DAE), a notion that we put forward. We also provide an alternative notion, a pseudorandom injection (PRI), which we prove to be equivalent. We provide a DAE construction, SIV, analyze its concrete security, develop a blockcipher-based instantiation of it, and suggest that the method makes a desirable alternative to the schemes of the X9.102 draft standard. The construction incorporates a method to turn a PRF that operates on a string into an equally efficient PRF that operates on a vector of strings, a problem of independent interest. Finally, we consider IV-based authenticated-encryption (AE) schemes that are maximally forgiving of repeated IVs, a goal we formalize as misuse-resistant AE. We show that a DAE scheme with a vector-valued header, such as SIV, directly realizes this goal.

A provable-security treatment of the key-wrap problem

Annex I. Treaty On Principles Governing The Activities Of States In The Exploration And Use Of Outer Space, Including The Moon And Other Celestial Bodies

The treaty on the Moon is not revolutionary but it embodies the legal rule for future activities of man on the Moon as opposed to the Space Treaty of 1967 which was too general. The new text is conservative but still allows some room for the developing States as in the law of the sea. The Moon is declared the "Common Heritage of Mankind" but the regime of exploitation of its resources is still blurred with imprecise guidelines still needing to be developed. The two superpowers cannot as in the past, ignore the rest of the world in the conquest of space and the fact that the U.N. is the depositary for ratifications, and not the two superpowers as in previous treaties, is the first sign of wider participation in the creation of Space Law.

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Agreement governing the activities of states on the Moon and other celestial bodies

When the impact risk from meteoroids and orbital debris is assessed the main concern is usually structural damage. With their high impact velocities of typically 10–20 km/s millimeter or centimeter sized objects can puncture pressure vessels and other walls or lead to destruction of complete subsystems or even whole spacecraft. Fortunately chances of collisions with such larger objects are small (at least at present). However, particles in the size range 1–100 μm are far more abundant than larger objects and every orbiting spacecraft will encounter them with certainty. Every solar cell (8 cm2 area) of the Hubble Space Telescope encountered on average 12 impacts during its 8.25 years of space exposure. Most were from micron sized particles. Micron sized particles are believed to have permanently damaged pixels of Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) of the XMM-Newton telescope on at least five occasions. Many shuttle windows have been replaced when showing impact craters, which resulted from sub-millimeter sized particles. Impacts from small sized particles can lead to momentum transfer sufficient to disrupt accurate formation flying as is planned for several future space missions. Numerous small impacts lead to degradation of sensors and of surface properties. Even small punctures of protective layers can lead to much larger damage by subsequent penetration of reactive plasma or gases. Future large sensors, which are freely exposed to space or just shielded by foils, like e.g. on the XEUS and GAIA space missions, will have to cope with frequent impacts from small particles. In addition, impacts by sub-millimeter sized particles can cause indirect disturbances or damage by e.g. creation of impact ionisation plasma or by triggering electrostatic discharges of pre-charged surfaces. The paper presents on overview and discussion of the various effects of hypervelocity impacts from small particles.

Impact effects from small size meteoroids and space debris

Fifth generation (5G) mobile communication systems have entered the stage of commercial deployment, providing users with new services, improved user experiences as well as a host of novel opportunities to various industries. However, 5G still faces many challenges. To address these challenges, international industrial, academic, and standards organizations have commenced research on sixth generation (6G) wireless communication systems. A series of white papers and survey papers have been published, which aim to define 6G in terms of requirements, application scenarios, key technologies, etc. Although ITU-R has been working on the 6G vision and it is expected to reach a consensus on what 6G will be by mid-2023, the related global discussions are still wide open and the existing literature has identified numerous open issues. This paper first provides a comprehensive portrayal of the 6G vision, technical requirements, and application scenarios, covering the current common understanding of 6G. Then, a critical appraisal of the 6G network architecture and key technologies is presented. Furthermore, existing testbeds and advanced 6G verification platforms are detailed for the first time. In addition, future research directions and open challenges are identified to stimulate the on-going global debate. Finally, lessons learned to date concerning 6G networks are discussed.

On the Road to 6G: Visions, Requirements, Key Technologies, and Testbeds

Over the past 60 years, satellite technology has demonstrated its usefulness successfully. However, this usefulness is at stake from a future point of view, due to the well-admitted orbital/space debris threat. This article thoroughly reviews all aspects of space debris issue including causes, amount and sizes of orbital debris, potential threats, counter-strategies with their latest status and related legal issues to highlight the criticality and urgency of the problem. This review elaborates the fact that despite all the worries and threats, the efforts to confront this challenge are considerably insufficient until today. This bitter reality demands for at-least curtailing the number of future launches to ensure the long-term sustainability of space, until the improvement in debris situation. However, contradictory to this necessity, large satellite constellations have been proposed that can drastically increase the existing orbital population in coming years. This approach will certainly not help in improving the space environment in the future; instead, it can worsen the space environment situation as recent studies shows. Also, space resources (i.e. orbital slots and frequencies) are limited to accommodate many more satellite projects from commercial and government organization in the future. So, there is a serious question of how the space industry can move forward to maintain a balance in controlling the future number of the satellite while accommodating many commercial or government space entities. This article also identifies two optimized approaches as a way forward for future satellite projects that can also enhance the effectiveness of space technology in the future.

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Orbital Debris Threat for Space Sustainability and Way Forward (Review Article)

Ethereum accelerates the transaction process through a quicker block creation design. Since the time interval between the generation of blocks is very short (about 15s), block propagation time in an inefficient network is not negligible compared with the block time interval. This lead to the production of a large number of orphan blocks. In order to solve the security problems that may be caused by the orphan block and improve the transaction processing efficiency, Ethereum introduces the uncle block mechanism, i.e., an orphan block may get part of minted reward if it gets a reference by a regular block. In this paper, we show the weakness of the uncle block mechanism. Firstly, we describe the specific differences of Ethereum selfish and stubborn mining in every state from the ones in Bitcoin. Secondly, we simulate possible attacks, and the results show that the Ethereum selfish and stubborn mining strategies not only increase the reward of an attacker but also decrease the security threshold. The security threshold refers to the proportion of the attacker's computational power that needs to be achieved in order to obtain a higher reward than he should. In a practical network congestion rate, the security threshold are weakened to 0.129 and 0.216 against the Lead stubborn mining strategy and the original selfish mining strategy, respectively. When the congestion rate is rising, the reward is increasing and the threshold is decreasing. Thirdly, possible strategies are evaluated to find out the optimal one in different settings. Fourthly, we also extend the evaluation by combining three eclipse attack strategies with selfish or stubborn mining. Most of combinations bring more advantages to an attacker than a single strategy.

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An Evaluation of Uncle Block Mechanism Effect on Ethereum Selfish and Stubborn Mining Combined With an Eclipse Attack

Due to various critical aspects of information security, using Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) in many real-world communication applications is advantageous. Satellite communication is also among those applications where communication security is vital; hence, PFS is valuable. Security protocols are widely used to exchange session keys after authentication in many applications. However, the majority of existing security protocols use cryptographic algorithms (e.g., asymmetric/symmetric encryption and hash function to ensure the security of the protocol, which results in slow processing. Also, most of them require the exchange of several messages, which result in additional delay in communication and waste of bandwidth in terms of exchange of additional data. This paper presents a new authentication and key sharing protocol, which is much simpler and lighter hence faster than other protocols and still very secure because of having security comparable to that of theoretically secure One Time Pad.

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A Lightweight Authentication and Key Sharing Protocol for Satellite Communication

High-speed data communication is becoming essential for many applications, including satellite communication. The security algorithms associated with the communication of information are also required to have high-speed for coping up with the communication speed. Moreover, the Authenticated Encryption (AE) algorithms provide high-speed communication and security services include data encryption, authentication, and integrity. The AE algorithms are available with serial and parallel architectures; among them, the Galois Counter Mode (GCM) algorithm has a parallel architecture. The Synthetic Initialization Vector (SIV) mode in the AES-GCM-SIV algorithm provides the nonce misuse protection using the GCM algorithm. Besides, reduced data throughput is provided using the AES-GCM-SIV algorithm as compared to the AES-GCM algorithm. This work introduced a parallel algorithm with re-keying and randomization of the initialization vector for high data throughput, nonce misuse protection, and side-channel attack protection. The implementation of the proposed algorithm is performed on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and it’s compared with the FPGA implementations of AES-GCM, AES-GCM-SIV, and recently introduced algorithms. The optimization of the proposed algorithm and security analysis is presented for space application using different optimizations and a combination of optimizations.

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Architectural Optimization of Parallel Authenticated Encryption Algorithm for Satellite Application

The rapid development in the industrial sector has caused severe damage to the environment, which resulted in the occurrence of catastrophic disasters of high magnitude on earth Moreover, the efforts for providing better early warnings and rescue operations during and after the disasters largely depend on communication protocol utilized for disaster management Therefore, researchers are working to devise an efficient communication protocol for detection and communication of disasters The communication protocol must comprise a methodology to transmit images of the disaster site effectively and facilitates communication between disaster site and disaster management centers Presently, the disaster management is performed using terrestrial networks (using the Internet and mobile networks), space-ground networks (using satellites in different orbits), and air-ground networks (using Un-manned Aerial Vehicle and airships) Besides, the utilization of all devices in space, air, and ground can help to enhance the services for disaster management In this work, Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network (SAGIN) is proposed to be used for disaster management Moreover, a framework is proposed for the realization of the enhanced services using Internet Protocol (IP) for the detection and communication of disasters Also, a comparison with the presently deployed networks is provided for comparison of services provided for disaster management

Tongge Xu

Papers

Orbital Debris Threat for Space Sustainability and Way Forward (Review Article)

An Evaluation of Uncle Block Mechanism Effect on Ethereum Selfish and Stubborn Mining Combined With an Eclipse Attack

A Lightweight Authentication and Key Sharing Protocol for Satellite Communication

Architectural Optimization of Parallel Authenticated Encryption Algorithm for Satellite Application

Detection and Communication of Disasters with Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network