In recent years there have been increased efforts to make supply chains transparent and traceable to better protect the end consumer's interests against counterfeiting, contamination, false claims, and inadequate processes. The actors in the supply chain can also leverage additional visibility to proactively tune their operations in response to upstream or downstream disruptions. Blockchain technology, with its promise of immutability, transparency, and provenance is a natural fit to supply chain problems. Several works have discussed the improved design of supply chains leveraging blockchain technology. There have been attempts to address some of the privacy concerns of participants on the blockchain network by using encryption schemes to hide confidential data and group signatures to hide the participant identities. But these do not handle the complexities of the supply chain, where items are constantly packaged, repackaged, and transformed before reaching the end consumer. Our work presents a blockchain-based model for the supply chain that provides privacy and traceability with efficient contamination tracing while accounting for the aforementioned complexities of the supply chain operations. The last property enables an end consumer to be convinced about a product to be unaffected by identified faulty upstream processes (contamination) without access to the entire history of the product. Our solution makes novel use of cryptographic tools such as zero-knowledge proofs and cryptographic accumulators to provide these guarantees. The choice of the cryptographic components is grounded in concrete efficiency, and we present an experimental evaluation of the implementation of our protocol on Hyperledger Fabric, a popular platform for enterprise blockchains.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
User Authentication and Security Systems
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Electronic voting (e-voting) systems have emerged as a convenient alternative to traditional paper-based voting, but they also pose significant security and integrity challenges. Cryptographic techniques provide solutions to ensure confidentiality, verifiability, and integrity in voting systems. This paper explores various cryptographic approaches used in secure voting systems, including homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, and blockchain-based voting. We analyze their strengths, weaknesses, and applicability in different voting environments. Furthermore, we discuss emerging challenges, threats, and future research directions in securing e-voting systems.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Shashank Agrawal, Saikrishna Badrinarayanan, Pratyay Mukherjee, Peter Rindal
We use biometrics like fingerprints and facial images to identify ourselves to our mobile devices and log on to applications everyday. Such authentication is internal-facing: we provide measurement on the same device where the template is stored. If our personal devices could participate in external-facing authentication too, where biometric measurement is captured by a nearby external sensor, then we could also enjoy a frictionless authentication experience in a variety of physical spaces like grocery stores, convention centers, ATMs, etc. The open setting of a physical space brings forth important privacy concerns though. We design a suite of secure protocols for external-facing authentication based on the cosine similarity metric which provide privacy for both user templates stored on their devices and the biometric measurement captured by external sensors in this open setting. The protocols provide different levels of security, ranging from passive security with some leakage to active security with no leakage at all. With the help of new packing techniques and zero-knowledge proofs for Paillier encryption -- and careful protocol design, our protocols achieve very practical performance numbers. For templates of length 256 with elements of size 16 bits each, our fastest protocol takes merely 0.024 seconds to compute a match, but even the slowest one takes no more than 0.12 seconds. The communication overhead of our protocols is very small too. The passive and actively secure protocols (with some leakage) need to exchange just 16.5KB and 27.8KB of data, respectively. The first message is designed to be reusable and, if sent in advance, would cut the overhead down to just 0.5KB and 0.8KB, respectively.
The problem of fair exchange consists of interchanging goods between two parties that do not trust each other. Despite known impossibility results, recent works leverage the block-chain and zero-knowledge proofs to implement zero-knowledge contingent payment (zkCP) systems that make fair exchange of digital goods possible. Implementing these systems in a secure and efficient way is a big challenge, as evidenced by several unsuccessful attempts from the literature. Campanelli et al. (ACM CCS 2017) discovered a vulnerability on an existing zkCP proposal based on SNARKs (succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge) and suggested several repairs. Fuchsbauer (ACM CCS 2019) found a flaw in the mentioned countermeasures. In particular, he showed that witness-indistinguishability (WI) is not sufficient for the zkCP schemes proposed by Campanelli et al. to be secure. In this work, we observe that a slightly stronger notion of WI, that we coin trapdoor subversion WI (tS-WI), rules out Fuchsbauer's attack. We formally define security properties for CP systems and show that, under tS-WI, Campanelli et al.'s proposal indeed satisfies these properties. Additionally, we explore alternative approaches to implement ZK (other than SNARKs) and develop a prototype, using it to demonstrate their potential. Our new ideas result in a protocol to sell ECDSA signatures with contingent payment that can be executed in less than $150$ milliseconds over a LAN network.
This paper follows the line of works that design concretely efficient transparent sublinear zero-knowledge Interactive Oracle Proofs (IOP). Arguments obtained via this paradigm have the advantages of not relying on public-key cryptography, not requiring a trusted setup, and resistance to known quantum attacks. In the realm of transparent systems, Ligero and Aurora stand out with incomparable advantages where the former has a fast prover algorithm somewhat succinct proofs and the latter has somewhat fast prover and succinct proofs. In this work, we introduce Ligero++ that combines the best features of both approaches to achieve the best of both worlds. We implement our protocol and benchmark the results.
Behzad Abdolmaleki, Sebastian Ramacher, Daniel Slamanig
Zero-knowledge proofs and in particular succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs (so called zk-SNARKs) are getting increasingly used in real-world applications, with cryptocurrencies being the prime example. Simulation extractability (SE) is a strong security notion for zk-SNARKs which informally ensures non-malleability of proofs. The high importance of this property is acknowledged by leading companies in this field such as Zcash and underpinned by various attacks against the malleability of cryptographic primitives in the past. Another problematic issue for the practical use of zk-SNARKs is the requirement of a fully trusted setup, as especially for large-scale decentralized applications finding a trusted party that runs the setup is practically impossible. Quite recently, the study of approaches to relax or even remove the trust in the setup procedure, and in particular subversion as well as updatable zk-SNARKs (with latter being the most promising approach), has been initiated and received considerable attention since then. Unfortunately, so far SE-SNARKs with the aforementioned properties are only constructed in an ad-hoc manner and no generic techniques are available.
Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs (ZKP) are foundational in cryptography. Most recent ZK research focuses on non-interactive proofs (NIZK) of small statements, useful in blockchain scenarios. Another line, and our focus, instead targets proofs of large statements that are useful, e.g., in proving properties of programs in ZK. We specify a zero-knowledge processor that executes arbitrary programs written in a simple instruction set, and proves in ZK the correctness of the execution. Such an approach is well-suited for constructing ZK proofs of large statements as it efficiently supports complex programming constructs, such as loops and RAM access. Critically, we propose several novel ZK improvements that make our approach concretely efficient: (1) an efficient arithmetic representation with conversions to/from Boolean, (2) an efficient read-only memory that uses $2łog n$ OTs per access, and (3) an efficient read-write memory, øurram, which uses $\frac1 2 łog^2 n$ OTs per access. øurram beats linear scan for RAM of size $>3$ elements! Prior ZK systems used generic ORAM costing orders of magnitude more. We cast our system as a garbling scheme that can be plugged into the ZK protocol of [Jawurek et al, CCS'13]. Put together, our system is concretely efficient: for a processor instantiated with $512$KB of main memory, each processor cycle costs $24$KB of communication. We implemented our approach in \textttC++. On a 1Gbps LAN our implementation realizes a $2.1$KHz processor.
Jiaheng Zhang, Zhiyong Fang, Yupeng Zhang, Dawn Song
Machine learning has become increasingly prominent and is widely used in various applications in practice. Despite its great success, the integrity of machine learning predictions and accuracy is a rising concern. The reproducibility of machine learning models that are claimed to achieve high accuracy remains challenging, and the correctness and consistency of machine learning predictions in real products lack any security guarantees. In this paper, we initiate the study of zero knowledge machine learning and propose protocols for zero knowledge decision tree predictions and accuracy tests. The protocols allow the owner of a decision tree model to convince others that the model computes a prediction on a data sample, or achieves a certain accuracy on a public dataset, without leaking any information about the model itself. We develop approaches to efficiently turn decision tree predictions and accuracy into statements of zero knowledge proofs. We implement our protocols and demonstrate their efficiency in practice. For a decision tree model with 23 levels and 1,029 nodes, it only takes 250 seconds to generate a zero knowledge proof proving that the model achieves high accuracy on a dataset of 5,000 samples and 54 attributes, and the proof size is around 287 kilobytes.
5G communications proposed significant improvements over 4G in terms of efficiency and security. Among these novelties, the 5G Network Slicing seems to have a prominent role: deploy multiple virtual network slices, each providing a different service with different needs and features. Like this, a Slice Operator (SO) ruling a specific slice may want to offer a service for users meeting some requirements. It is of paramount importance to provide a robust authentication protocol, able to ensure that users meet the requirements, but providing at the same time a privacy-by-design architecture. This makes even more sense having a growing density of Internet of Things (IoT) devices exchanging private information over the network. In this paper, we improve the 5G network slicing authentication using a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) scheme: granting users full control over their data. We introduce an approach to allow a user to prove his right to access a specific service without leaking any information about him. Such an approach is SANS, a protocol that provides non-linkable protection for any issued information, preventing an SO or an eavesdropper from tracking users' activity and relating it with their real identities. Furthermore, our protocol is scalable and can be taken as a framework for improving related technologies in similar scenarios, like authentication in the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) or other wireless networks and services. Such features can be achieved using cryptographic primitives called Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP). Upon implementing our solution using a state-of-the-art ZKP library and performing several experiments, we provide benchmarks demonstrating that our approach is affordable in speed and memory consumption.
It has been predicted that more devices will be connected to the internet network along with the development of IoT, and that will increase the complexity in the security system. The most important thing in security systems is the process of encryption and authentication. Various encryption techniques are developed to overcome security problems of the data. One of the methods used for authentication of data is Zero Knowledge Proof. This method works to identify the authenticity of someones statement to proof without showing any knowledge of the statement mentioned. This research will mainly discuss about the security of data transmission system by combining data encryption and data authentication. The proposed data encryption is using Advanced Encryption System and method for authentication of data using the Zero Knowledge Proof. This research will conduct the development methods of authentication Zero Knowledge Proof from previous research and the result was compared with the proposed method based on the simulation results transmission system client and server. Experiments will be conducted using thirty-text data, each of data will be measured on the performance of both encryption and authentication process between the previous method and proposed method. Experimental results show the performance of the proposed method has better speed to process application for security of data transmission systems, with performance to authenticate approximately 5 ms from the client side and server side.
Anders Dalskov, Daniele Lain, Enis Ulqinaku, Kari Kostiainen · 5 authors
Encrypted cloud storage services are steadily increasing in popularity, with many commercial solutions currently available. In such solutions, the cloud storage is trusted for data availability, but not for confidentiality. Additionally, the user's device is considered secure, and the user is expected to behave correctly. We argue that such assumptions are not met in reality: e.g., users routinely forget passwords and fail to make backups, and users' devices get stolen or become infected with malware. Therefore, we consider a more extensive threat model, where users' devices are susceptible to attacks and common human errors are possible. Given this model, we analyze 10 popular commercial services and show that none of them provides good confidentiality and data availability. Motivated by the lack of adequate solutions in the market, we design a novel scheme called Two-Factor Encryption (2FE) that draws inspiration from two-factor authentication and turns file encryption and decryption into an interactive process where two user devices, like a laptop and a smartphone, must interact. 2FE provides strong confidentiality and availability guarantees, as it withstands compromised cloud storage, one stolen or compromised user device at a time, and various human errors. 2FE achieves this by leveraging secret sharing with additional techniques such as oblivious pseudorandom functions and zero-knowledge proofs. We evaluate 2FE experimentally and show that its performance overhead is small. Finally, we explain how our approach can be adapted to other related use cases such as cryptocurrency wallets.
The on-demand mobility market, including ridesharing, is becoming increasingly important with e-hailing fares growing at a rate of approximately 130% per annum since 2013. By increasing utilization of existing vehicles and empty seats, ridesharing can provide many benefits including reduced traffic congestion and environmental impact from vehicle usage and production. However, the safety of riders and drivers has become of paramount concern and a method for privacy-preserving identity verification between untrusted parties is essential for protecting users. To this end, we propose a novel privacy-preserving identity verification system, extending zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) and blockchain for use in ridesharing applications. We design a permissioned blockchain network to perform the ZKP verification of a driver's identity, which also acts as an immutable ledger to store ride logs and ZKP records. For the ZKP module, we design a protocol to facilitate user verification without requiring the exchange of any private information. We prototype the proposed system on the Hyperledger Fabric platform, with the Hyperledger Ursa cryptography library, and conduct extensive experimentation. To measure the prototype's performance, we utilize the Hyperledger Caliper benchmark tool to perform extensive analysis and the results show that our system is suitable for use in real-world ridesharing applications.
Edoardo Puggioni, Arash Shaghaghi, Robin Doss, Salil S. Kanhere
Internet of Things (IoT) devices are being deployed in huge numbers around the world, and often present serious vulnerabilities. Accordingly, delivering regular software updates is critical to secure IoT devices. Manufactures face two predominant challenges in providing software updates to IoT devices: 1) scalability of the current client-server model and 2) integrity of the distributed updates - exacerbated due to the devices' computing power and lightweight cryptographic primitives. Motivated by these limitations, we propose CrowdPatching, a blockchain-based decentralized protocol, allowing manufacturers to delegate the delivery of software updates to self-interested distributors in exchange for cryptocurrency. Manufacturers announce updates by deploying a smart contract (SC), which in turn will issue cryptocurrency payments to any distributor who provides an unforgeable proof-of-delivery. The latter is provided by IoT devices authorizing the SC to issue payment to a distributor when the required conditions are met. These conditions include the requirement for a distributor to generate a zero-knowledge proof, generated with a novel proving system called zk-SNARKs. Compared with related work, CrowdPatching protocol offers three main advantages. First, the number of distributors can scale indefinitely by enabling the addition of new distributors at any time after the initial distribution by manufacturers (i.e., redistribution among the distributor network). The latter is not possible in existing protocols and is not account for. Secondly, we leverage the recent common integration of gateway or Hub in IoT deployments in our protocol to make CrowdPatching feasible even for the more constraint IoT devices. Thirdly, the trustworthiness of distributors is considered in our protocol, rewarding the honest distributors' engagements. We provide both informal and formal security analysis of CrowdPatching using Tamarin Prover.
A Preventive Medicine perspective:How COVID pandemic has impacted New Zealand and their adopted policies and strategiesElimination strategyMainstays of MethodolgyCOVID situation in Iraq, Impacting the economy of a developing countryStrategic implementation of preventive measures adopted by New ZealandCovid- 19: Strategic Implementation of Policies under the guidance of IOM:Discussion: Preparing to respond to COVID-19, what Iraq could learn from New ZealandConclusion and OutlookReferencesAbstract:Background. The first cases of COVID-19 pandemic were identified in people with pneumonia in Wuhan, China, in late December 2019. It is first and foremost the most publicized pandemic, which has taken the lives of many people. It has thrown everyone into doubt and has created a collective moment of contemplation about the future. The clinical enlistment organization MedWorld of New Zealand offered for resigned and low maintenance specialists to help endeavors by the health care division and Government to battle the spread of COVID-19, in New Zealand. (11“COVID-19 Pandemic in New Zealand.”) Starting in April, more than 20,000 tests have been done in Iraq in general (counting the Kurdistan Region), with 1202 of them turning out positive. Of those tests, half of the,m were finished by the Kurdish Ministry of Health, which implies that the other tests were finished by the Iraqi Ministry of Health. (22“COVID-19 Pandemic in Iraq.”) While KRG populace has been tried, just 0.05% of the remainder of the nation has been tried, along these lines featuring the conceivable difference between absolute positive case numbers between locales. Iraq is considered ”particularly powerless against the plague due to being desolated” – by war and United Nations sanctions, and by partisan clash in the course of recent decades. This paper primarily focuses on analyzing the accessible information through research papers, peer- reviewed and non-peer reviewed to understand the pandemic affecting two different countries like New Zealand- a developed country and Iraq- a developing country.1.2. Aim: The aim of this study is to provide information and access the current status of medical management in a developed country like New Zealand and a developing country like Iraq, based on current medical literature available. 1.3. Material used: The following review paper has considered published peer- reviewed papers and non peer-reviewed pre-print manuscripts on COVID-19 and related aspects with primary focus on preventive medicine. 1.4. Study Methodology: This retrospective view focuses on understanding the different preventive strategies implemented by the countries with different socio-economical backgrounds. 1.5. Preliminary thesis: The review paper focuses on comparing the strategic management and elimination of COVID-19, in the two countries, i.e. New Zealand and Iraq, in a public health and preventive medicine perspective.Introduction- 2.1. What is corona virus? Coronaviridae is a large family of viruses that cause mild to moderate upper-respiratory tract illnesses like the common cold. They are named for the crown-like spikes on their surfaces as seen on the electron microscope. In some cases these viruses infect the humans, which is called a spillover event and can cause several diseases. The international committee for the taxonomy of viruses has approved the naming of more than 40 corona viruses, majority of which infect animals, and lead to human transmission. The COVID-19 outbreak has brought the number of identified corona viruses that can infect humans to seven, out of which, four are community acquired. The other three are SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARV-CoV-2, which has resulted in the highest mortality rate. Covid-19 or previously known as Novel corona virus is a new strain of coronavirus that first emerged in Hubei provenience in China in the late 2019. It is predominantly spread by respiratory droplets and from contact to contaminated surfaces. The spread is similar to that of influenza virus, so practicing same precautions as to prevent the influenza virus can provide protection against Covid-19. The most common symptoms are cough, severe dyspnea, fever, chills, myalgia, sore throat, congestion or runny nose. Majority of the cases have milder diseases with few having severe diseases which lead to pneumonia and respiratory failure. Deaths have generally occurred in older population, and in patients having underlining health conditions. Reports of severe cases in children are uncommon. Currently the treatment is supportive, but severe cases may require intensive care. (33Cui, Li, and Shi, “Origin and Evolution of Pathogenic Coronaviruses.”)(44Masters, “The Molecular Biology of Coronaviruses.”) Impact of corona virus pandemic on New Zealand: New Zealand recorded its first day of no new instances of coronavirus infection 2019 (COVID-19), more than a month after its severe lockdown started. New Zealand had recorded from less than 1200 affirmed instances of COVID-19, 20 deaths. On March 23, a month to the first case reported, New Zealand focused on a disposal system. A couple of days afterward, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared a public lockdown at the point when it just had 102 cases and zero deaths. Her quick decision won universal recognition, including from WHO. New Zealand’s choice to seek after an end approach was a diverse way to deal with regular pandemic arranging, which has generally been in light of an alleviation model and centers around postponing the appearance of the infection, trailed by a scope of measures to level the bend of cases and passings. Michael Baker, teacher at the College of Otago’s specialty of general healthcare in Wellington, who has been exhorting the New Zealand Government on its reaction. ”The two greatest advantages of seeking after a disposal system is that you have barely any cases and hardly any deaths and you can get business back fully operational. The elective was that we are left with the infection and stuck between relief furthermore, concealment. Concealment is lovely terrible .” (55“Coronavirus Outbreak: Live Updates on COVID-19.”) While the methodology has had its experts, for Baker, the proof was overpowering that end could be accomplished. The full lockdown permitted the nation to get the major frameworks up and rushing to viably oversee fringes, furthermore, to do contact tracing, testing, and observation. Since January, more than half a million individuals have been tried in a nation of only 5 million. Testing has been centered around individuals who have presenting symptoms, with following of both close contacts and easygoing contacts. But currently, more broad testing has being presented. The Ministry of Health is in conversation with regions to organize testing of explicit networks who are at higher danger of gaining the infection such as human services laborers. Testing tests from sewerage is additionally being thought of to screen control and disposal. The reaction has additionally been one that set science, authority, and cautious language at the front line. Ardern has consistently showed up on online media, grinning and sharing parts of her own life under lockdown yet without underplaying the earnestness of the circumstance, which has served to construct open trust. Travelers from abroad are to be isolated as a major aspect of endeavors to forestall transmission in New Zealand. As New Zealand currently facilitates its limitations and its economy gradually resumes, there are conversations about how it can open up its fringes while guaranteeing that everybody is ensured, especially vulnerable populations. (66“(PDF) Coronavirus-19 Intervention Approach in New Zealand.”) Impact of corona virus pandemic on Iraq: On 31 December 2019, a group of pneumonia of obscure beginning was accounted for in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of the People’s Republic of China. On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) declared that the microorganism known as the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), established a pandemic. By 13 March, WHO announced that the expansion in instances of COVID-19 in the Eastern Mediterranean locale, including Iraq was ”of specific and incredible concern”. Starting at 20 April 2020, there were 1,539 affirmed instances of COVID-19 and 82 deaths in Iraq with the quantity of affirmed cases detailed expanding. The COVID-19 episode took steps to weaken the effectively delicate framework and effect the numerous networks who are as yet defenseless and recuperating from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) emergency and ensuing monetary downturn. The center public capacities with regards to anticipation, readiness and reaction, limit with regards to general wellbeing, and the medicinal services framework has been debilitated by years of contention, sanctions, helpless administration and low interests in wellbeing. There was an absence of wellbeing workforce across various units, with many having fled Iraq, and deficiencies in basic drugs and gear. The absence of open administrations, including medicinal services, were among the variables driving distress all through 2018, especially in the southern governorates. The exhibitions and related political flimsiness brought about the abdication of the Prime Minister. At the local and worldwide level, there are proceeded and rising strains among US and Iranian intermediaries; and ISIL have additionally expressed their expectation to abuse the current emergency, which could be especially horrendous for regular citizens seeking after an arrival to normalcy. Lengthy and permeable fringes aggravate the test of overseeing dangers related with human portability and episodes; Iraq has long land and ocean fringes with Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey, with 26 Points of Entry (PoE), including five air terminals, six ports and 15 ground intersections that convey worldwide traffic. Iraq is a country with many travelers and hence a significant number of whom are trapped in emergency and in considerably more dubious conditions. Iraq additionally has hundreds of thousands of south Asian, southeast Asian and African traveler laborers utilized in the residential, development also, administration divisions, prone to disproportionally affected by the wellbeing emergency, financial downturn and travel limitations. Travelers and evacuees in Iraq, incorporating those in outcast camps who may have residency and money related status issues, are at uplifted hazard, especially with regards to air terminal terminations, travel limitations, the stopping of worldwide resettlement program and failure to execute helped willful return and reintegration (AVRR) programming. To help stop transmission, the Government of Iraq (GoI) including the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have progressively implemented bans on travelers from countries with significant COVID-19 outbreaks from entering the country, quarantine requirements and closures of the main airports in Baghdad and Erbil. (77“WHO | Iraq Health Situation Reports.”)A Preventive Medicine perspective:How COVID pandemic has impacted New Zealand and their adopted policies and strategies: 3.1.1 Elimination strategy in New Zealand: The Government’s health policy methodology in regard of the COVID-19 pandemic influencing New Zealand is elimination. That is, to apply a scope of control measures all together to stop the transmission of COVID-19 in New Zealand. Disposal doesn’t mean annihilating the infection forever from New Zealand; rather it is being certain we have disposed of chains of transmission in our locale for at any rate 28 days and can successfully contain any future imported cases from abroad. It is acknowledged that this methodology will be required in the drawn out i.e., for a long time or more, contingent upon the developing the study of disease transmission and proof around the sickness and its the executives and progress with creating protected and powerful medicines and additionally antibodies. (88“New Zealand’s COVID-19 Elimination Strategy | The Medical of of the are a for the and spread of new cases from abroad. individuals entering New Zealand are in an administration for at any rate days on guaranteeing no new COVID-19 are into the more being as it to do as for in the event that we are have low of transmission. will be to for to new cases and The for COVID-19 as of testing of with respiratory and testing in the more populace as a of more measures to that we are The will testing for and as are to be by a broad to testing be and populace based testing will be utilized in A scope of will the proof of developing contact following and quarantine is a basic of transmission of the contact following of contacts of an who has a positive COVID-19 test are and isolated four days of to the to forestall transmission. wellbeing units, which cases and contacts and have been to their to do as A and have been created the Ministry of Health to help following are additionally being developed to additionally contact The most significant measures to limit the spread will at out and of when measures are to the by and large reaction and a significant level of is to from up Study information with open help for the and there have been just a number of of to open help for these measures is basic through and a scope of various and in the and medical is by the of Coronavirus-19 Intervention Approach in New situation in Iraq, Impacting the economy of a developing Iraq to the of the Strategic and with helpless have travelers and and with at and will a reaction, an and reaction financial also, with the the financial of this emergency and by the and will be to that endeavors are individuals and do no and to to and of various including people with more and or isolated may be the situation in with for more, guaranteeing that and is thought of and preventive and for of preventive and are Iraq COVID-19 Strategic implementation of preventive measures adopted by New March 2020, New Zealand’s reaction to COVID-19 its current pandemic in view of an alleviation approach for overseeing pandemic The steps to of the pandemic it forestall spread it and apply measures to the and from overpowering wellbeing Since pandemic be from by for there was an that case and contact based administration and the nation to having broad transmission of the pandemic infection across and were following the alleviation it was with COVID-19 cases overpowering wellbeing were to a This and travel limitations to infection transmission. A couple of were with a of alleviation to deal with the of so as to from overpowering the medicinal services framework and and individuals in the populace to at on infection transmission. 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Activity-tracking applications and location-based services using short-range communication (SRC) techniques have been abruptly demanded in the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for automated contact tracing. The attention from both public and policy keeps raising on related practical problems, including1) how to protect data security and location privacy? 2) how to efficiently and dynamically deploy SRC Internet of Thing (IoT) witnesses to monitor large areas?To answer these questions, in this paper, we propose a decentralized and permissionless blockchain protocol, namedBychain. Specifically, 1) a privacy-preserving SRC protocol for activity-tracking and corresponding generalized block structure is developed, by connecting an interactive zero-knowledge proof protocol and the key escrow mechanism. As a result, connections between personal identity and the ownership of on-chain location information are decoupled. Meanwhile, the owner of the on-chain location data can still claim its ownership without revealing the private key to anyone else. 2) An artificial potential field-based incentive allocation mechanism is proposed to incentivize IoT witnesses to pursue the maximum monitoring coverage deployment. We implemented and evaluated the proposed blockchain protocol in the real-world using the Bluetooth 5.0. The storage, CPU utilization, power consumption, time delay, and security of each procedure and performance of activities are analyzed. The experiment and security analysis is shown to provide a real-world performance evaluation.
Filippos Fotopoulos, Vangelis Malamas, Thomas K. Dasaklis, Panayiotis Kotzanikolaou · 5 authors
The healthcare sector is rapidly integrating the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) technologies and adopting new practices regarding how patient data are collected, processed, and stored. Although various medical device authentication mechanisms have been proposed so far, most of them are power consuming, not cost-effective, or face scalability issues. We propose a novel IoMT authentication framework incorporating new concepts and technologies such as self-sovereign identity, zero-knowledge proofs, and blockchain technology to cover this gap. The architecture is built upon key elements of the healthcare ecosystem (hospital entities, device manufacturers, medical devices) and provides multientity IoMT authentication functionalities with revocation. We demonstrate the proposed architecture's efficiency through a proof of concept implementation based on Hyperledger Aries, Indy, and Ursa.
Edoardo Puggioni, Arash Shaghaghi, Robin Doss, Salil S. Kanhere
We propose CrowdPatching, a blockchain-based decentralized protocol, allowing\nInternet of Things (IoT) manufacturers to delegate the delivery of software\nupdates to self-interested distributors in exchange for cryptocurrency.\nManufacturers announce updates by deploying a smart contract (SC), which in\nturn will issue cryptocurrency payments to any distributor who provides an\nunforgeable proof-of-delivery. The latter is provided by IoT devices\nauthorizing the SC to issue payment to a distributor when the required\nconditions are met. These conditions include the requirement for a distributor\nto generate a zero-knowledge proof, generated with a novel proving system\ncalled zk-SNARKs. Compared with related work, CrowdPatching protocol offers\nthree main advantages. First, the number of distributors can scale indefinitely\nby enabling the addition of new distributors at any time after the initial\ndistribution by manufacturers (i.e., redistribution among the distributor\nnetwork). The latter is not possible in existing protocols and is not account\nfor. Secondly, we leverage the recent common integration of gateway or Hub in\nIoT deployments in our protocol to make CrowdPatching feasible even for the\nmore constraint IoT devices. Thirdly, the trustworthiness of distributors is\nconsidered in our protocol, rewarding the honest distributors' engagements. We\nprovide both informal and formal security analysis of CrowdPatching using\nTamarin Prover.\n
One of the current challenges in cryptographic research is the development of advanced cryptographic primitives ensuring a high level of confidence. In this thesis, we focus on their design, while proving their security under well-studied algorithmic assumptions.My work grounds itself on the linearity of homomorphic encryption, which allows to perform linear operations on encrypted data. Precisely, I built upon the linearly homomorphic encryption scheme introduced by Castagnos and Laguillaumie at CT-RSA'15. Their scheme possesses the unusual property of having a prime order plaintext space, whose size can essentially be tailored to ones' needs. Aiming at a modular approach, I designed from their work technical tools (projective hash functions, zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge) which provide a rich framework lending itself to many applications.This framework first allowed me to build functional encryption schemes; this highly expressive primitive allows a fine grained access to the information contained in e.g., an encrypted database. Then, in a different vein, but from these same tools, I designed threshold digital signatures, allowing a secret key to be shared among multiple users, so that the latter must collaborate in order to produce valid signatures. Such signatures can be used, among other applications, to secure crypto-currency wallets. Significant efficiency gains, namely in terms of bandwidth, result from the instantiation of these constructions from class groups. This work is at the forefront of the revival these mathematical objects have seen in cryptography over the last few years.
The pervasive adoption of Internet-connected digital services has led to a growing concern in the personal data privacy of their customers. On the other hand, machine learning (ML) techniques have been widely adopted by digital service providers to improve operational productivity and customer satisfaction. ML inevitably accesses and processes users' personal data, which could potentially breach the relevant privacy protection regulations if not performed carefully. The situation is exacerbated by the cloud-based implementation of digital services when user data are captured and stored in distributed locations, hence aggregation of the user data for ML could be a serious breach of privacy regulations. In this backdrop, Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging area that allows ML on distributed data without the data leaving their stored location. However, depending on the nature of the digital services, data captured at different locations may carry different significance to the business operation, hence a weighted aggregation will be highly desirable for enhancing the quality of the FL-learned model. Furthermore, to prevent leakage of user data from the aggregated gradients, cryptographic mechanisms are needed to allow secure aggregation of FL. In this paper, we propose a privacy-enhanced FL scheme for supporting secure weighted aggregation. Besides, by devising a verification protocol based on Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP), the proposed scheme is capable of guarding against fraudulent messages from FL participants. Experimental results show that our scheme is practical and secure. Compared to existing FL approaches, our scheme achieves secure weighted aggregation with an additional security guarantee against fraudulent messages with an affordable 1.2 times runtime overheads and 1.3 times communication costs.
Michele Ciampi, Alexandru Cojocaru, Elham Kashefi, Atul Mantri
Secure two-party computation considers the problem of two parties computing a\njoint function of their private inputs without revealing anything beyond the\noutput. In this work, we consider the setting where the two parties (a\nclassical Alice and a quantum Bob) can communicate only via a classical\nchannel. Our first result shows that it is in general impossible to realize a\ntwo-party quantum functionality with black-box simulation in the case of\nmalicious quantum adversaries. In particular, we show that the existence of a\nsecure quantum computing protocol that relies only on classical channels would\ncontradict the quantum no-cloning argument.\n We circumvent this impossibility following three different approaches. The\nfirst is by considering a weaker security notion called one-sided simulation\nsecurity. This notion protects the input of one party (the quantum Bob) in the\nstandard simulation-based sense and protects the privacy of the other party's\ninput (the classical Alice). We show how to realize a protocol that satisfies\nthis notion relying on the learning with errors assumption. The second way to\ncircumvent the impossibility result, while at the same time providing standard\nsimulation-based security also against a malicious Bob, is by assuming that the\nquantum input has an efficient classical representation.\n Finally, we focus our attention on the class of zero-knowledge\nfunctionalities and provide a compiler that takes as input a classical proof of\nquantum knowledge (PoQK) protocol for a QMA relation R and outputs a\nzero-knowledge PoQK for R that can be verified by classical parties. The direct\nimplication of our result is that Mahadev's protocol for classical verification\nof quantum computations (FOCS'18) can be turned into a zero-knowledge proof of\nquantum knowledge with classical verifiers. To the best of our knowledge, we\nare the first to instantiate such a primitive.\n
In a block channel IoT system, sensitive details can be leaked by means of the proof of work or address check, as data or application Validation data is applied on the blockchain. In this, the zero-knowledge evidence is applied to a smart metering system to show how to improve the anonymity of the blockchain for privacy safety without disclosing information as a public key. Within this article, a blockchain has been implemented to deter security risks such as data counterfeiting by utilizing intelligent meters. Zero-Knowledge Proof, an anonymity blockchain technology, has been implemented through block inquiry to prevent threats to security like personal information infringement. It was suggested that intelligent contracts would be used to avoid falsification of intelligent meter data and abuse of personal details.
A boardroom election is an election with a small number of voters carried out with public communications. We present BVOT, a self-tallying boardroom voting protocol with ballot secrecy, fairness (no tally information is available before the polls close), and dispute-freeness (voters can observe that all voters correctly followed the protocol). BVOT works by using a multiparty threshold homomorphic encryption system in which each candidate is associated with a masked unique prime. Each voter engages in an oblivious transfer with an untrusted distributor: the voter selects the index of a prime associated with a candidate and receives the selected prime in masked form. The voter then casts their vote by encrypting their masked prime and broadcasting it to everyone. The distributor does not learn the voter's choice, and no one learns the mapping between primes and candidates until the audit phase. By hiding the mapping between primes and candidates, BVOT provides voters with insufficient information to carry out effective cheating. The threshold feature prevents anyone from computing any partial tally---until everyone has voted. Multiplying all votes, their decryption shares, and the unmasking factor yields a product of the primes each raised to the number of votes received. In contrast to some existing boardroom voting protocols, BVOT does not rely on any zero-knowledge proof; instead, it uses oblivious transfer to assure ballot secrecy and correct vote casting. Also, BVOT can handle multiple candidates in one election. BVOT prevents cheating by hiding crucial information: an attempt to increase the tally of one candidate might increase the tally of another candidate. After all votes are cast, any party can tally the votes.