The contemporary IC supply chain depends heavily on third-party intellectual property (3PIP) that is integrated to in-house designs. As the correctness of such 3PIPs should be verified before integration, one important challenge for 3PIP vendors is proving the functionality of their designs while protecting the privacy of circuit implementations. In this work, we present Pythia that employs zero-knowledge proofs to enable vendors convince integrators about the functionality of a circuit without disclosing its netlist. Pythia automatically encodes netlists into zero knowledge-friendly format, evaluates them on different inputs, and proves correctness of outputs. We evaluate Pythia using the ISCAS'85 benchmark suite.
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Integrated Circuits and Semiconductor Failure Analysis
The global daily data generation is estimated to be more than 2.5 quintillion bytes, and more than 90 percent of the total data produced is generated in the last two years. Most of this data is being generated and controlled by very few centralized agencies in the Web 2.0 internet architecture. This causes issues, including data manipulation, lack of privacy, and data leaks historically and is not just limited to the fields mentioned. This paper proposes a Web 3.0 based architecture which eliminates the centralized agencies and to promote a fully decentralized, secure, and transparent internet. It leverages IPFS, a peer to peer distributed hypermedia transfer protocol. Ethereum and smart contracts create a secure decentralized mechanism for initiating data-based payments. Furthermore, the proposed architecture uses zero-knowledge proofs and proxy re-encryption mechanisms to enhance the privacy of the nodes in the network.
The celebrated result of Fischer, Lynch and Paterson is the fundamental lower\nbound for asynchronous fault tolerant computation: any 1-crash resilient\nasynchronous agreement protocol must have some (possibly measure zero)\nprobability of not terminating. In 1994, Ben-Or, Kelmer and Rabin published a\nproof-sketch of a lesser known lower bound for asynchronous fault tolerant\ncomputation with optimal resilience against a Byzantine adversary: if $n\\le 4t$\nthen any t-resilient asynchronous verifiable secret sharing protocol must have\nsome non-zero probability of not terminating.\n Our main contribution is to revisit this lower bound and provide a rigorous\nand more general proof. Our second contribution is to show how to avoid this\nlower bound. We provide a protocol with optimal resilience that is almost\nsurely terminating for a strong common coin functionality. Using this new\nprimitive we provide an almost surely terminating protocol with optimal\nresilience for asynchronous Byzantine agreement that has a new fair validity\nproperty. To the best of our knowledge this is the first asynchronous Byzantine\nagreement with fair validity in the information theoretic setting.\n
Yanhong Xu, Reihaneh Safavi–Naini, Khoa Nguyen, Huaxiong Wang
Policy-based signatures (PBS) were proposed by Bellare and Fuchsbauer (PKC 2014) to allow an {\em authorized} member of an organization to sign a message on behalf of the organization. The user's authorization is determined by a policy managed by the organization's trusted authority, while the signature preserves the privacy of the organization's policy. Signing keys in PBS do not include user identity information and thus can be passed to others, violating the intention of employing PBS to restrict users' signing capability. In this paper, we introduce the notion of {\em traceability} for PBS by including user identity in the signing key such that the trusted authority will be able to open a suspicious signature and recover the signer's identity should the needs arise. We provide rigorous definitions and stringent security notions of traceable PBS (TPBS), capturing the properties of PBS suggested by Bellare-Fuchsbauer and resembling the "full traceability" requirement for group signatures put forward by Bellare-Micciancio-Warinschi (Eurocrypt 2003). As a proof of concept, we provide a modular construction of TPBS, based on a signature scheme, an encryption scheme and a zero-knowledge proof system. Furthermore, to demonstrate the feasibility of achieving TPBS from concrete, quantum-resistant assumptions, we give an instantiation based on lattices.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) have emerged as a revolutionary cryptographic technique that enables one party to prove knowledge of a statement without revealing any underlying information. ZKPs play a crucial role in enhancing cybersecurity by enabling privacy-preserving authentication, secure transactions, and data integrity verification. This paper explores the fundamentals of zero-knowledge proofs, including their classifications—interactive, non-interactive, and succinct proofs—along with real-world applications in secure communications, blockchain security, and identity verification. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges of implementing ZKPs and the potential future advancements in this cryptographic field
—In this paper, a sampled-data model predictive tracking control method is presented for mobile robots which is modeled as constrained continuous-time linear parameter varying (LPV) systems. The presented sampled-data predictive controller is designed by linear matrix inequality approach. Based on the input delay approach, a controller design condition is derived by constructing a new Lyapunov function. Finally, a numerical example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented method. Keywords—Model predictive control, sampled-data control, linear parameter varying systems, LPV I. INTRODUCTION OBILE robots nowadays move autonomously by recognizing external environment and determining the situation through the remote control. With the development of network communication, implementation employing wireless & wired network is widespread [1]. Though control through network is advantageous in maintenance, installation, flexibility and cost, it has to be carefully designed in reality. It may cause instability and performance degradation without considering network induced delay or data packet losses. Therefore, the design of control scheme should consider with aspects and performances of whole systems. Model predictive control (MPC) scheme is very useful since it provides good tracking performance and the MPC tuning parameters are explicitly related to the key characteristics safety, comfort, and fuel economy. But if the model is not accurate, the control technique does not guarantee the stability and performance [2]. Also, an important issue in the implementation of MPC algorithm is the discretization. A continuous-time model is much more natural and accurate in terms of describing the behavior of a system, Also, in network control systems, choosing proper sampling interval is very important for designing suitable controllers. It is clear that a longer sampling period will lead to lower communication channel occupation, few actuation of the controller, and less signal transmission. Thus, it is very important to consider the stabilizing control design problem under a bigger sampling period [5]. For sampled-data systems, the input delay approach has been widely used [4], which is based on the representation of the sampled-data system as a continuous-time system Fig. 1 Mobile robot in X-Y coordination with a delayed control input. Then, the Lyapunov Krasovskii functional (LKF) method can be used to establish the stability conditions. Recently, based on the input delay approach, the sampled-data control problem of dynamical systems with time-varying delay has been investigated in [3], [4]. In this paper, we consider a continuous-time LPV model to handle mobile robot systems and present a model predictive control method for the systems with sampled-data. To the best of authors' knowledge, there are no approaches considering sampled-data MPC for mobile robots. The presented synthesis condition is formulated by construction of a suitable Lyapunov-Krasovskii's functional and control inputs are obtained by minimizing the upper bound of the cost function satisfying the cost monotonicity. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach via numerical simulation. II. DESCRIPTION OF MOBILE ROBOT The dynamics of mobile robot with a rigid body and wheels can be described as follows [1] , (1) where [x,y,θ] denotes the position and orientation of the center with respect to a global frame, v is the translational velocity, and w is the angular velocity. For the given mobile robot, the reference trajectory is set to , (2) where xr, yr, θr are references in Cartesian coordination, vr is the reference translational velocity, and ωr is the reference angular velocity. Considering local coordinate frame, define From (1)-(3), the error dynamics is obtained as In general, systems represented by nonlinear systems can be transformed into Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) systems X˙ (t) = A(¯v(t),ω¯(t),vr(t))X(t) + BU(t), where A(·) is system matrices containing a time varying parameter vector v¯(t),ω¯(t),vr(t), X = [xe,ye,θe] − [¯xe,y¯e,θ¯e], and U = [v − v,ω¯ − ω¯]. By computing Jacobian matrix, the system matrices are given as . For a given sampling rates, the matrix A(¯v(t),ω¯(t),vr(t)) is subject to a polytope set Ω. (5) where Ω = {A1,A2,...,AL} is the convex hull. In the typical system architecture, control signals are conveyed through network communication. In network environments, the control signals pass through zero-order-hold (ZOH) which generate functions with a sequence of hold times 0 ≤ t0 < t1 < ··· < tk ··· < lim tk = +∞. Taking k→∞ consideration of ZOH, the control input is U(t) = KX(tk), t ∈ [tk,tk+1). (6) where K is the control gain matrix. Without loss of generality, it is assumed that the sampled time interval is bounded by h(t) ≤ hM where h(t) = tk+1 − tk, and hM is the maximum sampled delay. Using sampled signals, the systems are expressed as delayed LPV systems X˙ (t) = AiX(t) + BU(t − h(t)). (7) Lemma 1. [5] For given matrices Λ1,Λ2,Ψ, and a scalar 0 ≤ Lemma 2. [6] For given matrices H,N,R > 0 and a continuously differentiable function x(t) in [a,b] ∈ Rn, the following inequality is ensured. (10) (11) , where is any vector,, and x(s) . −b−a a III. MAIN RESULTS The main purpose of this paper is to design a proper sampled-data model predictive controller. Model Predictive Control is used to approximately obtain optimal trajectories. Therefore, choosing the following performance index is reasonable: (12) where Q, R are coefficients. For the given performance index, if the following condition is satisfied . (13) where · denotes 2-norm, then the upper bound of the performance index can be derived instead of directly minimizing performance index. By integrating (13) from i = 1 to i = ∞, one can notice the upper bound of the performance index is less than the Lyapunov function. Before presenting main results, we employed the following representations for simplicity. The matrices ei = R4n×n for i = 1,2,...,4 are matrices composed of nth zero elements with ith identity matrix. (For example, e1 = [I 0 0 0] and e3 = [0 0 I 0]). . With predefined Lemmas and notations, we present design methodology of model predictive control for delayed LPV systems by deriving a set of linear matrix inequality conditions. Theorem 1. For a given parameter hM and a vector X(tk), if U¯ U¯ there exist positive matrices G, 0,V >¯ 0, Y , Z¯1,Z¯2, satisfying the following LMI conditions, the control input at time instant tk guarantees the performance index (12) with γ . (14) (15) (16) (17) (18) where , with then, the state feedback gains are given as K = Y G−1. Proof. Choosing the following Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional (LKF) for t ∈ [tk,tk+1) yields V (xt) = V1(t) + V2(t) + V3(t) (19) where , Differentiate the LKF From Lemma 2, the following holds (23) where Z1,Z2 are auxiliary variables. Taking into account system dynamics (7), (24) Summing up from (20) to (24) leads to V˙ + XT(t)QX(t) + UT(t)RU(t) ≤ ζ(tk)Σ¯ζ(tk) (25) where Pre-and post-multiplying with a matrix γ1/2 × diag{G,G,G,G}, the followings are satisfied with Lemma 1. , (26) Σ1 + hMΣ3 < 0 (27) time (sec) Fig. 2 error response of the system in Example 1 where U¯ = GUG, V¯ = GV G, Z¯1 = GZ1G, Z¯2 = GZ2G, and K = Y G−1. Using Schur complement, The equations in (25) and (26) are equivalent to those of (16) and (17). For every sampling instance, V2 and V3 vanish. Then, the upper bound of LKF is expressed in terms of V1. XT(tk)GP¯1GX(tk) ≤ γ, (28) where γ denotes the bound of optimal performance index. The effect of input saturation is considered similar to the method in [7]. This ends the proof. IV. NUMERICAL EXAMPLE Example 1 This example considered the dynamical equations of the system represented from error dynamics. X˙ (t) = AiX(t) + BU(t − h(t)) (29) where ⎡ −0 ωr − 0.05 0 ⎤⎦ A1 =ω 0.05 0 vr(t) , 0 0 0 ⎡ 0 ωr + 0.05 0 ⎤ A2 =ω + 0.05 0 vr(t) , 0 0 0 ⎦ ⎡−1 0 ⎤ B = 0 0 . ⎣ 0 −1⎦ The model parameters are calculated with a sampling time 0.1s. The sampling time h(t) is less than 0.1 s. Along the reference trajectory, the input is constrained to −0.1 ≤ u(1) ≤ 0.1 and −0.05 ≤ u(2) ≤ 0.05. The corresponding controller gain matrix is Fig. 2 shows the simulation result which is obtained with the above controller gain, taking Q = I, R = I,α = 0.1. V. CONCLUSION The sampled-data MPC method for mobile robot systems have been investigated by considering constrained polytopic LPV model. Based on the input delay model, sufficient conditions for the sampled-data MPC controller design are obtained by constructing a new Lyapunov functional. The effectiveness of the presented method has been verified by illustrating numerical simulation. REFERENCES W. Lucia, F. Tedesco. "A networked-based receding horizon scheme for constrained LPV systems," European Journal of Control, vol. 25, pp. 69-75, 2015. S. Lee, Ju H. Park, D. Ji, S. Won, "Robust model predictive control for LPV systems using relaxation matrices," IET. Control Theory Appl., vol. 1, no. 6, pp. 1567-1573, 2007. A. Seuret, F. Gouaisbaut, Wirtinger-based integral inequality: application to time-delay systems, Automatica, vol. 49, no. 8, pp. 2860-2866, 2013. S. Lee, O. Kwon, Quantised MPC for LPV systems by using new LyapunovKrasovskii functional, IET. Control Theory Appl., vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 439-445, 2017. D. Yue, E. Tian, Y. Zhang, and C. Peng, "Delay-distribution-dependent stability and stabilization of T-S fuzzy systems with probabilistic interval delay," IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B (Cybernetics), vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 503–516, 2009. C.K. Zhang, Y. He, L. Jiang, W. Lin, M. Wu, "Delay-dependent stability analysis of neural networks with time-varying delay: A generalized free-weighting-matrix," Applied Mathematics and Computation, vol. 294, no. 1, pp. 102-120, 2017. E. Fridman and M. Dambrine, "Control under quantization, saturation and delay: An LMI approach," Automatica, vol. 45, no. 10, pp. 2258–2
How someone can get health insurance without sharing his health information? How you can get a loan without disclosing your credit score? There is a method to certify certain attributes of various data, either this is health metrics or finance information, without revealing the data itself or any other kind of personal data. This method is known as zero-knowledge proofs. Zero-Knowledge techniques are mathematical methods used to verify things without sharing or revealing underlying data. Zero-Knowledge protocols have vast applications from simple identity schemes and blockchains to defense research programs and nuclear arms control
Learning from data owned by several parties, as in federated learning, raises challenges regarding the privacy guarantees provided to participants and the correctness of the computation in the presence of malicious parties. We tackle these challenges in the context of distributed averaging, an essential building block of federated learning algorithms. Our first contribution is a scalable protocol in which participants exchange correlated Gaussian noise along the edges of a network graph, complemented by independent noise added by each party. We analyze the differential privacy guarantees of our protocol and the impact of the graph topology under colluding malicious parties, showing that we can nearly match the utility of the trusted curator model even when each honest party communicates with only a logarithmic number of other parties chosen at random. This is in contrast with protocols in the local model of privacy (with lower utility) or based on secure aggregation (where all pairs of users need to exchange messages). Our second contribution enables users to prove the correctness of their computations without compromising the efficiency and privacy guarantees of the protocol. Our verification protocol relies on standard cryptographic primitives like commitment schemes and zero knowledge proofs.
Muhammad Umar Javed, Abid Jamal, Nadeem Javaid, Noman Haider · 5 authors
Advertisement sharing in vehicular network through vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication is a fascinating in-vehicle service for advertisers and the users due to multiple reasons. It enable advertisers to promote their product or services in the region of their interest. Also the users get to receive more relevant ads. Usually, users tend to contribute in dissemination of ads if their privacy is preserved and if some incentive is provided. Recent researches have focused on enabling both of the parameters for the users by developing fair incentive mechanism which preserves privacy by using Zero-Knowledge Proof of Knowledge (ZKPoK) (Ming et al., 2019). However, the anonymity provided by ZKPoK can introduce internal attacker scenarios in the network due to which authenticated users can disseminate fake ads in the network without payment. As the existing scheme uses certificate-less cryptography, due to which malicious users cannot be removed from the network. In order to resolve these challenges, we employed conditional anonymity and introduced Monitoring Authority (MA) in the system. In our proposed scheme, the pseudonyms are assigned to the vehicles while their real identities are stored in Certification Authority (CA) in encrypted form. The pseudonyms are updated after a pre-defined time threshold to prevent behavioural privacy leakage. We performed security and performance analysis to show the efficiency of our proposed system.
Mehrdad Hajizadeh, Nima Afraz, Marco Ruffini, Thomas Bauschert
The legacy security defense mechanisms cannot resist where emerging sophisticated threats such as zero-day and malware campaigns have profoundly changed the dimensions of cyber-attacks. Recent studies indicate that cyber threat intelligence plays a crucial role in implementing proactive defense operations. It provides a knowledge-sharing platform that not only increases security awareness and readiness but also enables the collaborative defense to diminish the effectiveness of potential attacks. In this paper, we propose a secure distributed model to facilitate cyber threat intelligence sharing among diverse participants. The proposed model uses blockchain technology to assure tamper-proof record-keeping and smart contracts to guarantee immutable logic. We use an open-source permissioned blockchain platform, Hyperledger Fabric, to implement the blockchain application. We also utilize the flexibility and management capabilities of Software-Defined Networking to be integrated with the proposed sharing platform to enhance defense perspectives against threats in the system. In the end, collaborative DDoS attack mitigation is taken as a case study to demonstrate our approach.
Public blockchains can be abused to covertly store and disseminate potentially harmful digital content which poses a serious regulatory issue. In this work, we show the severity of the problem by demonstrating that blockchains can be exploited to surreptitiously distribute arbitrary content. More specifically, all major blockchain systems use randomized cryptographic primitives, such as digital signatures and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs; we illustrate how the uncontrolled randomness in such primitives can be maliciously manipulated to enable covert communication and hidden persistent storage. To clarify the potential risk, we design, implement and evaluate our technique against the widely-used ECDSA signature scheme, the CryptoNote's ring signature scheme, and Monero's ring confidential transactions. Importantly, the significance of the demonstrated attacks stems from their undetectability, their adverse effect on the future of decentralized blockchains, and their serious repercussions on users' privacy and crypto funds. Finally, we present a generic framework to immunize blockchains against these attacks.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Tianlin Song, Jingqiang Lin, Wei Wang, Quanwei Cai
User registration is the beginning of the life cycle of an account for most information systems. Some registration servers have special requirements for the validity of the registrant's identity and attributes, and thus demand his real-life identity and raw attributes for verification, which poses a great threat to privacy. However, the exposure of the registrant's real-life identity and raw attributes is not necessary, as long as he can prove to the server that he is associated with a real-life identity (RId) that fulfills the requirements. In this paper, we propose the concept of anonymous registration, with which a user can register an anonymous identity (AId) without privacy leakage. Anonymous registration has two basic features, i.e. privacy and verifiability, and two extended features, i.e. traceability and revocability. We design and implement an anonymous registration scheme with the above features, named Traceable Revocable Anonymous Registration Scheme (TRARS) based on Blockchain. In the proposed registration process, the user can calculate a zero-knowledge proof for a self-generated AId, which can prove to the registration server that the AId is associated with a valid RId and the RId's attributes meet the server's requirements, without leaking any privacy. We also introduce an identity revocation coordinator, with which evil identities can be tracked and outdated AIds can be revoked timely.
We propose a blockchain-based IoT devices anonymous access system using zero-knowledge proof in cloud-based radio over optical fiber networks (C-RoFN) to prevent device sensitive information from being exposed to massive IoT devices.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The blockchain's cross-chain atomic exchange uses smart contracts to replace trusted third parties, but atomic exchange cannot guarantee the anonymity of transactions, and it will inevitably increase the risk of privacy leakage. Therefore, this paper proposes an atom based on zero-knowledge proof. Improved methods of exchange to ensure the privacy of both parties in a transaction. The anonymous improvement scheme in this article uses the UTXO unconsumed model to add a new anonymous list in the blockchain. When sending assets to smart contracts, zero-knowledge proof is used to provide self-certification of ownership of the asset, and then the transaction is broken down. Only the hash value of the transaction is sent to the node, and the discarded list is used to verify the validity of the transaction, which achieves the effect of storing assets anonymously in the smart contract. At the same time, a smart contract is added when the two parties in the transaction communicate to exchange the contract address of the newly set smart contract between the two parties in the transaction. This can prevent the smart contract address information from being stolen when the two parties in the transaction communicate directly.
With the development of precise positioning technology, a growing number of location-based services (LBSs) facilitate people's life. Most LBSs require proof of location (PoL) to prove that the user satisfies the service requirement, which exposes the user's privacy. In this paper, we propose a zero-knowledge proof of location (zk-PoL) protocol to better protect the user's privacy. With the zk-PoL protocol, the user can choose necessary information to expose to the server, so that hierarchical privacy protection can be achieved. The evaluation shows that the zk-PoL has excellent security to resist main attacks, moreover the computational efficiency is independent of input parameters and the zk-PoL is appropriate to delay-tolerant LBSs.
Ring confidential transaction (RingCT) protocol is widely used in cryptocurrency to protect the privacy of both users’ identities and transaction amounts. Most recently, a new RingCT protocol (called RingCT 2.0) was proposed by leveraging cryptographic accumulators, which can achieve a constant-size output theoretically but still far from being practical due to the heavy zero-knowledge associated with the accumulator. In this article, we revisit the design of ring confidential transaction protocol and put forward a more efficient privacy-preserving payment protocol, which is built upon an extended version of one-out-of-many proof and a special multi-signature. Compared with previous works, the new protocol is not only more practical, but also does not suffer from a trusted setup. Besides, we show that the protocol satisfies the security requirements provided that the underlying cryptographic primitives are secure in the random oracle model. We implement our new payment protocol in Java, and the experimental results show that it is efficient enough to be used in practice.
Current cloud and network infrastructures do not employ privacy-preserving methods to protect their assets. Anonymous credential schemes are a cryptographic building block that enables the certification of data structures and prove properties over their representations without disclosing the innards of their data structures in zero-knowledge. The GRaph Signature (GRS) scheme enables the certification and proof methods to sign infrastructure topologies represented as graph data structures and use zero-knowledge to prove properties over their certificates. As such, they represent a powerful privacy-preserving method that proves properties over a signed topology graph to another party without disclosing the blueprint of its topology. In this paper, we report our efforts in designing, implementing and benchmarking a Graph Signature Library (GSL). GSL is a cryptographic library realized in Java that implements the graph signature scheme.
This paper describes techniques to help with COVID-19 automated contact tracing, and with the restoration efforts. We describe a decentralized protocol for ``proof-of-contact'' in zero knowledge where a person can publish a short cryptographic proof attesting to the fact that they have been infected and that they have come in contact with a set of people without revealing any information about any of the people involved. More importantly, we describe how to compose these proofs to support broader functionality such as proofs of $n$th-order exposure which can further speed up automated contact tracing. The cryptographic proofs are publicly verifiable, and places the burden on the person proving contact and not on third parties or healthcare providers rendering the system more decentralized, and accordingly more scalable.
In 2009, Gradwohl, Naor, Pinkas, and Rothblum proposed physical zero-knowledge proof protocols for Sudoku. That is, for a puzzle instance of Sudoku, their excellent protocols allow a prover to convince a verifier that there is a solution to the Sudoku puzzle and the prover knows it, without revealing any information about the solution. The possible drawback is that the existing protocols have an extractability error with a non-zero probability, or need special cards (such as scratch-off cards). Thus, in this study, we propose new protocols to perform zero-knowledge proof of knowledge for Sudoku using a normal deck of playing cards with no extractability error. Our protocols can be easily implemented by humans with a reasonable number of playing cards.