PakeMail: Authentication and Key Management in Decentralized Secure Email and Messaging via PAKE

in Obaidat, Mohammad S.; Ben-Othman, Jalel (Eds.) E-Business and Telecommunications - 17th International Conference on E-Business and Telecommunications, ICETE 2020, Online Event, July 8-10, 2020, Revised Selected Papers. (2021, October)

We propose the use of password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) for achieving and enhancing entity authentication (EA) and key management (KM) in the context of decentralized end-to-end encrypted email ... [more ▼]

We propose the use of password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) for achieving and enhancing entity authentication (EA) and key management (KM) in the context of decentralized end-to-end encrypted email and secure messaging, i.e., without a public key infrastructure or a trusted third party. This not only simplifies the EA process by requiring users to share only a low-entropy secret such as a memorable word, but it also allows us to establish a high-entropy secret key. This approach enables a series of cryptographic enhancements and security properties, which are hard to achieve using out-of-band (OOB) authentication. We first study a few vulnerabilities in voice-based OOB authentication, in particular a combinatorial attack against lazy users, which we analyze in the context of a secure email solution. We then propose tackling public key authentication by solving the problem of secure equality test using PAKE and discuss various protocols and their properties. This method enables the automation of important KM tasks such as key renewal and future key pair authentications, reduces the impact of human errors and lends itself to the asynchronous nature of email and modern messaging. It also provides cryptographic enhancements including multi-device synchronization, and secure secret storage/retrieval, and paves the path for forward secrecy, deniability and post-quantum security.We also discuss the use of auditable PAKEs for mitigating a class of online guess and abort attacks in authentication protocols. We present an implementation of our proposal, called PakeMail, to demonstrate the feasibility of the core idea and discuss some of its cryptographic details, implemented features and efficiency aspects. We conclude with some design and security considerations, followed by future lines of work. [less ▲]

Investigating Usability and User Experience of Individually Verifiable Internet Voting Schemes

in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (2021), 28(5), 1-36

Internet voting can afford more inclusive and inexpensive elections. The flip side is that the integrity of the election can be compromised by adversarial attacks and malfunctioning voting infrastructure ... [more ▼]

Internet voting can afford more inclusive and inexpensive elections. The flip side is that the integrity of the election can be compromised by adversarial attacks and malfunctioning voting infrastructure. Individual verifiability aims to protect against such risks by letting voters verify that their votes are correctly registered in the electronic ballot box. Therefore, voters need to carry out additional tasks making human factors crucial for security. In this article, we establish a categorization of individually verifiable Internet voting schemes based on voter interactions. For each category in our proposed categorization, we evaluate a voting scheme in a user study with a total of 100 participants. In our study, we assessed usability, user experience, trust, and further qualitative data to gain deeper insights into voting schemes. Based on our results, we conclude with recommendations for developers and policymakers to inform the choices and design of individually verifiable Internet voting schemes. [less ▲]

AVRNTRU: Lightweight NTRU-based Post-Quantum Cryptography for 8-bit AVR Microcontrollers

in 2021 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE 2021, Grenoble, France, February 1-5, 2021, Proceedings (2021, February)

Introduced in 1996, NTRUEncrypt is not only one of the earliest but also one of the most scrutinized lattice-based cryptosystems and expected to remain secure in the upcoming era of quantum computing ... [more ▼]

Introduced in 1996, NTRUEncrypt is not only one of the earliest but also one of the most scrutinized lattice-based cryptosystems and expected to remain secure in the upcoming era of quantum computing. Furthermore, NTRUEncrypt offers some efficiency benefits over “pre-quantum” cryptosystems like RSA or ECC since the low-level arithmetic operations are less computation-intensive and, thus, more suitable for constrained devices. In this paper we present AVR N TRU, a highly-optimized implementation of NTRUEncrypt for 8-bit AVR microcontrollers that we developed from scratch to reach high performance and resistance to timing attacks. AVR N TRU complies with the EESS #1 v3.1 specification and supports product-form parameter sets such as ees443ep1, ees587ep1, and ees743ep1. An entire encryption (including mask generation and blinding-polynomial generation) using the ees443ep1 parameters requires 847973 clock cycles on an ATmega1281 microcontroller; the decryption is more costly and has an execution time of 1051871 cycles. We achieved these results with the help of a novel hybrid technique for multiplication in a truncated polynomial ring, whereby one of the operands is a sparse ternary polynomial in product form and the other an arbitrary element of the ring. A constant-time multiplication in the ring given by the ees443ep1 parameters takes only 192577 cycles, which sets a new speed record for the arithmetic part of a lattice-based cryptosystem on AVR. [less ▲]

A Declaration of Software Independence

in Protocols, Strands, and Logic - Essays Dedicated to Joshua Guttman on the Occasion of his 66.66th Birthday (2021)

High-Throughput Elliptic Curve Cryptography Using AVX2 Vector Instructions

in Dunkelman, Orr; Jacobson Jr., Michael J.; O'Flynn, Colin (Eds.) Selected Areas in Cryptography, 27th International Conference, Halifax, NS, Canada (Virtual Event), October 21-23, 2020, Revised Selected Papers (2020, October)

Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) execution engines like Intel’s Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2) offer a great potential to accelerate elliptic curve cryptography compared to implementations ... [more ▼]

Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) execution engines like Intel’s Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2) offer a great potential to accelerate elliptic curve cryptography compared to implementations using only basic x64 instructions. All existing AVX2 implementations of scalar multiplication on e.g. Curve25519 (and alternative curves) are optimized for low latency. We argue in this paper that many real-world applications, such as server-side SSL/TLS handshake processing, would benefit more from throughput-optimized implementations than latency-optimized ones. To support this argument, we introduce a throughput-optimized AVX2 implementation of variable-base scalar multiplication on Curve25519 and fixed-base scalar multiplication on Ed25519. Both implementations perform four scalar multiplications in parallel, where each uses a 64-bit element of a 256-bit vector. The field arithmetic is based on a radix-2^29 representation of the field elements, which makes it possible to carry out four parallel multiplications modulo a multiple of p=2^255−19 in just 88 cycles on a Skylake CPU. Four variable-base scalar multiplications on Curve25519 require less than 250,000 Skylake cycles, which translates to a throughput of 32,318 scalar multiplications per second at a clock frequency of 2 GHz. For comparison, the to-date best latency-optimized AVX2 implementation has a throughput of some 21,000 scalar multiplications per second on the same Skylake CPU. [less ▲]

Coercion-Resistant Voting in Linear Time via Fully Homomorphic Encryption: Towards a Quantum-Safe Scheme

in Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2019. FC 2019: International Workshops, CIW, VOTING, and WTSC (2020)

We present an approach for performing the tallying work in the coercion-resistant JCJ voting protocol, introduced by Juels, Catalano, and Jakobsson, in linear time using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE ... [more ▼]

We present an approach for performing the tallying work in the coercion-resistant JCJ voting protocol, introduced by Juels, Catalano, and Jakobsson, in linear time using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). The suggested enhancement also paves the path towards making JCJ quantum-resistant, while leaving the underlying structure of JCJ intact. The pairwise comparison-based approach of JCJ using plaintext equivalence tests leads to a quadratic blow-up in the number of votes, which makes the tallying process rather impractical in realistic settings with a large number of voters. We show how the removal of invalid votes can be done in linear time via a solution based on recent advances in various FHE primitives such as hashing, zero-knowledge proofs of correct decryption, verifiable shuffles and threshold FHE. We conclude by touching upon some of the advantages and challenges of such an approach, followed by a discussion of further security and post-quantum considerations. [less ▲]

(Universal) Unconditional Verifiability in E-Voting without Trusted Parties

in 2020 IEEE 33rd Computer Security Foundations Symposium (2020)

Verifiable Inner Product Encryption Scheme

in Public-Key Cryptography – PKC 2020 (2020)

Revisiting Practical and Usable Coercion-Resistant Remote E-Voting

in Electronic Voting - 5th International Joint Conference, E-Vote-ID 2020, Bregenz, Austria, October 6-9, 2020, Proceedings (2020)

A Lightweight Implementation of NTRU Prime for the Post-Quantum Internet of Things

in Laurent, Maryline; Giannetsos, Thanassis (Eds.) Information Security Theory and Practice, 13th IFIP WG 11.2 International Conference, WISTP 2019, Paris, France, December 11–12, 2019, Proceedings (2019, December)

The dawning era of quantum computing has initiated various initiatives for the standardization of post-quantum cryptosystems with the goal of (eventually) replacing RSA and ECC. NTRU Prime is a variant of ... [more ▼]

The dawning era of quantum computing has initiated various initiatives for the standardization of post-quantum cryptosystems with the goal of (eventually) replacing RSA and ECC. NTRU Prime is a variant of the classical NTRU cryptosystem that comes with a couple of tweaks to minimize the attack surface; most notably, it avoids rings with "worrisome" structure. This paper presents, to our knowledge, the first assembler-optimized implementation of Streamlined NTRU Prime for an 8-bit AVR microcontroller and shows that high-security lattice-based cryptography is feasible for small IoT devices. An encapsulation operation using parameters for 128-bit post-quantum security requires 8.2 million clock cycles when executed on an 8-bit ATmega1284 microcontroller. The decapsulation is approximately twice as costly and has an execution time of 15.6 million cycles. We achieved this performance through (i) new low-level software optimization techniques to accelerate Karatsuba-based polynomial multiplication on the 8-bit AVR platform and (ii) an efficient implementation of the coefficient modular reduction written in assembly language. The execution time of encapsulation and decapsulation is independent of secret data, which makes our software resistant against timing attacks. Finally, we assess the performance one could theoretically gain by using a so-called product-form polynomial as part of the secret key and discuss potential security implications. [less ▲]