Christian Gehrmann

Authorization framework for the Internet-of-Things

This paper describes a framework that allows fine-grained and flexible access control to connected devices with very limited processing power and memory. We propose a set of security and performance requirements for this setting and derive an authorization framework distributing processing costs between constrained devices and less constrained back-end servers while keeping message exchanges with the constrained devices at a minimum. As a proof of concept we present performance results from a prototype implementing the device part of the framework.

Multiround Unconditionally Secure Authentication

Authentication codes are used to protect communication against a malicious adversary. In this paper we investigate unconditionally secure multiround authentication schemes. In a multiround scheme a message is authenticated by passing back and forth several codewords between the sender and receiver. We define a multiround authentication model and show how to calculate the probability of a successful attack for this model. We prove the security for a 3-round scheme and give a construction for the 3-round scheme based on Reed-Solomom codes. This construction has a very small key size for even extremely large messages. Furthermore, a secure scheme for an arbitrary number of rounds is given. We give a new upper bound for the keys size of an n-round scheme.

Unconditionally Secure Group Authentication

Group authentication schemes as introduced by Boyd and by Desmedt and Frankel are cryptographic schemes in which only certain designated groups can provide messages with authentication information. In this paper we study unconditionally secure group authentication schemes based on linear perfect secret sharing and authentication schemes, for which we give expressions for the probabilities of successful attacks. Furthermore, we give a construction that uses maximum rank distance codes.

On improving resistance to Denial of Service and key provisioning scalability of the DTLS handshake

DTLS is a transport layer security protocol designed to provide secure communication over unreliable datagram protocols. Before starting to communicate, a DTLS client and server perform a specific handshake in order to establish a secure session and agree on a common security context. However, the DTLS handshake is affected by two relevant issues. First, the DTLS server is vulnerable to a specific Denial of Service (DoS) attack aimed at forcing the establishment of several half-open sessions. This may exhaust memory and network resources on the server, so making it less responsive or even unavailable to legitimate clients. Second, although it is one of the most efficient key provisioning approaches adopted in DTLS, the pre-shared key provisioning mode does not scale well with the number of clients, it may result in scalability issues on the server side, and it complicates key re-provisioning in dynamic scenarios. This paper presents a single and efficient security architecture which addresses both issues, by substantially limiting the impact of DoS, and reducing the number of keys stored on the server side to one unit only. Our approach does not break the existing standard and does not require any additional message exchange between DTLS client and server. Our experimental results show that our approach requires a shorter amount of time to complete a handshake execution and consistently reduces the time a DTLS server is exposed to a DoS instance. We also show that it considerably improves a DTLS server in terms of service availability and robustness against DoS attack.