Vanesa Daza

Trustworthy Privacy-Preserving Car-Generated Announcements in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) allow vehicle-to-vehicle communication and, in particular, vehicle-generated announcements. Provided that the trustworthiness of such announcements can be guaranteed, they can greatly increase the safety of driving. A new system for vehicle-generated announcements is presented that is secure against external and internal attackers attempting to send fake messages. Internal attacks are thwarted by using an endorsement mechanism based on threshold signatures. Our system outperforms previous proposals in message length and computational cost. Three different privacy-preserving variants of the system are also described to ensure that vehicles volunteering to generate and/or endorse trustworthy announcements do not have to sacrifice their privacy.

On Codes, Matroids, and Secure Multiparty Computation From Linear Secret-Sharing Schemes

Error-correcting codes and matroids have been widely used in the study of ordinary secret sharing schemes. In this paper, the connections between codes, matroids, and a special class of secret sharing schemes, namely, multiplicative linear secret sharing schemes (LSSSs), are studied. Such schemes are known to enable multiparty computation protocols secure against general (nonthreshold) adversaries. Two open problems related to the complexity of multiplicative LSSSs are considered in this paper. The first one deals with strongly multiplicative LSSSs. As opposed to the case of multiplicative LSSSs, it is not known whether there is an efficient method to transform an LSSS into a strongly multiplicative LSSS for the same access structure with a polynomial increase of the complexity. A property of strongly multiplicative LSSSs that could be useful in solving this problem is proved. Namely, using a suitable generalization of the well-known Berlekamp-Welch decoder, it is shown that all strongly multiplicative LSSSs enable efficient reconstruction of a shared secret in the presence of malicious faults. The second one is to characterize the access structures of ideal multiplicative LSSSs. Specifically, the considered open problem is to determine whether all self-dual vector space access structures are in this situation. By the aforementioned connection, this in fact constitutes an open problem about matroid theory, since it can be restated in terms of representability of identically self-dual matroids by self-dual codes. A new concept is introduced, the flat-partition, that provides a useful classification of identically self-dual matroids. Uniform identically self-dual matroids, which are known to be representable by self-dual codes, form one of the classes. It is proved that this property also holds for the family of matroids that, in a natural way, is the next class in the above classification: the identically self-dual bipartite matroids.

Cryptographic techniques for mobile ad-hoc networks

In this paper, we propose some cryptographic techniques to securely set up a mobile ad-hoc network. The process is fully self-managed by the nodes, without any trusted party. New nodes can join the network and are able to obtain the same capabilities as initial nodes; further, each node can obtain a pair of secret/public keys to secure and authenticate its communication. Two additional features of our system are that it allows to implement threshold operations (signature or decryption) involving subgroups of nodes in the network and that any subgroup with a small number of nodes (between 2 and 6) can obtain a common secret key without any communication after the set up phase.

On codes, matroids and secure multi-party computation from linear secret sharing schemes

Error-correcting codes and matroids have been widely used in the study of ordinary secret sharing schemes. In this paper, the connections between codes, matroids, and a special class of secret sharing schemes, namely, multiplicative linear secret sharing schemes (LSSSs), are studied. Such schemes are known to enable multiparty computation protocols secure against general (nonthreshold) adversaries. Two open problems related to the complexity of multiplicative LSSSs are considered in this paper. The first one deals with strongly multiplicative LSSSs. As opposed to the case of multiplicative LSSSs, it is not known whether there is an efficient method to transform an LSSS into a strongly multiplicative LSSS for the same access structure with a polynomial increase of the complexity. A property of strongly multiplicative LSSSs that could be useful in solving this problem is proved. Namely, using a suitable generalization of the well-known Berlekamp-Welch decoder, it is shown that all strongly multiplicative LSSSs enable efficient reconstruction of a shared secret in the presence of malicious faults. The second one is to characterize the access structures of ideal multiplicative LSSSs. Specifically, the considered open problem is to determine whether all self-dual vector space access structures are in this situation. By the aforementioned connection, this in fact constitutes an open problem about matroid theory, since it can be restated in terms of representability of identically self-dual matroids by self-dual codes. A new concept is introduced, the flat-partition, that provides a useful classification of identically self-dual matroids. Uniform identically self-dual matroids, which are known to be representable by self-dual codes, form one of the classes. It is proved that this property also holds for the family of matroids that, in a natural way, is the next class in the above classification: the identically self-dual bipartite matroids.

Extensions of access structures and their cryptographic applications

In secret sharing schemes a secret is distributed among a set of users

On Dynamic Distribution of Private Keys over MANETs

{\mathcal{P}}

MOOC attack: closing the gap between pre-university and university mathematics

in such a way that only some sets, the authorized sets, can recover it. The family Γ of authorized sets is called the access structure. To design new cryptographic protocols, we introduce in this work the concept of extension of an access structure: given a monotone family