Articulating wider smartphone emerging security issues in the case of M-government in Turkey

For the last several years, mobile devices and platform security threats, including wireless networking technology, have been top security issues. A departure has occurred from automatic anti-virus software based on traditional PC defense: risk management (authentication and encryption), compliance, and disaster recovery following polymorphic viruses and malware as the primary activities within many organizations and government services alike. This chapter covers research in Turkey as a reflection of the current market – e-government started officially in 2008. This situation in an emerging country presents the current situation and resistances encountered while engaging with mobile and e-government interfaces. The authors contend that research is needed to understand more precisely security threats and most of all potential solutions for sustainable future intention to use m-government services. Finally, beyond m-government initiatives' success or failure, the mechanisms related to public administration mobile technical capacity building and security issues are discussed.

A combined approach for hiding partial information in RSA

Partial information leakage in deterministic public-key cryptosystems refers to a problem that arises when information about either the plaintext or the key is leaked in subtle ways. Quite a common case is where there are a small number of possible messages that may be sent. An attacker may be able to crack the scheme simply by enumerating all the possible ciphertexts. Two methods are proposed for facing the partial information leakage problem in RSA that incorporate a random element into the encrypted message to increase the number of possible ciphertexts. The resulting scheme is, effectively, an RSA-like cryptosystem which exhibits probabilistic encryption. The first method involves encrypting several similar messages with RSA and then using the Quadratic Residuosity Problem (QRP) to mark the intended one. In this way, an adversary who has correctly guessed two or more of the ciphertexts is still in doubt about which message is the intended one. The cryptographic strength of the combined system is equal to the computational difficulty of factorising a large integer; ideally, this should be feasible. The second scheme uses error-correcting codes for accommodating the random component. The plaintext is processed with an error-correcting code and deliberately corrupted before encryption. The introduced corruption lies within the error-correcting ability of the code, so as to enable the recovery of the original message. The random corruption offers a vast number of possible ciphertexts corresponding to a given plaintext; hence an attacker cannot deduce any useful information from it. The proposed systems are compared to other cryptosystems sharing similar characteristics, in terms of execution time and ciphertext size, so as to determine their practical utility. Finally, parameters which determine the characteristics of the proposed schemes are also examined.

Sparsity and "something else": an approach to encrypted image folding

A property of sparse representations in relation to their capacity for information storage is discussed. It is shown that this feature can be used for an application that we term Encrypted Image Folding. The proposed procedure is realizable through any suitable transformation. In particular, in this paper we illustrate the approach by recourse to the Discrete Cosine Transform and a combination of redundant Cosine and Dirac dictionaries. The main advantage of the proposed technique is that both storage and encryption can be achieved simultaneously using simple processing steps.

Statistical distribution, host for encrypted information

The statistical distribution, when determined from an incomplete set of constraints, is shown to be suitable as host for encrypted information. We design an encoding/decoding scheme to embed such a distribution with hidden information. The encryption security is based on the extreme instability of the encoding procedure. The essential feature of the proposed system lies in the fact that the key for retrieving the code is generated by random perturbations of very small value. The security of the proposed encryption relies on the security to interchange the secret key. Hence, it appears as a good complement to the quantum key distribution protocol. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Genetic Algorithm for Finding the Key’s Length and Cryptanalysis of the Permutation Cipher

In this article we discuss a possibility to use genetic algorithms in cryptanalysis. We developed and described the genetic algorithm for finding the secret key of a block permutation cipher. In this case key is a permutation of some first natural numbers. Our algorithm finds the exact key’s length and the key with controlled accuracy. Evaluation of conducted experiment’s results shows that the almost automatic cryptanalysis is possible.

On Graph-Based Cryptography and Symbolic Computations

We have been investigating the cryptographical properties of in nite families of simple graphs of large girth with the special colouring of vertices during the last 10 years. Such families can be used for the development of cryptographical algorithms (on symmetric or public key modes) and turbocodes in error correction theory. Only few families of simple graphs of large unbounded girth and arbitrarily large degree are known. The paper is devoted to the more general theory of directed graphs of large girth and their cryptographical applications. It contains new explicit algebraic constructions of in finite families of such graphs. We show that they can be used for the implementation of secure and very fast symmetric encryption algorithms. The symbolic computations technique allow us to create a public key mode for the encryption scheme based on algebraic graphs.

Analysis of Security in Archiving

Some basic types of archiving programs are described in the paper in addition to their advantages and disadvantages with respect to the analysis of security in archiving. Analysis and appraisal are performed on the results obtained during the described experiments.

Key Agreement Protocol (KAP) Based on Matrix Power Function

* Work is partially supported by the Lithuanian State Science and Studies Foundation.

Matrix Power S-box Analysis

* Work supported by the Lithuanian State Science and Studies Foundation.

Key Agreement Protocol Using Elliptic Curve Matrix Power Function

* Work is partially supported by the Lithuanian State Science and Studies Foundation.

Asymmetric Cipher Protocol Using Decomposition Problem

The asymmetric cipher protocol based on decomposition problem in matrix semiring M over semiring of natural numbers N is presented. The security parameters are defined and preliminary security analysis is presented.

Improved Cryptoanalysis of the Self-shrinking P-adic Cryptographic Generator

The Self-shrinking p-adic cryptographic generator (SSPCG) is a fast software stream cipher. Improved cryptoanalysis of the SSPCG is introduced. This cryptoanalysis makes more precise the length of the period of the generator. The linear complexity and the cryptography resistance against most recently used attacks are invesigated. Then we discuss how such attacks can be avoided. The results show that the sequence generated by a SSPCG has a large period, large linear complexity and is stable against the cryptographic attacks. This gives the reason to consider the SSPSG as suitable for critical cryptographic applications in stream cipher encryption algorithms.

Long-range, high bit-rate secure key distribution link utilizing Raman Ultra-long fiber laser (UFL)

The distribution of the secret key is the weakest link of many data encryption systems. Quantum key distribution (QKD) schemes provide attractive solutions [1], however their implementation remains challenging and their range and bit-rate are limited. Moreover, practical QKD systems, employ real-life components and are, therefore, vulnerable to diverse attack schemes [2]. Ultra-Long fiber lasers (UFLs) have been drawing much attention recently because of their fundamentally different properties compared to conventional lasers as well as their unique applications [3]. Here, we demonstrate a 100Bps, practically secure key distribution, over a 500km link, employing Raman gain UFL. Fig. 1(a) depicts a schematic of the UFL system. Each user has an identical set of two wavelength selective mirrors centered at l0 and l 1. In order to exchange a key-bit, each user independently choose one of these mirrors and introduces it as a laser reflector at their end. If both users choose identical mirrors, a clear signal develops and the bits in these cases are discarded. However if they choose complementary mirrors, (1, 0 or 0, 1 states), the UFL remains below lasing threshold and no signal evolves. In these cases, an eavesdropper can only detect noise and is unable to determine the mirror choice of the users, where the choice of mirrors represent a single key bit (e.g. Alice's choice of mirror is the key-bit). These bits are kept and added to the key. The absence of signal in the secure states faxilitates fast measurements to distinguish between the non-secure and the secure states and to determine the key-bit in the later case, Sequentially reapeating the single bit exchange protocol generate the entire keys of any desirable length. © 2013 IEEE.

Plaintext Recovery in DES-like Cryptosystems Based on S-boxes with Embedded Parity Check

We describe an approach for recovering the plaintext in block ciphers having a design structure similar to the Data Encryption Standard but with improperly constructed S-boxes. The experiments with a backtracking search algorithm performing this kind of attack against modified DES/Triple-DES in ECB mode show that the unknown plaintext can be recovered with a small amount of uncertainty and this algorithm is highly efficient both in time and memory costs for plaintext sources with relatively low entropy. Our investigations demonstrate once again that modifications resulting to S-boxes which still satisfy some design criteria may lead to very weak ciphers. ACM Computing Classification System (1998): E.3, I.2.7, I.2.8.

Secure information flow via stripping and fast simulation

Type systems for secure information flow aim to prevent a program from leaking information from H (high) to L (low) variables. Traditionally, bisimulation has been the prevalent technique for proving the soundness of such systems. This work introduces a new proof technique based on stripping and fast simulation, and shows that it can be applied in a number of cases where bisimulation fails. We present a progressive development of this technique over a representative sample of languages including a simple imperative language (core theory), a multiprocessing nondeterministic language, a probabilistic language, and a language with cryptographic primitives. In the core theory we illustrate the key concepts of this technique in a basic setting. A fast low simulation in the context of transition systems is a binary relation where simulating states can match the moves of simulated states while maintaining the equivalence of low variables; stripping is a function that removes high commands from programs. We show that we can prove secure information flow by arguing that the stripping relation is a fast low simulation. We then extend the core theory to an abstract distributed language under a nondeterministic scheduler. Next, we extend to a probabilistic language with a random assignment command; we generalize fast simulation to the setting of discrete time Markov Chains, and prove approximate probabilistic noninterference. Finally, we introduce cryptographic primitives into the probabilistic language and prove computational noninterference, provided that the underling encryption scheme is secure.