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Internet of Things (IoT) and Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) continuum permit cost-effective maintenance of security-sensitive information collected by IoT devices over cloud systems. It is necessary to guarantee the security of sensitive data in IoT-STaaS applications. Especially, log entries trace critical events in computer systems and play a vital role in the trustworthiness of IoT-STaaS. An ideal log protection tool must be scalable and lightweight for vast quantities of resource-limited IoT devices while permitting efficient and public verification at STaaS. However, the existing cryptographic logging schemes either incur significant computation/signature overhead to the logger or extreme storage and verification costs to the cloud. There is a critical need for a cryptographic forensic log tool that respects the efficiency requirements of the IoT-STaaS continuum. In this paper, we created novel digital signatures for logs called Optimal Signatures for secure Logging (OSLO), which are the first (to the best of our knowledge) to offer both small-constant signature and public key sizes with near-optimal signing and batch verification via various granularities. We introduce new design features such as one-time randomness management, flexible aggregation along with various optimizations to attain these seemingly conflicting properties simultaneously. Our experiments show that OSLO offers 50× faster verification (for 235 entries) than the most compact alternative with equal signature sizes, while also being several magnitudes of more compact than its most logger efficient counterparts. These properties make OSLO an ideal choice for the IoT-STaaS, wherein lightweight logging and efficient batch verification of massive-size logs are vital for the IoT edge and cold storage servers, respectively.
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Compact and Resilient Cryptographic Tools for Digital Forensics
Audit logs play a crucial role in the security of computer systems and are targeted by the attackers due to their forensic value. Digital signatures are essential tools to ensure the authentication/integrity of logs with public verifiability and nonrepudiation. Especially, forward-secure and aggregate signatures (FAS) offer compromise-resiliency and append-only features such that an active attacker compromising a computer cannot tamper or selectively delete the logs collected before the breach. Despite their high-security, existing FAS schemes can only sign a small pre-defined number (K) of logs, and their key-size/computation overhead grows linearly with K. These limitations prevent a practical adoption of FAS schemes for digital forensics. In this paper, we created new signatures named COmpact and REsilient (CORE) schemes, which are (to the best of our knowledge) the first FAS that can sign (practically) unbounded number of messages with only a sub-linear growth in the keysize/computation overhead. Central to CORE is the creation of a novel K-time signature COREKBase that has a small-constant key generation overhead and public key size. We then develop CORE-MMM that harnesses COREK Base via forward-secure transformations. We showed that CORE-MMM significantly outperforms its alternatives for essential metrics. For instance, CORE-MMM provides more than two and one magnitudes faster key updates and smaller signatures, respectively, with smaller private keys. CORE-MMM also offers extra efficiency when the same messages are signed with evolving keys. We formally prove that CORE schemes are secure. Our analysis indicates that CORE schemes are ideal tools to enhance the trustworthiness of digital forensic applications.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1917627
- PAR ID:
- 10206542
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 9
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/CNS48642.2020.9162236
