skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Search for: All records

Creators/Authors contains: "Michaels, Alan J"

Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

  1. When personal information is shared across the Internet, we have limited confidence that the designated second party will safeguard it as we would prefer. Privacy policies offer insight into the best practices and intent of the organization, yet most are written so loosely that sharing with undefined third parties is to be anticipated. Tracking these sharing behaviors and identifying the source of unwanted content is exceedingly difficult when personal information is shared with multiple such second parties. This paper formulates a model for realistic fake identities, constructs a robust fake identity generator, and outlines management methods targeted towards online transactions (email, phone, text) that pass both cursory machine and human examination for use in personal privacy experimentation. This fake ID generator, combined with a custom account signup engine, are the core front-end components of our larger Use and Abuse of Personal Information system that performs one-time transactions that, similar to a cryptographic one-time pad, ensure that we can attribute the sharing back to the single one-time transaction and/or specific second party. The flexibility and richness of the fake IDs also serve as a foundational set of control variables for a wide range of social science research questions revolving around personal information. Collectively, these fake identity models address multiple inter-disciplinary areas of common interest and serve as a foundation for eliciting and quantifying personal information-sharing behaviors. 
    more » « less
  2. This paper focuses on a block cipher adaptation of the Galois Extension Fields (GEF) combination technique for PRNGs and targets application in the Internet of Things (IoT) space, an area where the combination technique was concluded as a quality stream cipher. Electronic Codebook (ECB) and Cipher Feedback (CFB) variations of the cryptographic algorithm are discussed. Both modes offer computationally efficient, scalable cryptographic algorithms for use over a simple combination technique like XOR. The cryptographic algorithm relies on the use of quality PRNGs, but adds an additional layer of security while preserving maximal entropy and near-uniform distributions. The use of matrices with entries drawn from a Galois field extends this technique to block size chunks of plaintext, increasing diffusion, while only requiring linear operations that are quick to perform. The process of calculating the inverse differs only in using the modular inverse of the determinant, but this can be expedited by a look-up table. We validate this GEF block cipher with the NIST test suite. Additional statistical tests indicate the condensed plaintext results in a near-uniform distributed ciphertext across the entire field. The block cipher implemented on an MSP430 offers a faster, more power-efficient alternative to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) system. This cryptosystem is a secure, scalable option for IoT devices that must be mindful of time and power consumption. 
    more » « less