arXiv subjects

Xinxin Fan

Publications and source records attributed to Xinxin Fan.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Decentralized Translator of Trust: Supporting Heterogeneous TEE for Critical Infrastructure Protection

Trusted execution environment (TEE) technology has found many applications in mitigating various security risks in an efficient manner, which is attractive for critical infrastructure protection. First, the natural of critical infrastructure requires it to be well protected from various cyber attacks. Second, performance is usually important for critical infrastructure and it cannot afford an expensive protection mechanism. While a large number of TEE-based critical infrastructure protection systems have been proposed to address various security challenges (e.g., secure sensing and reliable control), most existing works ignore one important feature, i.e., devices comprised the critical infrastructure may be equipped with multiple incompatible TEE technologies and belongs to different owners. This feature makes it hard for these devices to establish mutual trust and form a unified TEE environment. To address these challenges and fully unleash the potential of TEE technology for critical infrastructure protection, we propose DHTee, a decentralized coordination mechanism. DHTee uses blockchain technology to support key TEE functions in a heterogeneous TEE environment, especially the attestation service. A Device equipped with one TEE can interact securely with the blockchain to verify whether another potential collaborating device claiming to have a different TEE meets the security requirements. DHTee is also flexible and can support new TEE schemes without affecting devices using existing TEEs that have been supported by the system.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Thickness and temperature dependent damping in La$_{0.67}$Sr$_{0.33}$MnO$_{3}$ epitaxial films

The damping of La0.67Sr0.33MnO3 (LSMO) epitaxial films as a function of thickness at different temperatures was studied. The competition between two scattering types (\r{ho}-like and σ-like) with entirely distinct thickness and temperature dependencies resulted in complicated damping behavior. The behavior of σ-like damping in LSMO films is consistent with the behavior in magnetic metal films. However, because \r{ho}-like damping is sensitive to the fine electron structure near the Fermi surface, the distortion of the oxygen octahedra controlled by the film thickness is an important factor in controlling the damping. Our study demonstrates that the complexity of damping in LSMO epitaxial films is a consequence of strong-correlation effects, which are characteristic of complex transition-metal oxides.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2022

Private delegated computations using strong isolation

Sensitive computations are now routinely delegated to third-parties. In response, Confidential Computing technologies are being introduced to microprocessors, offering a protected processing environment, which we generically call an isolate, providing confidentiality and integrity guarantees to code and data hosted within -- even in the face of a privileged attacker. Isolates, with an attestation protocol, permit remote third-parties to establish a trusted "beachhead" containing known code and data on an otherwise untrusted machine. Yet, the rise of these technologies introduces many new problems, including: how to ease provisioning of computations safely into isolates; how to develop distributed systems spanning multiple classes of isolate; and what to do about the billions of "legacy" devices without support for Confidential Computing? Tackling the problems above, we introduce Veracruz, a framework that eases the design and implementation of complex privacy-preserving, collaborative, delegated computations among a group of mutually mistrusting principals. Veracruz supports multiple isolation technologies and provides a common programming model and attestation protocol across all of them, smoothing deployment of delegated computations over supported technologies. We demonstrate Veracruz in operation, on private in-cloud object detection on encrypted video streaming from a video camera. In addition to supporting hardware-backed isolates -- like AWS Nitro Enclaves and Arm Confidential Computing Architecture Realms -- Veracruz also provides pragmatic "software isolates" on Armv8-A devices without hardware Confidential Computing capability, using the high-assurance seL4 microkernel and our IceCap framework.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

Decentralized Trust Management: Risk Analysis and Trust Aggregation

Decentralized trust management is used as a referral benchmark for assisting decision making by human or intelligence machines in open collaborative systems. During any given period of time, each participant may only interact with a few of other participants. Simply relying on direct trust may frequently resort to random team formation. Thus, trust aggregation becomes critical. It can leverage decentralized trust management to learn about indirect trust of every participant based on past transaction experiences. This paper presents alternative designs of decentralized trust management and their efficiency and robustness from three perspectives. First, we study the risk factors and adverse effects of six common threat models. Second, we review the representative trust aggregation models and trust metrics. Third, we present an in-depth analysis and comparison of these reference trust aggregation methods with respect to effectiveness and robustness. We show our comparative study results through formal analysis and experimental evaluation. This comprehensive study advances the understanding of adverse effects of present and future threats and the robustness of different trust metrics. It may also serve as a guideline for research and development of next generation trust aggregation algorithms and services in the anticipation of risk factors and mischievous threats.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2018

Faster Dual-Key Stealth Address for Blockchain-Based Internet of Things Systems

Stealth address prevents public association of a blockchain transaction's output with a recipient's wallet address and hides the actual destination address of a transaction. While stealth address provides an effective privacy-enhancing technology for a cryptocurrency network, it requires blockchain nodes to actively monitor all the transactions and compute the purported destination addresses, which restricts its application for resource-constrained environments like Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we propose DKSAP-IoT, a faster dual-key stealth address protocol for blockchain-based IoT systems. DKSAP-IoT utilizes a technique similar to the TLS session resumption to improve the performance and reduce the transaction size at the same time between two communication peers. Our theoretical analysis as well as the extensive experiments on an embedded computing platform demonstrate that DKSAP-IoT is able to reduce the computational overhead by at least 50% when compared to the state-of-the-art scheme, thereby paving the way for its application to blockchain-based IoT systems.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2017

RSPP: A Reliable, Searchable and Privacy-Preserving e-Healthcare System for Cloud-Assisted Body Area Networks

The integration of cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) is quickly becoming the key enabler for the digital transformation of the healthcare industry by offering comprehensive improvements in patient engagements, productivity and risk mitigation. This paradigm shift, while bringing numerous benefits and new opportunities to healthcare organizations, has raised a lot of security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we present a reliable, searchable and privacy-preserving e-healthcare system, which takes advantage of emerging cloud storage and IoT infrastructure and enables healthcare service providers (HSPs) to realize remote patient monitoring in a secure and regulatory compliant manner. Our system is built upon a novel dynamic searchable symmetric encryption scheme with forward privacy and delegated verifiability for periodically generated healthcare data. While the forward privacy is achieved by maintaining an increasing counter for each keyword at an IoT gateway, the data owner delegated verifiability comes from the combination of the Bloom filter and aggregate message authentication code. Moreover, our system is able to support multiple HSPs through either data owner assistance or delegation. The detailed security analysis as well as the extensive simulations on a large data set with millions of records demonstrate the practical efficiency of the proposed system for real world healthcare applications.

cs.CR↗