Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) are cryptographic primitives allowing a party to prove to another party that the former knows some information while keeping it secret. Such a premise can lead to the development of numerous privacy-preserving protocols in different scenarios, like proving knowledge of some credentials to a server without leaking the identity of the user. Even when the applications of ZKPs were endless, they were not exploited in the wild for a couple of decades due to the fact that computing and verifying proofs was too computationally expensive. However, the advent of efficient schemes (in particular, zk-SNARKs) made this primitive to break into the scene in fields like cryptocurrencies, smart-contracts, and more recently, self-sovereign scenarios: private-by-design identity management and authentication. Nevertheless, its adoption in environments like the Internet of Things (IoT) remains unexplored due to the computational limitations of embedded systems. In this paper, we introduce ZPiE, a C library intended to create ZKP applications to be executed in embedded systems. Its main feature is portability: it can be compiled, executed, and used out-of-the-box in a wide variety of devices. Moreover, our proof-of-concept has been proved to work smoothly in different devices with limited resources, which can execute state-of-the-art ZKP authentication protocols.

Over the past decade, the Bitcoin P2P network protocol has become a reference model for all modern cryptocurrencies. While nodes in this network are known, the connections among them are kept hidden, as it is commonly believed that this helps protect from deanonymization and low-level attacks. However, adversaries can bypass this limitation by inferring connections through side channels. At the same time, the lack of topology information hinders the analysis of the network, which is essential to improve efficiency and security. In this paper, we thoroughly review network-level attacks and empirically show that topology obfuscation is not an effective countermeasure. We then argue that the benefits of an open topology potentially outweigh its risks, and propose a protocol to reliably infer and monitor connections among reachable nodes of the Bitcoin network. We formally analyze our protocol and experimentally evaluate its accuracy in both trusted and untrusted settings. Results show our system has a low impact on the network, and has precision and recall are over 90% with up to 20% of malicious nodes in the network.

5G communications proposed significant improvements over 4G in terms of efficiency and security. Among these novelties, the 5G network slicing seems to have a prominent role: deploy multiple virtual network slices, each providing a different service with different needs and features. Like this, a Slice Operator (SO) ruling a specific slice may want to offer a service for users meeting some requirements. It is of paramount importance to provide a robust authentication protocol, able to ensure that users meet the requirements, providing at the same time a privacy-by-design architecture. This makes even more sense having a growing density of Internet of Things (IoT) devices exchanging private information over the network. In this paper, we improve the 5G network slicing authentication using a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) scheme: granting users full control over their data. We introduce an approach to allow a user to prove his right to access a specific service without leaking any information about him. Such an approach is SANS, a protocol that provides nonlinkable protection for any issued information, preventing an SO or an eavesdropper from tracking users’ activity and relating it to their real identities. Furthermore, our protocol is scalable and can be taken as a framework for improving related technologies in similar scenarios, like authentication in the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) or other wireless networks and services. Such features can be achieved using cryptographic primitives called Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). Upon implementing our solution using a state-of-the-art ZKP library and performing several experiments, we provide benchmarks demonstrating that our approach is affordable in speed and memory consumption.

Nowadays, there are a plethora of services that are provided and paid for online, such as video streaming subscriptions, car-share, vehicle parking, purchasing tickets for events, etc. Online services usually issue tokens that are directly related to the identities of their users after they sign up to a platform; users need to authenticate themselves by using the same credentials each time they use the service. Likewise, when using in-person services, such as going to a concert, after paying for this service, the user usually receives a ticket, which proves that he/she has the right to use that service. In both scenarios, the main concerns surround the centralization of these systems and that they do not ensure customers’ privacy. The involved service providers are trusted third parties—authorities that offer services and handle private data about users. In this paper, we designed and implemented FORT, a decentralized system that allows customers to prove their rights to use specific services (either online or in-person) without revealing sensitive information. To achieve decentralization, we proposed a solution where all of the data are handled by a blockchain. We describe and uniquely identify users’ rights using non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and possession of these rights is demonstrated by using zero-knowledge proofs—cryptographic primitives that allow us to guarantee customers’ privacy. Furthermore, we provide benchmarks of FORT, which show that our protocol is efficient enough to be used in devices with low computing resources, such as smartphones or smartwatches, which are devices commonly used in our use case scenario.

5G communications proposed significant improvements over 4G in terms of efficiency and security. Among these novelties, the 5G Network Slicing seems to have a prominent role: deploy multiple virtual network slices, each providing a different service with different needs and features. Like this, a Slice Operator (SO) ruling a specific slice may want to offer a service for users meeting some requirements. It is of paramount importance to provide a robust authentication protocol, able to ensure that users meet the requirements, but providing at the same time a privacy-by-design architecture. This makes even more sense having a growing density of Internet of Things (IoT) devices exchanging private information over the network. In this paper, we improve the 5G network slicing authentication using a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) scheme: granting users full control over their data. We introduce an approach to allow a user to prove his right to access a specific service without leaking any information about him. Such an approach is SANS, a protocol that provides non-linkable protection for any issued information, preventing an SO or an eavesdropper from tracking users' activity and relating it with their real identities. Furthermore, our protocol is scalable and can be taken as a framework for improving related technologies in similar scenarios, like authentication in the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) or other wireless networks and services. Such features can be achieved using cryptographic primitives called Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP). Upon implementing our solution using a state-of-the-art ZKP library and performing several experiments, we provide benchmarks demonstrating that our approach is affordable in speed and memory consumption.

Since Remote Keyless Entry (RKE) systems started to be widely used, several vulnerabilities in their protocols have been found. Attacks such as jamming-and-replay attacks and relay attacks are still effective against most recent RKE systems, even when many secure schemes have been designed. Although they are interesting from a theoretical point of view, the complexity of these solutions is excessive to implement them into a fob. This paper presents a lightweight and general solution based on a one message protocol, which guarantees the integrity and validity of the authentication in RKE systems, protecting the communication against the well-known jamming-and-replay and relay attacks, without using complex cryptographic schemes. Moreover, we also adapt our protocol for passive RKE (PRKE) systems. Our solution also includes a novel frequency-hopping-based approach which mitigates deny-of-service attacks. Finally, a prototype has been implemented using non-expensive hardware. Obtained results assure scalability, effectiveness and robustness.