Special Issue: Advances in Security for Communication Networks
Ivan Visconti · Journal of Computer Security · 2013
The success of the Internet and of communication networks in general, opened new intriguing challenges for protocol designers.Consider, for example, the classic notion of "secure computation" introduced and achieved in the seminal works of Yao and of Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson.While such a notion considers only the stand-alone setting, where parties are connected to each other but isolated from the rest of the world, security in communication networks is more demanding.Indeed, when parties are connected to a network (i.e., parties can run several instances of protocols concurrently), secure computation has been proved impossible to achieve.Therefore, achieving information security in communication networks required to solve various open problems.New security notions have been introduced in order to better model real-world scenarios.New hardness assumptions have been used in order to enable the construction of more powerful cryptographic primitives.New security protocols and proof techniques have been developed in order to defeat network attacks mounted by malicious adversaries.This special issue of the Journal of Computer Security includes six papers that cover various aspects of such recent challenges in information security in communication networks.The paper "5PM: Secure pattern matching" by Joshua Baron, Karim El Defrawy, Kirill Minkovich, Rafail Ostrovsky and Eric Tressler addresses a popular problem in information security: secure pattern matching.The authors focus on the specific case of single-character wildcards and substring matching.They show a protocol called 5PM that outperforms previous constructions.The paper "Short blind signatures" by Olivier Blazy, Georg Fuchsbauer, David Pointcheval and Damien Vergnaud introduces an improved form of blind signatures.Blind signatures are signatures of messages that remain hidden to the signer.They have various applications (e.g., e-cash).The construction given by the authors focuses on short signatures obtained with minimal interactions.The paper "Field switching in BGV-style homomorphic encryption" by Craig Gentry, Shai Halevi, Chris Peikert and Nigel P. Smart proposes a general fieldswitching transformation that can be used to outperform previous transformations needed in homomorphic encryption schemes.Such schemes are a powerful tool in client-server applications and certainly represent one of the main novelties in Cryptography.