DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF ENCRYPTION SCHEMES BASED ON SOME ADDITIONAL PROPERTIES

Abstract

The objective of this research is to cater for the emerging need to provide privacy or confidentiality to the magnanimous digital communications happening in the modern world. Encryption and access control are two primary tools helping achieve confidentiality. Existing literature reveals that researchers have been working in the theses areas, but new challenges are faced regularly with recent advancements. New developments like Big Data, Cloud Computing, IoT etc. and increased use of distributed environments pose new hurdles in achieving desired levels of privacy in vulnerable communications. In this thesis, schemes to address the privacy needs of modern-day communications are proposed. Traditional encryption methods include symmetric-key encryption schemes like DES, AES, IDEA, as well as asymmetric-key encryption schemes like RSA, Diffie Helman Key exchange etc. However, they do not accommodate the need for modern-day communications, which are happening at an unprecedented rate. Secure key management, including secure exchanges for such high-rate electronic transactions, is a significant research area today. To safeguard the cryptographic keys and other possible applications, a hybrid verifiable secret sharing is proposed in this thesis to fulfil the need for multilevel and multi-secret environments. Results are verified to check the performance of the scheme mathematically and experimentally. Secret sharing provides more trustful management of sensitive data, including key launch codes for missiles and many such types of information. However, the challenge is to store and compute the necessary shares. Compared to the existing methods, homomorphic encryption is a more powerful way to handle this challenge. It allows computation on encrypted data (shares) stored on the cloud. It obviates the need for secure (private) storage and paves the way to allow computation of a certain depth. This would help to provide many more practical applications such as Electronic voting, multiparty computation, and many more. Another important aspect is that data and transactions on the cloud need to be trusted. However, such information can always be leaked without appropriate security measures because cloud resources are shared by multiple users and managed by third-party cloud service providers. Thus, there is a need to have a mechanism that can offer distributed trust, which can be x achieved using Blockchain. Likewise, with the advancement of smart activities via the Internet of Things, the data moves in the air. This data is being exchanged via sensor nodes installed in various sensor-based applications, including healthcare, agriculture, the manufacturing industry, and many more. These applications may be susceptible and require appropriate security provisions to be put in place to establish trust in such human-less communications. For handling the challenges mentioned above in trust management, Blockchain acts as a potential technology. Exploiting its potential, a Blockchain-based lightweight scheme is proposed to cater the low-powered sensor devices. This scheme also ensures performance in terms of transactional throughput and mining latency. Another buzzword that emerges hand to hand with IoT and Cloud is Big Data. Thereby, systematic management of Big-Data is a matter of concern while storing and accessing it on the cloud, so, a cloud-based Big-Data management scheme is proposed. The proposed Schemes are implemented and analysed as part of the thesis work. Experiments show promising results with respect to their efficiency, communication cost, security, and other parameters suitable for their respective applications compared to the state-of-the-art.