Abstract. Relay attacks are one of the most challenging threats RFID will have to face in the close future. They consist in making the verifier believe that the prover is in its close vicinity by surreptitiously forwarding the signal between the verifier and an out-of-field prover. Distance bounding protocols represent a promising way to thwart relay attacks, by measuring the round trip time of short authenticated messages. Several such protocols have been designed during the last years but none of them combine all the features one may expect in a RFID system. We introduce in this paper the first solution that compounds in a single protocol all these desirable features. We prove, with respect to the previous protocols, that our proposal is the best one in terms of security, privacy, tag computational overhead, and fault tolerance. We also point out a weakness in Tu and Piramuthu's protocol, which was considered up to now as one of the most efficient distance bounding protocol.

Marine microbes have tremendous diversity, but a fundamental question remains unanswered: why are there so many microbial species in the sea? The idea of functional redundancy for microbial communities has long been assumed, so that the high level of richness is often explained by the presence of different taxa that are able to conduct the exact same set of metabolic processes and that can readily replace each other. Here, we refute the hypothesis of functional redundancy for marine microbial communities by showing that a shift in the community composition altered the overall functional attributes of communities across different temporal and spatial scales. Our metagenomic monitoring of a coastal northwestern Mediterranean site also revealed that diverse microbial communities harbor a high diversity of potential proteins. Working with all information given by the metagenomes (all reads) rather than relying only on known genes (annotated orthologous genes) was essential for revealing the similarity between taxonomic and functional community compositions. Our finding does not exclude the possibility for a partial redundancy where organisms that share some specific function can coexist when they differ in other ecological requirements. It demonstrates, however, that marine microbial diversity reflects a tremendous diversity of microbial metabolism and highlights the genetic potential yet to be discovered in an ocean of microbes.

Abstract. The Fiat-Shamir transformation is the most efficient construction of non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs. This paper is concerned with two variants of the transformation that appear but have not been clearly delineated in existing literature. Both variants start with the prover making a commitment. The strong variant then hashes both the commitment and the statement to be proved, whereas the weak variant hashes only the commitment. This minor change yields dramatically different security guarantees: in situations where malicious provers can select their statements adaptively, the weak Fiat-Shamir transformation yields unsound/unextractable proofs. Yet such settings naturally occur in systems when zero-knowledge proofs are used to enforce honest behavior. We illustrate this point by showing that the use of the weak Fiat-Shamir transformation in the Helios cryptographic voting system leads to several possible security breaches: for some standard types of elections, under plausible circumstances, malicious parties can cause the tallying procedure to run indefinitely and even tamper with the result of the election. On the positive side, we define a form of adaptive security for zeroknowledge proofs in the random oracle model (essentially simulationsound extractability), and show that a variant which we call strong FiatShamir yields secure non-interactive proofs. This level of security was assumed in previous works on Helios and our results are then necessary for these analyses to be valid. Additionally, we show that strong proofs in Helios achieve non-malleable encryption and satisfy ballot privacy, improving on previous results that required CCA security.

Abstract-We critically survey game-based security definitions for the privacy of voting schemes. In addition to known limitations, we unveil several previously unnoticed shortcomings. Surprisingly, the conclusion of our study is that none of the existing definitions is satisfactory: they either provide only weak guarantees, or can be applied only to a limited class of schemes, or both.Based on our findings, we propose a new game-based definition of privacy which we call BPRIV. We also identify a new property which we call strong consistency, needed to express that tallying does not leak sensitive information. We validate our security notions by showing that BPRIV, strong consistency (and an additional simple property called strong correctness) for a voting scheme imply its security in a simulation-based sense. This result also yields a proof technique for proving entropy-based notions of privacy which offer the strongest security guarantees but are hard to prove directly: first prove your scheme BPRIV, strongly consistent (and correct), then study the entropy-based privacy of the result function of the election, which is a much easier task.

We present the Time-Bounded Task-PIOA modeling framework, an extension of the Probabilistic I/O Automata (PIOA) framework that is intended to support modeling and verification of security protocols. Time-Bounded Task-PIOAs directly model probabilistic and nondeterministic behavior, partial-information adversarial scheduling, and time-bounded computation. Together, these features are adequate to support modeling of key aspects of security protocols, including secrecy requirements and limitations on the knowledge and computational power of adversarial parties. They also support security protocol verification, using methods that are compatible with informal approaches used in the computational cryptography research community. We illustrate the use of our framework by outlining a proof of functional correctness and security properties for a well-known Oblivious Transfer protocol.

Abstract. We propose a new encryption primitive, commitment consistent encryption (CCE), and instances of this primitive that enable building the first universally verifiable voting schemes with a perfectly private audit trail (PPAT) and practical complexity. That is:-the audit trail that is published for verifying elections guarantees everlasting privacy, and -the computational load required from the participants is only increased by a small constant factor compared to traditional voting schemes, and is optimal in the sense of Cramer, Gennaro and Schoenmakers [16]. These properties make it possible to introduce election verifiability in large scale elections as a pure benefit, that is, without loss of privacy compared to a non-verifiable scheme and at a similar level of efficiency. We propose different approaches for constructing voting schemes with PPAT from CCE, as well as two efficient CCE constructions: one is tailored for elections with a small number of candidates, while the second is suitable for elections with complex ballots.

Cryptographic systems and protocols are the core of many Internet security procedures (such as SSL, SSH, IPSEC, DNSSEC, secure mail, etc.). At the heart of all cryptographic functions is a good source of randomness, and for efficiency, the primitive of pseudorandom generator (PRG). PRG can also be used in the design of stream ciphers, for secure communications. The Internet is nowadays composed of many types of devices with very different hardware and software characteristics. Hence, one of the concerns in such open environments is the information "leakage" and its exploitation via the so-called "side channel attacks".

Abstract. Recent results show that the current implementation of Helios, a practical e-voting protocol, does not ensure independence of the cast votes, and demonstrate the impact of this lack of independence on vote privacy. Some simple fixes seem to be available and security of the revised scheme has been studied with respect to symbolic models. In this paper we study the security of Helios using computational models. Our first contribution is a model for the property known as ballot privacy that generalizes and extends several existing ones. Using this model, we investigate an abstract voting scheme (of which the revised Helios is an instantiation) built from an arbitrary encryption scheme with certain functional properties. We prove, generically, that whenever this encryption scheme falls in the class of voting-friendly schemes that we define, the resulting voting scheme provably satisfies ballot privacy. We explain how our general result yields cryptographic security guarantees for the revised version of Helios (albeit from non-standard assumptions). Furthermore, we show (by giving two distinct constructions) that it is possible to construct voting-friendly encryption, and therefore voting schemes, using only standard cryptographic tools. We detail an instantiation based on ElGamal encryption and Fiat-Shamir non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs that closely resembles Helios and which provably satisfies ballot privacy.