In recent years, Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) evolved from a futuristic-sounding research project to an increasingly affordable technology for determining complete genome sequences of complex organisms, including humans. This prompts a wide range of
revolutionary applications, as WGS promises to improve modern healthcare and provide a better understanding of the human genome -- in particular, its relation to diseases and response to treatments. However, this progress raises worrisome privacy and ethical issues, since, besides uniquely identifying its owner, the genome contains a treasure trove of highly personal and sensitive information. In this article, after summarizing recent advances in genomics, we discuss some important privacy issues associated with human genomic information and identify a number of particularly relevant research challenges.
Wireless communication enables a broad spectrum of applications, ranging from commodity to tactical systems. Neighbor discovery (ND), that is, determining which devices are within direct radio communication, is a building block of network protocols a
nd applications, and its vulnerability can severely compromise their functionalities. A number of proposals to secure ND have been published, but none have analyzed the problem formally. In this paper, we contribute such an analysis: We build a formal model capturing salient characteristics of wireless systems, most notably obstacles and interference, and we provide a specification of a basic variant of the ND problem. Then, we derive an impossibility result for a general class of protocols we term time-based protocols, to which many of the schemes in the literature belong. We also identify the conditions under which the impossibility result is lifted. Moreover, we explore a second class of protocols we term time- and location-based protocols, and prove they can secure ND.
Transportation safety, one of the main driving forces of the development of vehicular communication (VC) systems, relies on high-rate safety messaging (beaconing). At the same time, there is consensus among authorities, industry, and academia on the
need to secure VC systems. With specific proposals in the literature, a critical question must be answered: can secure VC systems be practical and satisfy the requirements of safety applications, in spite of the significant communication and processing overhead and other restrictions security and privacy-enhancing mechanisms impose? To answer this question, we investigate in this paper the following three dimensions for secure and privacy-enhancing VC schemes: the reliability of communication, the processing overhead at each node, and the impact on a safety application. The results indicate that with the appropriate system design, including sufficiently high processing power, applications enabled by secure VC can be in practice as effective as those enabled by unsecured VC.
This is a report and a collection of abstracts from the Feb. 2008 Lausanne Workshop on Secure Vehicular Communication Systems.
Resource and cost constraints remain a challenge for wireless sensor network security. In this paper, we propose a new approach to protect confidentiality against a parasitic adversary, which seeks to exploit sensor networks by obtaining measurements
in an unauthorized way. Our low-complexity solution, GossiCrypt, leverages on the large scale of sensor networks to protect confidentiality efficiently and effectively. GossiCrypt protects data by symmetric key encryption at their source nodes and re-encryption at a randomly chosen subset of nodes en route to the sink. Furthermore, it employs key refreshing to mitigate the physical compromise of cryptographic keys. We validate GossiCrypt analytically and with simulations, showing it protects data confidentiality with probability almost one. Moreover, compared with a system that uses public-key data encryption, the energy consumption of GossiCrypt is one to three orders of magnitude lower.
In wireless systems, neighbor discovery (ND) is a fundamental building block: determining which devices are within direct radio communication is an enabler for networking protocols and a wide range of applications. To thwart abuse of ND and the resul
tant compromise of the dependent functionality of wireless systems, numerous works proposed solutions to secure ND. Nonetheless, until very recently, there has been no formal analysis of secure ND protocols. We close this gap in cite{asiaccs08}, but we concentrate primarily on the derivation of an impossibility result for a class of protocols. In this paper, we focus on reasoning about specific protocols. First, we contribute a number of extensions and refinements on the framework of [24]. As we are particularly concerned with the practicality of provably secure ND protocols, we investigate availability and redefine accordingly the ND specification, and also consider composability of ND with other protocols. Then, we propose and analyze two secure ND protocols: We revisit one of the protocols analyzed in [24], and introduce and prove correct a more elaborate challenge-response protocol.
