Prasant Mahapatra

Rourab Paul, Nimisha Ghosh, Amlan Chakrabarti et al.

The growing sophistication of cyber attacks, vulnerabilities in high computing systems and increasing dependency on cryptography to protect our digital data make it more important to keep secret keys safe and secure. Few major issues on secret keys like incorrect use of keys, inappropriate storage of keys, inadequate protection of keys, insecure movement of keys, lack of audit logging, insider threats and non-destruction of keys can compromise the whole security system dangerously. In this article, we have proposed and implemented an isolated secret key memory which can log life cycle of secret keys cryptographically using blockchain (BC) technology. We have also implemented a special custom bus interconnect which receives custom crypto instruction from Processing Element (PE). During the execution of crypto instructions, the architecture assures that secret key will never come in the processor area and the movement of secret keys to various crypto core is recorded cryptographically after the proper authentication process controlled by proposed hardware based BC. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work which uses blockchain based solution to address the issues of the life cycle of the secret keys in hardware platform. The additional cost of resource usage and timing complexity we spent to implement the proposed idea is very nominal. We have used Xilinx Vivado EDA tool and Artix 7 FPGA board.

Rourab Paul, Nimisha Ghosh, Suman Sau et al.

Standard security protocols like SSL, TLS, IPSec etc. have high memory and processor consumption which makes all these security protocols unsuitable for resource constrained platforms such as Internet of Things (IoT). Blockchain (BC) finds its efficient application in IoT platform to preserve the five basic cryptographic primitives, such as confidentiality, authenticity, integrity, availability and non-repudiation. Conventional adoption of BC in IoT platform causes high energy consumption, delay and computational overhead which are not appropriate for various resource constrained IoT devices. This work proposes a machine learning (ML) based smart access control framework in a public and a private BC for a smart city application which makes it more efficient as compared to the existing IoT applications. The proposed IoT based smart city architecture adopts BC technology for preserving all the cryptographic security and privacy issues. Moreover, BC has very minimal overhead on IoT platform as well. This work investigates the existing threat models and critical access control issues which handle multiple permissions of various nodes and detects relevant inconsistencies to notify the corresponding nodes. Comparison in terms of all security issues with existing literature shows that the proposed architecture is competitively efficient in terms of security access control.