Talk for ICT group in University of Calgary

I had a great and friendly talk in Calgary with ICT group members. They gave me an opportunity for presenting my PhD research. Here is my slides.

Identity based cryptosystems

I did a quick reading on "identity-based" cryptography. The idea was firstly proposed by Shamir in 1994: "Identity based cryptosystems and signituare schemes".
The idea is to get rid of public key exchange protocols, third trusted parties, CAs in an assymetric (public/private) key cryptosystem by using the pre-known id of the users (like email address, social number, etc.) as their public key.

what is a public key's life cycle?

Although the key life cycle seems to be an important factor in cryptosystems' security, I couldn't find a solid refrence on the topic. After hours of web search, a discreption on RSA Lab's website is satisfactory.

problems in installing TOR + Polipo on Centos

I did install TOR+Polipo on my Centos machine, however, the following problems came out during the installation process:

- TOR and POLIPO don't add themselves as Daemon to /etc/init.d/ directory; therefore it should be done manually as follows:

1- make "polipo" in /etc/init.d/ directory and give it excecution permission:

$ su
password:...
# vim polipo
---save polipo and exit (:wq)
# chmod +x polipo

2- insert the following code in polipo:

Nice review on Wiener filter

Wiener filter is useful for signal estimation where the signal is stationary. For non-stationary signals, Kalman filter can be used. Download the overview from here.

Using Wireless Channel Characterizations for Secure Secret Key Generation

This year the ISSNET workshop took place in Toronto (26-29 April). I presented a poster and gave a talk. The poster and slides are attached to the bottom of this post.

Using Wireless Channel Characterizations for Secure Secret Key Generation

Masoud Ghoreishi Madiseh, Stephen W. Neville, Micheal L. McGuire
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Victoria
Victoria, B.C. V8W 3P6

Wireless key generation solutions have been widely proposed to address the need for secure communication in domains where existing solutions such as PKI can be problematic, (i.e., wireless keyboards, RFID tags, on the first contact to an access point, in wireless sensor networks, etc. ) [1], [2]. Several wireless channel characterization-based key generation solutions have been reported in the literature [3], [4]. The critical aspect of real-world security solutions based on these techniques not addressed in the existing literature is the quantification of the security that they produce. The existing works have only assessed the security of the generated secret key in the context of eavesdroppers located far from the transmitting antennas with poor knowledge of the propagation environment. This leads to the core problem that two parties, nominally Alice and Bob, may engage in wireless channelcharacterization-based key generation under the belief that their resulting key is secure, when in reality this key is partially or completely known to an eavesdropper, Eve. It should be noted that the intention of key generation is not to solve the authentication problem, instead, if properly constructed, it provides a mechanism by which Alice and Bob can engage in an authentication process over a secured channel which requires zero pre-shared secret information to construct, (i.e., once the secure channel is in place Alice and Bob can engage in a standard challenge-response process for authentication).

Phishing on my email!!!

Be more careful of your phishing writing.

Statistical measures of random vectors and matrices

Recently I am working on a problem that needs some matrix statistical analysis. In my web search, this pdf is found which is a valuable document, I think. Thanks the author.
The part that I was concerning about in my research paper is the result of the expectation of two independent matrices which is given by,