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A new approach to secure logging

Published: 31 March 2009 Publication History

Abstract

The need for secure logging is well-understood by the security professionals, including both researchers and practitioners. The ability to efficiently verify all (or some) log entries is important to any application employing secure logging techniques. In this article, we begin by examining the state of the art in secure logging and identify some problems inherent to systems based on trusted third-party servers. We then propose a different approach to secure logging based upon recently developed Forward-Secure Sequential Aggregate (FssAgg) authentication techniques. Our approach offers both space-efficiency and provable security. We illustrate two concrete schemes—one private-verifiable and one public-verifiable—that offer practical secure logging without any reliance on online trusted third parties or secure hardware. We also investigate the concept of immutability in the context of forward-secure sequential aggregate authentication to provide finer grained verification. Finally we evaluate proposed schemes and report on our experience with implementing them within a secure logging system.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Storage
ACM Transactions on Storage  Volume 5, Issue 1
March 2009
62 pages
ISSN:1553-3077
EISSN:1553-3093
DOI:10.1145/1502777
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 31 March 2009
Accepted: 01 December 2008
Revised: 01 October 2008
Received: 01 May 2008
Published in TOS Volume 5, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. MACs
  2. Secure logging
  3. forward secure sequential aggregate (FssAgg) authentication
  4. forward-secure stream integrity
  5. signatures
  6. truncation attack

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