Abstract-The Deletion-Insertion Correcting Code construction proposed by Davey and MacKay consists of an inner code that recovers synchronization and an outer code that provides substitution error protection. The inner code uses low-weight codewords which are added (modulo two) to a pilot sequence. The receiver is able to synchronise on the pilot sequence in spite of the changes introduced by the added codeword.The original bit-level formulation of the inner decoder assumes that all bits in the sparse codebook are identically and independently distributed. Not only is this assumption inaccurate, but it also prevents the use of soft a-priori input to the decoder. We propose an alternative symbol-level inner decoding algorithm that takes the actual codebook into account. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has an improved performance with only a small penalty in complexity, and it allows other improvements using inner codes with larger minimum distance.

Electronic tickets (e-tickets) are electronic versions of paper tickets, which enable users to access intended services and improve services' efficiency. However, privacy may be a concern of e-ticket users. In this paper, a privacy-preserving electronic ticket scheme with attribute-based credentials is proposed to protect users' privacy and facilitate ticketing based on a user's attributes. Our proposed scheme makes the following contributions: (1) users can buy different tickets from ticket sellers without releasing their exact attributes; (2) two tickets of the same user cannot be linked; (3) a ticket cannot be transferred to another user; (4) a ticket cannot be double spent; (5) the security of the proposed scheme is formally proven and reduced to wellknown (q-strong Diffie-Hellman) complexity assumption; (6) the scheme has been implemented and its performance empirically evaluated. To the best of our knowledge, our privacy-preserving attribute-based e-ticket scheme is the first one providing these five features. Application areas of our scheme include event or transport tickets where users must convince ticket sellers that their attributes (e.g. age, profession, location) satisfy the ticket price policies to buy discounted tickets. More generally, our scheme can be used in any system where access to services is only dependent on a user's attributes (or entitlements) but not their identities.

Direct Anonymous Attestation (Daa) is a set of cryptographic schemes used to create anonymous digital signatures. To provide additional assurance, Daa schemes can utilise a Trusted Platform Module (Tpm) that is a tamper-resistant hardware device embedded in a computing platform and which provides cryptographic primitives and secure storage. We extend Chen and Li's Daa scheme to support: 1) signing a message anonymously, 2) self-certifying Tpm keys, and 3) ascertaining a platform's state as recorded by the Tpm's platform configuration registers (PCR) for remote attestation, with explicit reference to Tpm 2.0 API calls. We perform a formal analysis of the scheme and are the first symbolic models to explicitly include the low-level Tpm call details. Our analysis reveals that a fix proposed by Whitefield et al. to address an authentication attack on an Ecc-Daa scheme is also required by our scheme. Developing a finegrained, formal model of a Daa scheme contributes to the growing body of work demonstrating the use of formal tools in supporting security analyses of cryptographic protocols. We additionally provide and benchmark an open-source C++ implementation of this Daa scheme supporting both a hardware and a software Tpm and measure its performance.

In this paper we consider Time-Varying Block (TVB) codes, which generalize a number of previous synchronization error-correcting codes. We also consider various practical issues related to MAP decoding of these codes. Specifically, we give an expression for the expected distribution of drift between transmitter and receiver due to synchronization errors. We determine an appropriate choice for state space limits based on the drift probability distribution. In turn, we obtain an expression for the decoder complexity under given channel conditions in terms of the state space limits used. For a given state space, we also give a number of optimizations that reduce the algorithm complexity with no further loss of decoder performance. We also show how the MAP decoder can be used in the absence of known frame boundaries, and demonstrate that an appropriate choice of decoder parameters allows the decoder to approach the performance when frame boundaries are known, at the expense of some increase in complexity. Finally, we express some existing constructions as TVB codes, comparing performance with published results, and showing that improved performance is possible by taking advantage of the flexibility of TVB codes.

Research on vehicular networking (V2X) security has produced a range of security mechanisms and protocols tailored for this domain, addressing both security and privacy. Typically, the security analysis of these proposals has largely been informal. However, formal analysis can be used to expose flaws and ultimately provide a higher level of assurance in the protocols. This paper focusses on the formal analysis of a particular element of security mechanisms for V2X found in many proposals, that is the revocation of malicious or misbehaving vehicles from the V2X system by invalidating their credentials. This revocation needs to be performed in an unlinkable way for vehicle privacy even in the context of vehicles regularly changing their pseudonyms. The Rewire scheme by Förster et al. and its subschemes Plain and R-token aim to solve this challenge by means of cryptographic solutions and trusted hardware. Formal analysis using the Tamarin prover identifies two flaws: one previously reported in the literature concerned with functional correctness of the protocol, and one previously unknown flaw concerning an authentication property of the R-token scheme. In response to these flaws we propose Obscure Token (O-token), an extension of Rewire to enable revocation in a privacy preserving manner. Our approach addresses the functional and authentication properties by introducing an additional key-pair, which offers a stronger and verifiable guarantee of successful revocation of vehicles without resolving the long-term identity. Moreover O-token is the first V2X revocation protocol to be co-designed with a formal model.