Recently, Xie, Guo, and Jia (IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, vol. 16, pp. 3068-3081, 2021) proposed a privacy-preserving Online Ride-Hailing (ORH) protocol that does not make use of a trusted third-party server. The primary goal of such privacy-preserving ORH protocols is to ensure the privacy of riders’ and drivers’ location data w.r.t. the ORH Service Provider (SP). In this work, we demonstrate a passive attack by the SP in the protocol of Xie, Guo, and Jia that enables it to completely recover the location of the rider as well as that of the responding drivers in each and every ride request query. The running time of our attack is independent of the security parameter.

Location-based services are getting more popular day by day. Finding nearby stores, proximity-based marketing, on-road service assistance, etc., are some of the services that use location-based services. In location-based services, user information like user identity, user query, and location must be protected. Ma et al. (INFOCOM-BigSecurity 2019) proposed a privacy-preserving location-based service using Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption (SHE). Their protocol uses edge nodes that compute on SHE encrypted location data and determines the k-nearest points of interest contained in the Location-based Server (LBS) without revealing the original user coordinates to LBS, hence, ensuring privacy of users locations.

In the last few years a new design paradigm, the so-called ARX (modular addition, rotation, exclusive-or) ciphers, have gained popularity in part because of their non-linear operation’s seemingly ‘inherent resilience’ against Differential Power Analysis (DPA) Attacks: the non-linear modular addition is not only known to be a poor target for DPA attacks, but also the computational complexity of DPA-style attacks grows exponentially with the operand size and thus DPA-style attacks quickly become practically infeasible. We however propose a novel DPA-style attack strategy that scales linearly with respect to the operand size in the chosen-message attack setting.

Leakage-resilient cryptosystems aim to maintain security in situations where their implementation leaks physical information about their internal secrets. Because of their efficiency and usability on a wide range of platforms, solutions based on symmetric primitives (such as block ciphers) are particularly attractive in this context. So far, the literature has mostly focused on the design of leakage-resilient pseudorandom objects (e.g. PRGs, PRFs, PRPs). In this paper, we consider the complementary and practically important problem of designing secure authentication and encryption schemes. For this purpose, we follow a pragmatic approach based on the advantages and limitations of existing leakage-resilient pseudorandom objects, and rely on the (arguably necessary, yet minimal) use of a leak-free component. The latter can typically be instantiated with a block cipher implementation protected by traditional countermeasures, and we investigate how to combine it with the more intensive use of a much more efficient (less protected) block cipher implementation. Based on these premises, we propose and analyse new constructions of leakage-resilient MAC and encryption schemes, which allow fixing security and efficiency drawbacks of previous proposals in this direction. For encryption, we additionally provide a detailed discussion of why previously proposed (indistinguishability based) security definitions cannot capture actual side-channel attacks, and suggest a relaxed and more realistic way to quantify leakage-resilience in this case, by reducing the security of many iterations of the primitive to the security of a single iteration, independent of the security notion guaranteed by this single iteration (that remains hard to define).