Biblio

A single RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is a technology for the remote identification of objects or people. It integrates a reader that receives the information contained in an RFID tag through an RFID authentication protocol. RFID provides several security services to protect the data transmitted between the tag and the reader. However, these advantages do not prevent an attacker to access this communication and remaining various security and privacy issues in these systems. Furthermore, with the rapid growth of IoT, there is an urgent need of security authentication and confidential data protection. Authentication protocols based on elliptic curve cryptographic (ECC) were widely investigated and implemented to guarantee protection against the various attacks that can suffer an RFID system. In this paper, we are going to focus on a comparative study between the most efficient ECC-based RFID authentication protocols that are already published, and study their security against the different wireless attacks.

The fusion of peer-to-peer (P2P) fog network and the traditional three-tier fog computing architecture allows fog devices to conjointly pool their resources together for improved service provisioning and better bandwidth utilization. However, any unauthorized access to the fog network may have calamitous consequences. In this paper, a new lightweight two-party authenticated and key agreement (AKA) protocol is proposed for fog-to-fog collaboration. The security analysis of the protocol reveals that it is resilient to possible attacks. Moreover, the validation of the protocol conducted using the broadly-accepted Automated Verification of internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) shows that it is safe for practical deployment. The performance evaluation in terms of computation and communication overheads demonstrates its transcendence over the state-of-the-art protocols.

The convergence of Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing is due to the practical necessity for providing broader services to extensive user in distinct environments. However, cloud computing has numerous constraints for applications that require high-mobility and high latency, notably in adversarial situations (e.g. battlefields). These limitations can be elevated to some extent, in a fog computing model because it covers the gap between remote data-center and edge device. Since, the fog nodes are usually installed in remote areas, therefore, they impose the design of fool proof safety solution for a fog-based setting. Thus, to ensure the security and privacy of fog-based environment, numerous schemes have been developed by researchers. In the recent past, Jia et al. (Wireless Networks, DOI: 10.1007/s11276-018-1759-3) designed a fog-based three-party scheme for healthcare system using bilinear. They claim that their scheme can withstand common security attacks. However, in this work we investigated their scheme and show that their scheme has different susceptibilities such as revealing of secret parameters, and fog node impersonation attack. Moreover, it lacks the anonymity of user anonymity and has inefficient login phase. Consequently, we have suggestion with some necessary guidelines for attack resilience that are unheeded by Jia et al.

The advent of 5G, one of the most recent and promising technologies currently under deployment, fulfills the emerging needs of mobile subscribers by introducing several new technological advancements. However, this may lead to numerous attacks in the emerging 5G networks. Thus, to guarantee the secure transmission of user data, 5G Authentication protocols such as Extensible Authentication Protocol - Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol (EAP-AKA) were developed. These protocols play an important role in ensuring security to the users as well as their data. However, there exists no guarantees about the security of the protocols. Thus formal verification is necessary to ensure that the authentication protocols are devoid of vulnerabilities or security loopholes. Towards this goal, we formally verify the security of the 5G EAP-AKA protocol using an automated verification tool called ProVerif. ProVerif identifies traces of attacks and checks for security loopholes that can be accessed by the attackers. In addition, we model the complete architecture of the 5G EAP-AKA protocol using the language called typed pi-calculus and analyze the protocol architecture through symbolic model checking. Our analysis shows that some cryptographic parameters in the architecture can be accessed by the attackers which cause the corresponding security properties to be violated.

The maturity of intelligent transportation system, cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technology has encouraged the rapid growth of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). Currently, vehicles are supposed to carry relatively more storage, on board computing facilities, increased sensing power and communication systems. In order to cope with real world demands such as low latency, low storage cost, mobility, etc., for the deployment of VANETs, numerous attempts have been taken to integrate fog-computing with VANETs. In the recent past, Ma et al. (IEEE Internet of Things, pp 2327-4662, 10. 1109/JIOT.2019.2902840) designed “An Efficient and Provably Secure Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Fog-Based Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks”. Ma et al. claimed that their protocol offers secure communication in fog-based VANETs and is resilient against several security attacks. However, this comment demonstrates that their scheme is defenseless against vehicle-user impersonation attack and reveals secret keys of vehicle-user and fog-node. Moreover, it fails to offer vehicle-user anonymity and has inefficient login phase. This paper also gives some essential suggestions on strengthening resilience of the scheme, which are overlooked by Ma et al.

Owing to the advancements in communication media and devices all over the globe, there has arisen a dire need for to limit the alarming number of attacks targeting these and to enhance their security. Multiple techniques have been incorporated in different researches and various protocols and schemes have been put forward to cater security issues of session initiation protocol (SIP). In 2008, Qiu et al. presented a proposal for SIP authentication which while effective than many existing schemes, was still found vulnerable to many security attacks. To overcome those issues, Zhang et al. proposed an authentication protocol. This paper presents the analysis of Zhang et al. authentication scheme and concludes that their proposed scheme is susceptible to user traceablity. It also presents an improved SIP authentication scheme that eliminates the possibility of traceability of user's activities. The proposed scheme is also verified by contemporary verification tool, ProVerif and it is found to be more secure, efficient and practical than many similar SIP authetication scheme.

Due to practical constraints in preventing phishing through public network or insecure communication channels, simple physical unclonable function (PDF)-based authentication protocol with unrestricted queries and transparent responses is vulnerable to modeling and replay attacks. In this paper, we present a PUF-based authentication method to mitigate the practical limitations in applications where a resource-rich server authenticates a device with no strong restriction imposed on the type of PUF designs or any additional protection on the binary channel used for the authentication. Our scheme uses an active deception protocol to prevent machine learning (ML) attacks on a device. The monolithic system makes collection of challenge response pairs (CRPs) easy for model building during enrollment but prohibitively time consuming upon device deployment. A genuine server can perform a mutual authentication with the device at any time with a combined fresh challenge contributed by both the server and the device. The message exchanged in clear does not expose the authentic CRPs. The false PUF multiplexing is fortified against prediction of waiting time by doubling the time penalty for every unsuccessful authentication.

Outsourcing services to cloud server (CS) becomes popular in these years. However, the outsourced services often involve with sensitive activity and CS naturally becomes a target of varieties of attacks. Even worse, CS itself can misuse the outsourced services for illegal profit. Traditional online banking system also can make use of a cloud framework to provide economical and high-speed online services to the consumers, which makes the financial dealing easy and convenient. Most of the banking organizations provide services through passbook, ATM, mobile banking, electronic banking (e-banking) etc. Among these, the e-banking and mobile banking are more convenient and becomes essential. Therefore, it is critical to provide an efficient, reliable and more importantly, secure e-banking services to the consumers. The cloud environment is suitable paradigm to a new, small and medium scale banking organization as it eliminates the requirement for them to start with small resources and increase gradually as the service demand rises. However, security is one of the main concerns since it deals with many sensitive data of the valuable customers. In addition to this, the access of various data needs to be restricted to prevent any unauthorized transaction. Nagaraju et al. presented a framework to achieve reliability and security in public cloud based online banking using multi-factor authentication concept. Unfortunately, the login and authentication protocol of this framework is prone to impersonation attack. In this paper, we have revised the framework to avoid this attack.

All popular browsers support browser extensions. They are small software module for customizing web browsers. It provides extra features like user interface modifications, ad blocking, cookie management and so on. As features increase, security becomes more difficult. The impact of malicious browser extensions is also enormous. More than 1 million Chrome users got affected by extensions from Chrome store itself. [1] The risk further increases with offline extension installations. The privileges browser extensions have, pave the path for many kinds of attacks. Replay attack and session hijacking are two of these attacks we are dealing here. Here we propose a defence system based on dynamic encrypted cookies to defend these attacks. We use cookies as token for continuous authentication, which protects entire communication. Static cookies are prone for session hijacking, and therefore we use dynamic cookies which are sealed with encryption. It also protects from replay attack by changing itself, making previous message obsolete. This essentially solves both of the problems.

Two-factor authentication has been widely used due to the vulnerabilities associated with the traditional password-based authentication. One-Time Password (OTP) plays an important role in authentication protocol. However, a variety of security problems have been challenging the security of OTP, and improvements are introduced to solve it. This paper reviews several schemes to implement and modify the OTP, a comparison among the popular OTP algorithms is presented. A smart grid architecture with edge computing is shown. The authentication techniques in the smart grid are analyzed.

The public key infrastructure (PKI) based authentication protocol provides the basic security services for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). However, trust and privacy are still open issues due to the unique characteristics of vehicles. It is crucial for VANETs to prevent internal vehicles from broadcasting forged messages while simultaneously protecting the privacy of each vehicle against tracking attacks. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based anonymous reputation system (BARS) to break the linkability between real identities and public keys to preserve privacy. The certificate and revocation transparency is implemented efficiently using two blockchains. We design a trust model to improve the trustworthiness of messages relying on the reputation of the sender based on both direct historical interactions and indirect opinions about the sender. Experiments are conducted to evaluate BARS in terms of security and performance and the results show that BARS is able to establish distributed trust management, while protecting the privacy of vehicles.

This paper presents an authentication protocol specifically tailored for IoT devices that inherently limits the number of times that an entity can authenticate itself with a given key pair. The protocol we propose is based on a stateful hash-based digital signature system called eXtended Merkle Signature Scheme (XMSS), which has increased its popularity of late due to its resistance to quantum-computer-aided attacks. We propose a 1-pass authentication protocol that can be customized according to the server capabilities to keep track of the key pair state. In addition, we present results when ported to ARM Cortex-M3 and M0 processors.

Kerberos is a third party and widely used authentication protocol, in which it enables computers to connect securely using a single sign-on over an insecure channel. It proves the identity of clients and encrypts all the communications between them to ensure data privacy and integrity. Typically, Kerberos composes of three communication phases to establish a secure session between any two clients. The authentication is based on a password-based scheme, in which it is a secret long-term key shared between the client and the Kerberos. Therefore, Kerberos suffers from a password-guessing attack, the main drawback of Kerberos. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by modifying the first initial phase using the virtual password and biometric data. In addition, the proposed protocol provides a strong authentication scenario against multiple types of attacks.

Design of anonymous authentication scheme is one of the most important challenges in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET). Most of the existing schemes have high computational and communication overhead and they do not meet security requirements. Recently, Azees et al. have introduced an Efficient Anonymous Authentication with Conditional Privacy-Preserving (EAAP) scheme for VANET and claimed that it is secure. In this paper, we show that this protocol is vulnerable against replay attack, impersonation attack and message modification attack. Also, we show that the messages sent by a vehicle are linkable. Therefore, an adversary can easily track the vehicles. In addition, it is shown that vehicles face with some problems when they enter in a new Trusted Authority (TA) range. As a solution, we propose a new authentication protocol which is more secure than EAAP protocol without increasing its computational and communication overhead.

The data transmitted from the wearable device commonly includes sensitive data. So, application service using the data collected from the unauthorized wearable devices can cause serious problems. Also, it is important to authenticate any wearable device and then, protect the transmitted data between the wearable devices and the application server. In this paper, we propose an authentication protocol, which is designed by using the Transport Layer Security (TLS) handshake protocol combined with a mobile authentication proxy. By using the proposed authentication protocol, we can authenticate the wearable device. And we can secure data transmission since session key is shared between the wearable device and the application server. In addition, the proposed authentication protocol is secure even when the mobile authentication proxy is unreliable.

When a large scale disaster strikes, it demands an efficient communication and coordination among first responders to save life and other community resources. Normally, the traditional communication infrastructures such as landline phone or cellular networks are damaged and dont provide adequate communication services to first responders for exchanging emergency related information. Wireless mesh networks is the promising alternatives in such type of situations. The security requirements for emergency response communications include privacy, data integrity, authentication, access control and availability. To build a secure communication system, usually the first attempt is to employ cryptographic keys. In critical-mission wireless mesh networks, a mesh router needs to maintain secure data communication with its neighboring mesh routers. The effective designs on fast pairwise key generation and rekeying for mesh routers are critical for emergency response and are essential to protect unicast traffic. In this paper, we present a security-enhanced session key generation and rekeying protocols EHPFS (enhanced 4-way handshake with PFS support). It eliminate the DoS attack problem of the 4-way handshake in 802.11s. EHPFS provides additional support for perfect forward secrecy (PFS). Even in case a Primary Master Key (PMK) is exposed, the session key PTK will not be compromised. The performance and security analysis show that EHPFS is efficient.

Denial of service (DoS) attack is a great threaten to privacy-preserving authentication protocols for low-cost devices such as RFID. During such attack, the legal internal states can be consumed by the DoS attack. Then the attacker can observe the behavior of the attacked tag in authentication to break privacy. Due to the inadequate energy and computing power, the low cost devices can hardly defend against the DoS attacks. In this paper, we propose a new insight of the DoS attack on tags and leverage the attacking behavior as a new source of power harvesting. In this way, a low-cost device such as a tag grows more and more powerful under DoS attack. Finally, it can defend against the DoS attack. We further propose a protocol that enables DoS-defending constant-time privacy-preserving authentication.

The traditional Kerberos protocol exists some limitations in achieving clock synchronization and storing key, meanwhile, it is vulnerable from password guessing attack and attacks caused by malicious software. In this paper, a new authentication scheme is proposed for wireless mesh network. By utilizing public key encryption techniques, the security of the proposed scheme is enhanced. Besides, timestamp in the traditional protocol is replaced by random numbers to implementation cost. The analysis shows that the improved authentication protocol is fit for wireless Mesh network, which can make identity authentication more secure and efficient.

Establishing trust relationships between network participants by having them prove their operating system's integrity via a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) provides interesting approaches for securing local networks at a higher level. In the introduced approach on OSI layer 2, attacks carried out by already authenticated and participating nodes (insider threats) can be detected and prevented. Forbidden activities and manipulations in hard- and software, such as executing unknown binaries, loading additional kernel modules or even inserting unauthorized USB devices, are detected and result in an autonomous reaction of each network participant. The provided trust establishment and authentication protocol operates independently from upper protocol layers and is optimized for resource constrained machines. Well known concepts of backbone architectures can maintain the chain of trust between different kinds of network types. Each endpoint, forwarding and processing unit monitors the internal network independently and reports misbehaviours autonomously to a central instance in or outside of the trusted network.