Biblio

E- Health systems, specifically, Telecare Medical Information Systems (TMIS), are deployed in order to provide patients with specific diseases with healthcare services that are usually based on remote monitoring. Therefore, making an efficient, convenient and secure connection between users and medical servers over insecure channels within medical services is a rather major issue. In this context, because of the biometrics' characteristics, many biometrics-based three factor user authentication schemes have been proposed in the literature to secure user/server communication within medical services. In this paper, we make a brief study of the most interesting proposals. Then, we propose a new three-factor authentication and key agreement scheme for TMIS. Our scheme tends not only to fix the security drawbacks of some studied related work, but also, offers additional significant features while minimizing resource consumption. In addition, we perform a formal verification using the widely accepted formal security verification tool AVISPA to demonstrate that our proposed scheme is secure. Also, our comparative performance analysis reveals that our proposed scheme provides a lower resource consumption compared to other related work's proposals.

The internet of things (IoT) is consisting of many complementary elements which have their own specificities and capacities. These elements are gaining new application and use cases in our lives. Nevertheless, they open a negative horizon of security and privacy issues which must be treated delicately before the deployment of any IoT. Recently, different works emerged dealing with the same branch of issues, like the work of Yuwen Chen et al. that is called LightPriAuth. LightPriAuth has several drawbacks and weakness against various popular attacks such as Insider attack and stolen smart card. Our objective in this paper is to propose a novel solution which is “authentication scheme with three factor using ECC and fuzzy extractor” to ensure security and privacy. The obtained results had proven the superiority of our scheme's performances compared to that of LightPriAuth which, additionally, had defeated the weaknesses left by LightPriAuth.

In the context of the rapid technological progress, the cyber-threats become a serious challenge that requires immediate and continuous action. As cybercrime poses a permanent and increasing threat, governments, corporate and individual users of the cyber-space are constantly struggling to ensure an acceptable level of security over their assets. Maliciousness on the cyber-space spans identity theft, fraud, and system intrusions. This is due to the benefits of cyberspace-low entry barriers, user anonymity, and spatial and temporal separation between users, make it a fertile field for deception and fraud. Numerous, supervised and unsupervised, techniques have been proposed and used to identify fraudulent transactions and activities that deviate from regular patterns of behaviour. For instance, neural networks and genetic algorithms were used to detect credit card fraud in a dataset covering 13 months and 50 million credit card transactions. Unsupervised methods, such as clustering analysis, have been used to identify financial fraud or to filter fake online product reviews and ratings on e-commerce websites. Blockchain technology has demonstrated its feasibility and relevance in e-commerce. Its use is now being extended to new areas, related to electronic government. The technology appears to be the most appropriate in areas that require storage and processing of large amounts of protected data. The question is what can blockchain technology do and not do to fight malicious online activity?

Wear and tear are essential in establishing the market value of an asset. From shutter counters on DSLRs to odometers inside cars, specific counters, that encode the degree of wear, exist on most products. But malicious modification of the information that they report was always a concern. Our work explores a solution to this problem by using the blockchain technology, a layered encoding of product attributes and identity-based cryptography. Merging such technologies is essential since blockchains facilitate the construction of a distributed database that is resilient to adversarial modifications, while identity-based signatures set room for a more convenient way to check the correctness of the reported values based on the name of the product and pseudonym of the owner alone. Nonetheless, we reinforce security by using ownership cards deployed around NFC tokens. Since odometer fraud is still a major practical concern, we discuss a practical scenario centered on vehicles, but the framework can be easily extended to many other assets.

To prevent unauthorized access to adversaries, strong authentication scheme is a vital security requirement in client-server inter-networking systems. These schemes must verify the legitimacy of such users in real-time environments and establish a dynamic session key fur subsequent communication. Of late, T. H. Chen and J. C. Huang proposed a two-factor authentication framework claiming that the scheme is secure against most of the existing attacks. However we have shown that Chen and Huang scheme have many critical weaknesses in real-time environments. The scheme is prone to man in the middle attack and information leakage attack. Furthermore, the scheme does not provide two essential security services such user anonymity and session key establishment. In this paper, we present an enhanced user participating authenticating scheme which overcomes all the weaknesses of Chen et al.'s scheme and provide most of the essential security features.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the way of how pervasive computing devices communicate and disseminate information over the global network. A plethora of user data is collected and logged daily into cloud-based servers. Such data can be analyzed by the IoT infrastructure to capture users' behaviors (e.g. users' location, tagging of smart home occupancy). This brings a new set of security challenges, specifically user anonymity. Existing access control and authentication technologies failed to support user anonymity. They relied on the surrendering of the device/user authentication parameters to the trusted server, which hence could be utilized by the IoT infrastructure to track users' behavioral patterns. This paper, presents two novel configurable privacy-preserving authentication schemes. User anonymity capabilities were incorporated into our proposed authentication schemes through the implementation of two crypto-based approaches (i) Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) and (ii) Verifiable Common Secret Encoding (VCSE). We consider a user-oriented approach when determining user anonymity. The proposed authentication schemes are dynamically capable of supporting various levels of user privacy based on the user preferences. To validate the two schemes, they were fully implemented and deployed on an IoT testbed. We have tested the performance of each proposed schemes in terms of power consumption and computation time. Based on our performance evaluation results, the proposed ZKP-based approach provides better performance compared to the VCSE-based approach.

User authentication in wireless sensor networks is more complex than normal networks due to sensor network characteristics such as unmanned operation, limited resources, and unreliable communication. For this reason, various authentication protocols have been presented to provide secure and efficient communication. In 2017, Wu et al. presented a provable and privacy-preserving user authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks. Unfortunately, we found that Wu et al.'s protocol was still vulnerable against user impersonation attack, and had a problem in the password change phase. We show how an attacker can impersonate an other user and why the password change phase is ineffective.

Smart Grid (SG) technology has been developing for years, which facilitates users with portable access to power through being applied in numerous application scenarios, one of which is the electric vehicle charging. In order to ensure the security of the charging process, users need authenticating with the smart meter for the subsequent communication. Although there are many researches in this field, few of which have endeavored to protect the anonymity and the untraceability of users during the authentication. Further, some studies consider the problem of user anonymity, but they are non-light-weight protocols, even some can not assure any fairness in key agreement. In this paper, we first points out that existing authentication schemes for Smart Grid are neither lack of critical security nor short of important property such as untraceability, then we propose a new two-factor lightweight user authentication scheme based on password and biometric. The authentication process of the proposed scheme includes four message exchanges among the user mobile, smart meter and the cloud server, and then a security one-time session key is generated for the followed communication process. Moreover, the scheme has some new features, such as the protection of the user's anonymity and untraceability. Security analysis shows that our proposed scheme can resist various well-known attacks and the performance analysis shows that compared to other three schemes, our scheme is more lightweight, secure and efficient.

Recently, Jung et al. [1] proposed a data access privilege scheme and claimed that their scheme addresses data and identity privacy as well as multi-authority, and provides data access privilege for attribute-based encryption. In this paper, we show that this scheme, and also its former and latest versions (i.e. [2] and [3] respectively) suffer from a number of weaknesses in terms of finegrained access control, users and authorities collusion attack, user authorization, and user anonymity protection. We then propose our new scheme that overcomes these shortcomings. We also prove the security of our scheme against user collusion attacks, authority collusion attacks and chosen plaintext attacks. Lastly, we show that the efficiency of our scheme is comparable with existing related schemes.

The veil of anonymity provided by smartphones with pre-paid SIM cards, public Wi-Fi hotspots, and distributed networks like Tor has drastically complicated the task of identifying users of social media during forensic investigations. In some cases, the text of a single posted message will be the only clue to an author's identity. How can we accurately predict who that author might be when the message may never exceed 140 characters on a service like Twitter? For the past 50 years, linguists, computer scientists, and scholars of the humanities have been jointly developing automated methods to identify authors based on the style of their writing. All authors possess peculiarities of habit that influence the form and content of their written works. These characteristics can often be quantified and measured using machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the methods of authorship attribution that can be applied to the problem of social media forensics. Furthermore, we examine emerging supervised learning-based methods that are effective for small sample sizes, and provide step-by-step explanations for several scalable approaches as instructional case studies for newcomers to the field. We argue that there is a significant need in forensics for new authorship attribution algorithms that can exploit context, can process multi-modal data, and are tolerant to incomplete knowledge of the space of all possible authors at training time.

To establish a secure connection between a mobile user and a remote server, this paper presents a session key agreement scheme through remote mutual authentication protocol by using mobile application software(MAS). We analyzed the security of our protocol informally, which confirms that the protocol is secure against all the relevant security attacks including off-line identity-password guessing attacks, user-server impersonation attacks, and insider attack. In addition, the widely accepted simulator tool AVISPA simulates the proposed protocol and confirms that the protocol is SAFE under the OFMC and CL-AtSe back-ends. Our protocol not only provide strong security against the relevant attacks, but it also achieves proper mutual authentication, user anonymity, known key secrecy and efficient password change operation. The performance comparison is also performed, which ensures that the protocol is efficient in terms of computation and communication costs.

A scheme for preserving privacy in MobilityFirst (MF) clean-slate future Internet architecture is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme, called Anonymity in MobilityFirst (AMF), utilizes the three-tiered approach to effectively exploit the inherent properties of MF Network such as Globally Unique Flat Identifier (GUID) and Global Name Resolution Service (GNRS) to provide anonymity to the users. While employing new proposed schemes in exchanging of keys between different tiers of routers to alleviate trust issues, the proposed scheme uses multiple routers in each tier to avoid collaboration amongst the routers in the three tiers to expose the end users.

User authentication is an important security mechanism that allows mobile users to be granted access to roaming service offered by the foreign agent with assistance of the home agent in mobile networks. While security-related issues have been well studied, how to preserve user privacy in this type of protocols still remains an open problem. In this paper, we revisit the privacy-preserving two-factor authentication scheme presented by Li et al. at WCNC 2013. We show that, despite being armed with a formal security proof, this scheme actually cannot achieve the claimed feature of user anonymity and is insecure against offline password guessing attacks, and thus, it is not recommended for practical applications. Then, we figure out how to fix these identified drawbacks, and suggest an enhanced scheme with better security and reasonable efficiency. Further, we conjecture that under the non-tamper-resistant assumption of the smart cards, only symmetric-key techniques are intrinsically insufficient to attain user anonymity.