Citizen Electronic Identities using TPM 2.0

Electronic Identification (eID) is becoming commonplace in several European countries. eID is typically used to authenticate to government e-services, but is also used for other services, such as public transit, e-banking, and physical security access control. Typical eID tokens take the form of physical smart cards, but successes in merging eID into phone operator SIM cards show that eID tokens integrated into a personal device can offer better usability compared to standalone tokens. At the same time, trusted hardware that enables secure storage and isolated processing of sensitive data have become commonplace both on PC platforms as well as mobile devices. Some time ago, the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) released the version 2.0 of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) specification. We propose an eID architecture based on the new, rich authorization model introduced in the TCGs TPM 2.0. The goal of the design is to improve the overall security and usability compared to traditional smart card-based solutions. We also provide, to the best our knowledge, the first accessible description of the TPM 2.0 authorization model.Comment: This work is based on an earlier work: Citizen Electronic Identities using TPM 2.0, to appear in the Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on Trustworthy embedded devices, TrustED'14, November 3, 2014, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2666141.266614

Device-Based Isolation for Securing Cryptographic Keys

In this work, we describe an eective device-based isolation approach for achieving data security. Device-based isolation leverages the proliferation of personal computing devices to provide strong run-time guarantees for the condentiality of secrets. To demonstrate our isolation approach, we show its use in protecting the secrecy of highly sensitive data that is crucial to security operations, such as cryptographic keys used for decrypting ciphertext or signing digital signatures. Private key is usually encrypted when not used, however, when being used, the plaintext key is loaded into the memory of the host for access. In our threat model, the host may be compromised by attackers, and thus the condentiality of the host memory cannot be preserved. We present a novel and practical solution and its prototype called DataGuard to protect the secrecy of the highly sensitive data through the storage isolation and secure tunneling enabled by a mobile handheld device. DataGuard can be deployed for the key protection of individuals or organizations

Analysis of roles and position of mobile network operators in mobile payment infrastructure

A number of different mobile payment solutions have been presented the last decade. The phone subscription with its security mechanisms are used for user identification and payments. This is the case for SMS based payment and ticketing systems that are getting more and more popular. However, there are other ways to implement a Trusted Element (TE) , where a SIM card architecture is only one. It can be in the mobile phone, as a separate integrated circuit, as an optional customer deployed plug-in device (e.g., microSD) or be running as an application on a server existing entirely as software. In this paper we analyze what roles and responsibilities different actors have in different types of mobile payments solutions. The main focus is on the implications for the mobile operator business. It turns out that new types of intermediary actors in most cases play an important role. Sometimes mobile operators are not even involved. The emergence of new payment together with other non-SIM card based TE solutions opens up for many different market scenarios for mobile payment services. --

Trustworthy content push

Delivery of content to mobile devices gains increasing importance in industrial environments to support employees in the field. An important application are e-mail push services like the fashionable Blackberry. These systems are facing security challenges regarding data transport to, and storage of the data on the end user equipment. The emerging Trusted Computing technology offers new answers to these open questions.Comment: 4 pages, 4 eps figure

Secure Identification in Social Wireless Networks

The applications based on social networking have brought revolution towards social life and are continuously gaining popularity among the Internet users. Due to the advanced computational resources offered by the innovative hardware and nominal subscriber charges of network operators, most of the online social networks are transforming into the mobile domain by offering exciting applications and games exclusively designed for users on the go. Moreover, the mobile devices are considered more personal as compared to their desktop rivals, so there is a tendency among the mobile users to store sensitive data like contacts, passwords, bank account details, updated calendar entries with key dates and personal notes on their devices. The Project Social Wireless Network Secure Identification (SWIN) is carried out at Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) to explore the practicality of providing the secure mobile social networking portal with advanced security features to tackle potential security threats by extending the existing methods with more innovative security technologies. In addition to the extensive background study and the determination of marketable use-cases with their corresponding security requirements, this thesis proposes a secure identification design to satisfy the security dimensions for both online and offline peers. We have implemented an initial prototype using PHP Socket and OpenSSL library to simulate the secure identification procedure based on the proposed design. The design is in compliance with 3GPP‟s Generic Authentication Architecture (GAA) and our implementation has demonstrated the flexibility of the solution to be applied independently for the applications requiring secure identification. Finally, the thesis provides strong foundation for the advanced implementation on mobile platform in future

Privacy-Preserving Electronic Ticket Scheme with Attribute-based Credentials

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 well known (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.Comment: 18pages, 6 figures, 2 table

Formal security analysis of registration protocols for interactive systems: a methodology and a case of study

In this work we present and formally analyze CHAT-SRP (CHAos based Tickets-Secure Registration Protocol), a protocol to provide interactive and collaborative platforms with a cryptographically robust solution to classical security issues. Namely, we focus on the secrecy and authenticity properties while keeping a high usability. In this sense, users are forced to blindly trust the system administrators and developers. Moreover, as far as we know, the use of formal methodologies for the verification of security properties of communication protocols isn't yet a common practice. We propose here a methodology to fill this gap, i.e., to analyse both the security of the proposed protocol and the pertinence of the underlying premises. In this concern, we propose the definition and formal evaluation of a protocol for the distribution of digital identities. Once distributed, these identities can be used to verify integrity and source of information. We base our security analysis on tools for automatic verification of security protocols widely accepted by the scientific community, and on the principles they are based upon. In addition, it is assumed perfect cryptographic primitives in order to focus the analysis on the exchange of protocol messages. The main property of our protocol is the incorporation of tickets, created using digests of chaos based nonces (numbers used only once) and users' personal data. Combined with a multichannel authentication scheme with some previous knowledge, these tickets provide security during the whole protocol by univocally linking each registering user with a single request. [..]Comment: 32 pages, 7 figures, 8 listings, 1 tabl

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

Options for Securing RTP Sessions

The Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) is used in a large number of different application domains and environments. This heterogeneity implies that different security mechanisms are needed to provide services such as confidentiality, integrity, and source authentication of RTP and RTP Control Protocol (RTCP) packets suitable for the various environments. The range of solutions makes it difficult for RTP-based application developers to pick the most suitable mechanism. This document provides an overview of a number of security solutions for RTP and gives guidance for developers on how to choose the appropriate security mechanism