A PUF-and biometric-based lightweight hardware solution to increase security at sensor nodes

Security is essential in sensor nodes which acquire and transmit sensitive data. However, the constraints of processing, memory and power consumption are very high in these nodes. Cryptographic algorithms based on symmetric key are very suitable for them. The drawback is that secure storage of secret keys is required. In this work, a low-cost solution is presented to obfuscate secret keys with Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), which exploit the hardware identity of the node. In addition, a lightweight fingerprint recognition solution is proposed, which can be implemented in low-cost sensor nodes. Since biometric data of individuals are sensitive, they are also obfuscated with PUFs. Both solutions allow authenticating the origin of the sensed data with a proposed dual-factor authentication protocol. One factor is the unique physical identity of the trusted sensor node that measures them. The other factor is the physical presence of the legitimate individual in charge of authorizing their transmission. Experimental results are included to prove how the proposed PUF-based solution can be implemented with the SRAMs of commercial Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) chips which belong to the communication module of the sensor node. Implementation results show how the proposed fingerprint recognition based on the novel texture-based feature named QFingerMap16 (QFM) can be implemented fully inside a low-cost sensor node. Robustness, security and privacy issues at the proposed sensor nodes are discussed and analyzed with experimental results from PUFs and fingerprints taken from public and standard databases.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad TEC2014-57971-R, TEC2017-83557-

Streaming Verification of Graph Properties

Streaming interactive proofs (SIPs) are a framework for outsourced computation. A computationally limited streaming client (the verifier) hands over a large data set to an untrusted server (the prover) in the cloud and the two parties run a protocol to confirm the correctness of result with high probability. SIPs are particularly interesting for problems that are hard to solve (or even approximate) well in a streaming setting. The most notable of these problems is finding maximum matchings, which has received intense interest in recent years but has strong lower bounds even for constant factor approximations. In this paper, we present efficient streaming interactive proofs that can verify maximum matchings exactly. Our results cover all flavors of matchings (bipartite/non-bipartite and weighted). In addition, we also present streaming verifiers for approximate metric TSP. In particular, these are the first efficient results for weighted matchings and for metric TSP in any streaming verification model.Comment: 26 pages, 2 figure, 1 tabl

A Fingerprint Matching Model using Unsupervised Learning Approach

The increase in the number of interconnected information systems and networks to the Internet has led to an increase in different security threats and violations such as unauthorised remote access. The existing network technologies and communication protocols are not well designed to deal with such problems. The recent explosive development in the Internet allowed unwelcomed visitors to gain access to private information and various resources such as financial institutions, hospitals, airports ... etc. Those resources comprise critical-mission systems and information which rely on certain techniques to achieve effective security. With the increasing use of IT technologies for managing information, there is a need for stronger authentication mechanisms such as biometrics which is expected to take over many of traditional authentication and identification solutions. Providing appropriate authentication and identification mechanisms such as biometrics not only ensures that the right users have access to resources and giving them the right privileges, but enables cybercrime forensics specialists to gather useful evidence whenever needed. Also, critical-mission resources and applications require mechanisms to detect when legitimate users try to misuse their privileges; certainly biometrics helps to provide such services. This paper investigates the field of biometrics as one of the recent developed mechanisms for user authentication and evidence gathering despite its limitations. A biometric-based solution model is proposed using various statistical-based unsupervised learning approaches for fingerprint matching. The proposed matching algorithm is based on three various similarity measures, Cosine similarity measure, Manhattan distance measure and Chebyshev distance measure. In this paper, we introduce a model which uses those similarity measures to compute a fingerprint’s matching factor. The calculated matching factor is based on a certain threshold value which could be used by a forensic specialist for deciding whether a suspicious user is actually the person who claims to be or not. A freely available fingerprint biometric SDK has been used to develop and implement the suggested algorithm. The major findings of the experiments showed promising and interesting results in terms of the performance of all the proposed similarity measures.Final Accepted Versio