A Cloud Authentication Protocol using One-Time Pad

There is a significant increase in the amount of data breaches in corporate servers in the cloud environments. This includes username and password compromise in the cloud and account hijacking, thus leading to severe vulnerabilities of the cloud service provisioning. Traditional authentication schemes rely on the users to use their credentials to gain access to cloud service. However once the credential is compromised, the attacker will gain access to the cloud service easily. This paper proposes a novel scheme that does not require the user to present his credentials, and yet is able to prove ownership of access to the cloud service using a variant of zero-knowledge proof. A challenge-response protocol is devised to authenticate the user, requiring the user to compute a one-time pad (OTP) to authenticate himself to the server without revealing password to the server. A prototype has been implemented to facilitate the authentication of the user when accessing Dropbox, and the experiment results showed that the overhead incurred is insignificant

Protection of privacy in biometric data

Biometrics is commonly used in many automated veri cation systems offering several advantages over traditional veri cation methods. Since biometric features are associated with individuals, their leakage will violate individuals\u27 privacy, which can cause serious and continued problems as the biometric data from a person are irreplaceable. To protect the biometric data containing privacy information, a number of privacy-preserving biometric schemes (PPBSs) have been developed over the last decade, but they have various drawbacks. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the existing PPBSs and give guidance for future privacy-preserving biometric research. In particular, we explain the functional mechanisms of popular PPBSs and present the state-of-the-art privacy-preserving biometric methods based on these mechanisms. Furthermore, we discuss the drawbacks of the existing PPBSs and point out the challenges and future research directions in PPBSs

A fingerprint based crypto-biometric system for secure communication

To ensure the secure transmission of data, cryptography is treated as the most effective solution. Cryptographic key is an important entity in this procedure. In general, randomly generated cryptographic key (of 256 bits) is difficult to remember. However, such a key needs to be stored in a protected place or transported through a shared communication line which, in fact, poses another threat to security. As an alternative, researchers advocate the generation of cryptographic key using the biometric traits of both sender and receiver during the sessions of communication, thus avoiding key storing and at the same time without compromising the strength in security. Nevertheless, the biometric-based cryptographic key generation possesses few concerns such as privacy of biometrics, sharing of biometric data between both communicating users (i.e., sender and receiver), and generating revocable key from irrevocable biometric. This work addresses the above-mentioned concerns. In this work, a framework for secure communication between two users using fingerprint based crypto-biometric system has been proposed. For this, Diffie-Hellman (DH) algorithm is used to generate public keys from private keys of both sender and receiver which are shared and further used to produce a symmetric cryptographic key at both ends. In this approach, revocable key for symmetric cryptography is generated from irrevocable fingerprint. The biometric data is neither stored nor shared which ensures the security of biometric data, and perfect forward secrecy is achieved using session keys. This work also ensures the long-term security of messages communicated between two users. Based on the experimental evaluation over four datasets of FVC2002 and NIST special database, the proposed framework is privacy-preserving and could be utilized onto real access control systems.Comment: 29 single column pages, 8 figure

Biometrics for internet‐of‐things security: A review

The large number of Internet‐of‐Things (IoT) devices that need interaction between smart devices and consumers makes security critical to an IoT environment. Biometrics offers an interesting window of opportunity to improve the usability and security of IoT and can play a significant role in securing a wide range of emerging IoT devices to address security challenges. The purpose of this review is to provide a comprehensive survey on the current biometrics research in IoT security, especially focusing on two important aspects, authentication and encryption. Regarding authentication, contemporary biometric‐based authentication systems for IoT are discussed and classified based on different biometric traits and the number of biometric traits employed in the system. As for encryption, biometric‐cryptographic systems, which integrate biometrics with cryptography and take advantage of both to provide enhanced security for IoT, are thoroughly reviewed and discussed. Moreover, challenges arising from applying biometrics to IoT and potential solutions are identified and analyzed. With an insight into the state‐of‐the‐art research in biometrics for IoT security, this review paper helps advance the study in the field and assists researchers in gaining a good understanding of forward‐looking issues and future research directions

BRAKE: Biometric Resilient Authenticated Key Exchange

Biometric data are uniquely suited for connecting individuals to their digital identities. Deriving cryptographic key exchange from successful biometric authentication therefore gives an additional layer of trust compared to password-authenticated key exchange. However, biometric data are sensitive personal data that need to be protected on a long-term basis. Furthermore, efficient feature extraction and comparison components resulting in high intra-subject tolerance and inter-subject distinguishability, documented with good biometric performance, need to be applied in order to prevent zero-effort impersonation attacks. In this work, we present a novel protocol for Biometric Resilient Authenticated Key Exchange that fulfils the above requirements of biometric information protection compliant with the international ISO/IEC 24745 standard. In our protocol, we present a novel modification of unlinkable fuzzy vault schemes that allows their connection with oblivious pseudo-random functions to achieve resilient protection against offline attacks crucial for the protection of biometric data. Our protocol is independent of the biometric modality and can be implemented based on the security of discrete logarithms as well as lattices. We provide an open-source implementation of both instantiations of our protocol which achieve real-time efficiency with transaction times of less than one second from the image capture to the completed key exchange