17,648 research outputs found
Secure and Usable Behavioural User Authentication for Resource-Constrained Devices
Robust user authentication on small form-factor and resource-constrained smart devices, such as smartphones, wearables and IoT remains an important problem, especially as such devices are increasingly becoming stores of sensitive personal data, such as daily digital payment traces, health/wellness records and contact e-mails. Hence, a secure, usable and practical authentication mechanism to restrict access to unauthorized users is a basic requirement for such devices. Existing user authentication methods based on passwords pose a mental demand on the user's part and are not secure. Behavioural biometric based authentication provides an attractive means, which can replace passwords and provide high security and usability. To this end, we devise and study novel schemes and modalities and investigate how behaviour based user authentication can be practically realized on resource-constrained devices.
In the first part of the thesis, we implemented and evaluated the performance of touch based behavioural biometric on wearables and smartphones. Our results show that touch based behavioural authentication can yield very high accuracy and a small inference time without imposing huge resource requirements on the wearable devices. The second part of the thesis focus on designing a novel hybrid scheme named BehavioCog. The hybrid scheme combined touch gestures (behavioural biometric) with challenge-response based cognitive authentication. Touch based behavioural authentication is highly usable but is prone to observation attacks. While cognitive authentication schemes are highly resistant to observation attacks but not highly usable. The hybrid scheme improves the usability of cognitive authentication and improves the security of touch based behavioural biometric at the same time.
Next, we introduce and evaluate a novel behavioural biometric modality named BreathPrint based on an acoustics obtained from individual's breathing gestures. Breathing based authentication is highly usable and secure as it only requires a person to breathe and low observability makes it secure against spoofing and replay attacks. Our investigation with BreathPrint showed that it could be used for efficient real-time authentication on multiple standalone smart devices especially using deep learning models
Survey and Systematization of Secure Device Pairing
Secure Device Pairing (SDP) schemes have been developed to facilitate secure
communications among smart devices, both personal mobile devices and Internet
of Things (IoT) devices. Comparison and assessment of SDP schemes is
troublesome, because each scheme makes different assumptions about out-of-band
channels and adversary models, and are driven by their particular use-cases. A
conceptual model that facilitates meaningful comparison among SDP schemes is
missing. We provide such a model. In this article, we survey and analyze a wide
range of SDP schemes that are described in the literature, including a number
that have been adopted as standards. A system model and consistent terminology
for SDP schemes are built on the foundation of this survey, which are then used
to classify existing SDP schemes into a taxonomy that, for the first time,
enables their meaningful comparison and analysis.The existing SDP schemes are
analyzed using this model, revealing common systemic security weaknesses among
the surveyed SDP schemes that should become priority areas for future SDP
research, such as improving the integration of privacy requirements into the
design of SDP schemes. Our results allow SDP scheme designers to create schemes
that are more easily comparable with one another, and to assist the prevention
of persisting the weaknesses common to the current generation of SDP schemes.Comment: 34 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, accepted at IEEE Communications
Surveys & Tutorials 2017 (Volume: PP, Issue: 99
A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends
This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the
inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense
mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the
security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity,
confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive
overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in
view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats
are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing
security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless
network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term
evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in
physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open
communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer.
We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their
counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive
jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the
integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and
cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some
technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are
summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201
Conceivable security risks and authentication techniques for smart devices
With the rapidly escalating use of smart devices and fraudulent transaction of users’ data from their devices, efficient and reliable techniques for authentication of the smart devices have become an obligatory issue. This paper reviews the security risks for mobile devices and studies several authentication techniques available for smart devices. The results from field studies enable a comparative evaluation of user-preferred authentication mechanisms and their opinions about reliability, biometric authentication and visual authentication techniques
Frictionless Authentication Systems: Emerging Trends, Research Challenges and Opportunities
Authentication and authorization are critical security layers to protect a
wide range of online systems, services and content. However, the increased
prevalence of wearable and mobile devices, the expectations of a frictionless
experience and the diverse user environments will challenge the way users are
authenticated. Consumers demand secure and privacy-aware access from any
device, whenever and wherever they are, without any obstacles. This paper
reviews emerging trends and challenges with frictionless authentication systems
and identifies opportunities for further research related to the enrollment of
users, the usability of authentication schemes, as well as security and privacy
trade-offs of mobile and wearable continuous authentication systems.Comment: published at the 11th International Conference on Emerging Security
Information, Systems and Technologies (SECURWARE 2017
KALwEN: a new practical and interoperable key management scheme for body sensor networks
Key management is the pillar of a security architecture. Body sensor networks (BSNs) pose several challenges–some inherited from wireless sensor networks (WSNs), some unique to themselves–that require a new key management scheme to be tailor-made. The challenge is taken on, and the result is KALwEN, a new parameterized key management scheme that combines the best-suited cryptographic techniques in a seamless framework. KALwEN is user-friendly in the sense that it requires no expert knowledge of a user, and instead only requires a user to follow a simple set of instructions when bootstrapping or extending a network. One of KALwEN's key features is that it allows sensor devices from different manufacturers, which expectedly do not have any pre-shared secret, to establish secure communications with each other. KALwEN is decentralized, such that it does not rely on the availability of a local processing unit (LPU). KALwEN supports secure global broadcast, local broadcast, and local (neighbor-to-neighbor) unicast, while preserving past key secrecy and future key secrecy (FKS). The fact that the cryptographic protocols of KALwEN have been formally verified also makes a convincing case. With both formal verification and experimental evaluation, our results should appeal to theorists and practitioners alike
The Case for Quantum Key Distribution
Quantum key distribution (QKD) promises secure key agreement by using quantum
mechanical systems. We argue that QKD will be an important part of future
cryptographic infrastructures. It can provide long-term confidentiality for
encrypted information without reliance on computational assumptions. Although
QKD still requires authentication to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, it can
make use of either information-theoretically secure symmetric key
authentication or computationally secure public key authentication: even when
using public key authentication, we argue that QKD still offers stronger
security than classical key agreement.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure; to appear in proceedings of QuantumComm 2009
Workshop on Quantum and Classical Information Security; version 2 minor
content revision
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