Privacy Preserving Physical Layer Authentication Scheme for LBS based Wireless Networks

With the fast development in services related to localisation, location-based service (LBS) gains more importance amongst all the mobile wireless services. To avail the service in the LBS system, information about the location and identity of the user has to be provided to the service provider. The service provider authenticates the user based on their identity and location before providing services. In general, sharing location information and preserving the user’s privacy is a highly challenging task in conventional authentication techniques. To resolve these challenges in authenticating the users, retaining users’ privacy, a new SVD (singular value decomposition) based Privacy Preserved Location Authentication Scheme (SPPLAS) has been proposed. In this proposed method, physical layer signatures such as channel state information (CSI) and carrier frequency offset (CFO) are used for generating secret key required for encrypting the user’s location and identity information, and thus encrypted user’s information is sent to service provider for authentication. Secret key is generated by applying SVD on CSI vector. The proposed scheme aids in authenticating the user through location information while protecting the user’s privacy. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in terms of bit mismatch, leakage and bit error rate performance of receiver and adversary. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves better robustness and security than the existing location-based authentication techniques

Group Time-based One-Time Passwords and its application to efficient privacy-preserving Proof of Location

Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP) provides a strong second factor for user authentication. In TOTP, a prover authenticates to a verifier by using the current time and a secret key to generate an authentication token (or password) which is valid for a short time period. Our goal is to extend TOTP to the group setting, and to provide both authentication and privacy. To this end, we introduce a new authentication scheme, called Group TOTP (GTOTP), that allows the prover to prove that it is a member of an authenticated group without revealing its identity. We propose a novel construction that transforms any asymmetric TOTP scheme into a GTOTP scheme. Our approach combines Merkle tree and Bloom filter to reduce the verifier’s states to constant sizes. As a promising application of GTOTP, we show that GTOTP can be used to construct an efficient privacy-preserving Proof of Location (PoL) scheme. We utilize a commitment protocol, a privacy-preserving location proximity scheme, and our GTOTP scheme to build the PoL scheme, in which GTOTP is used not only for user authentication but also as a tool to glue up other building blocks. In the PoL scheme, with the help of some witnesses, a user can prove its location to a verifier, while ensuring the identity and location privacy of both the prover and witnesses. Our PoL scheme outperforms the alternatives based on group digital signatures. We evaluate our schemes on Raspberry Pi hardware, and demonstrate that they achieve practical performance. In particular, the password generation and verification time are in the order of microseconds and milliseconds, respectively, while the computation time of proof generation is less than 1 second

Group Time-based One-time Passwords and its Application to Efficient Privacy-Preserving Proof of Location

Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP) provides a strong second factor for user authentication. In TOTP, a prover authenticates to a verifier by using the current time and a secret key to generate an authentication token (or password) which is valid for a short time period. Our goal is to extend TOTP to the group setting, and to provide both authentication and privacy. To this end, we introduce a new authentication scheme, called Group TOTP (GTOTP), that allows the prover to prove that it is a member of an authenticated group without revealing its identity. We propose a novel construction that transforms any asymmetric TOTP scheme into a GTOTP scheme. Our approach combines Merkle tree and Bloom filter to reduce the verifier\u27s states to constant sizes. As a promising application of GTOTP, we show that GTOTP can be used to construct an efficient privacy-preserving Proof of Location (PoL) scheme. We utilize a commitment protocol, a privacy-preserving location proximity scheme, and our GTOTP scheme to build the PoL scheme, in which GTOTP is used not only for user authentication but also as a tool to glue up other building blocks. In the PoL scheme, with the help of some witnesses, a user can prove its location to a verifier, while ensuring the identity and location privacy of both the prover and witnesses. Our PoL scheme outperforms the alternatives based on group digital signatures. We evaluate our schemes on Raspberry Pi hardware, and demonstrate that they achieve practical performance. In particular, the password generation and verification time are in the order of microseconds and milliseconds, respectively, while the computation time of proof generation is less than $1$ second

An OAuth2-based protocol with strong user privacy preservation for smart city mobile e-Health apps

In the context of the Smart City concept, mobile e-Health applications can play a pivotal role towards the improvement of citizens’ quality of life, since they can enable citizens to access personalized e-Health services, without limitations on time and location. However, accessing personalized e-Health services through citizens’ mobile e-Health applications, running on their mobile devices, raises many privacy issues in terms of citizens’ identity and location. These privacy issues should be addressed so that citizens, concerned about privacy leakage, will embrace Smart City mobile e-Health applications and reap their benefits. Hence, in this paper we propose an OAuth2-based protocol with strong user privacy preservation that addresses these privacy issues. Our proposed protocol follows the OAuth2 protocol flow and integrates a pseudonym-based signature scheme and a delegation signature scheme into the user authentication phase of the OAuth2 protocol. The proposed protocol enables citizens authentication towards the servers providing personalized e-Health services, while preserving their privacy from malicious mobile applications and/or eavesdroppers. Moreover, the proposed protocol does not require to store sensitive information in the citizens’ mobile devices

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

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

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