Methods and techniques to protect against shoulder surfing and phishing attacks

Identity theft refers to the preparatory stage of acquiring and collecting someone else's personal information for criminal purposes. During the past few years, a very large number of people suffered adverse consequences of identity theft crimes. In this thesis, we investigate different methods and techniques that can be used to provide better protection against identity theft techniques that have some hi-tech relevance such as shoulder surfing of user's passwords and personal identification numbers (PINs), phishing and keylogging attacks. To address the shoulder surfing threat to traditional PIN entry schemes, two new PIN entry schemes are proposed. Both schemes achieve a good balance between security and usability. In addition, our analysis shows that these two schemes are resilient to shoulder surfing, given that the attacker has a limited capability in recording the login process. We also propose a click-based graphical password authentication scheme. This scheme aims at improving the resistance to shoulder surfing attacks while maintaining the merits of the click-based authentication solutions. It is also resilient to shoulder surfing attacks even if the attacker can record the entire login process for one time with a video device. Finally, in order to defend against online phishing attacks, we present a framework to strengthen password authentication using mobile devices and browser extensions. The proposed authentication framework produces a different password depending on the domain name of the login site. Besides defending against phishing attacks, this solution does not require any modifications at the server sid

PALPAS - PAsswordLess PAssword Synchronization

Tools that synchronize passwords over several user devices typically store the encrypted passwords in a central online database. For encryption, a low-entropy, password-based key is used. Such a database may be subject to unauthorized access which can lead to the disclosure of all passwords by an offline brute-force attack. In this paper, we present PALPAS, a secure and user-friendly tool that synchronizes passwords between user devices without storing information about them centrally. The idea of PALPAS is to generate a password from a high entropy secret shared by all devices and a random salt value for each service. Only the salt values are stored on a server but not the secret. The salt enables the user devices to generate the same password but is statistically independent of the password. In order for PALPAS to generate passwords according to different password policies, we also present a mechanism that automatically retrieves and processes the password requirements of services. PALPAS users need to only memorize a single password and the setup of PALPAS on a further device demands only a one-time transfer of few static data.Comment: An extended abstract of this work appears in the proceedings of ARES 201

I bought a new security token and all I got was this lousy phish— Relay attacks on visual code authentication schemes

One recent thread of academic and commercial research into web authentication has focused on schemes where users scan a visual code with their smartphone, which is a convenient alternative to password- based login. We find that many schemes in the literature (including, previously, our own) are, unfortunately, vulnerable to relay attacks. We explain the inherent reasons for this vulnerability and offer an architec- tural fix, evaluating its trade-offs and discussing why it has never been proposed by other authors.ERC 30722

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

Identidade digital federada globaliD

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e TelemáticaO presente texto propõe uma solução para a gestão de identidade digital online tendo em conta a versatilidade, o anonimato, a privacidade, a veracidade, a credibilidade e a responsabilidade do utilizador, recorrendo para isso ao uso do Cartão de Cidadão Electrónico Nacional Português e a outros meios de autenticação públicos usados diariamente pelos utilizadores. A dissertação é composta pela apresentação do conceito de identidade e das suas particularidades, por uma análise aos vários problemas da gestão da informação pessoal online, uma análise aos vários modelos, mecanismos e especificações existentes para gerir a identidade digital online (gestão de identidade digital). Uma solução de gestão de identidade digital baseada no modelo de identidade federada e associada ao Cartão do Cidadão Electrónico Nacional Português é apresentada, descrita, analisada, avaliada e comparada com outras soluções existentes. Por fim um protótipo de um provedor de identidades digitais federadas baseado na solução de gestão de identidade digital proposta é apresentado.The following text provides a solution for the digital identity management on the Web regarding the users’ versatility, anonymity, privacy, veracity, trustworthiness and accountability by using the Portuguese National Electronic Citizen Identity Card and other publicly available authentication mechanisms users use daily. The dissertation consists of the presentation of the concept of identity and its particularities, an analysis to the several problems of managing personal information online, and an analysis to the several existing models, mechanisms and specifications for the management of the digital identity online (digital identity management). A solution for digital identity management based on the federated identity model and associated to the Portuguese National Electronic Citizen Identity Card is introduced, described, analyzed, evaluated and compared to other several existing solutions. Last, a prototype of a federated digital identity provider based on the purposed solution for digital identity management is presented