172 research outputs found

    On the Security of the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast Protocol

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    Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) is the communications protocol currently being rolled out as part of next generation air transportation systems. As the heart of modern air traffic control, it will play an essential role in the protection of two billion passengers per year, besides being crucial to many other interest groups in aviation. The inherent lack of security measures in the ADS-B protocol has long been a topic in both the aviation circles and in the academic community. Due to recently published proof-of-concept attacks, the topic is becoming ever more pressing, especially with the deadline for mandatory implementation in most airspaces fast approaching. This survey first summarizes the attacks and problems that have been reported in relation to ADS-B security. Thereafter, it surveys both the theoretical and practical efforts which have been previously conducted concerning these issues, including possible countermeasures. In addition, the survey seeks to go beyond the current state of the art and gives a detailed assessment of security measures which have been developed more generally for related wireless networks such as sensor networks and vehicular ad hoc networks, including a taxonomy of all considered approaches.Comment: Survey, 22 Pages, 21 Figure

    Security of distance-bounding: A survey

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    The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI linkDistance-bounding protocols allow a verifier to both authenticate a prover and evaluate whether the latter is located in his vicinity. These protocols are of particular interest in contactless systems, e.g., electronic payment or access control systems, which are vulnerable to distance-based frauds. This survey analyzes and compares in a unified manner many existing distance-bounding protocols with respect to several key security and complexity features

    Privacy-preserving and secure location authentication

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    With the advent of Location-Based-Systems, positioning systems must face new security requirements: how to guarantee the authenticity of the geographical positon announced by a user before granting him access to location-restricted! resources. In this thesis, we are interested in the study of ! security ! protocols that can ensure autheniticity of the position announced by a user without the prior availability of any form of trusted architecture. A first result of our study is the proposal for a distance-bounding protocol based on asymmetric cryptography which allows a node knowing a public key to authenticate the holder of the associated private key, while establishing confidence in the distance between them. The distance measurement procedure is sufficently secure to resist to well-known attacks such as relay attacks, distance-, mafia- and terrorist-attacks. We then use such distance-bounding protocol to define an architecture for gathering privacy friendly location proofs. We define a location proof as a digital certificate attesting of presence of an individual at a location at a given time. The privacy properties we garanty through the use of our system are: the anonymity of users, un-linkability of their actions within the system and a strong binding between each user ! and the localization proof it is associated. on last property of our system is the possibility to use the same location proof to demonstrate different granularity of the associated position

    A System for the Verication of Location Claims

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    As location becomes an increasingly important piece of context information regarding a device, so too must the method of providing this information increase in reliability. In many situations, false location information may impact the security or objectives of the system to which it has been supplied. Research concerning localization and location verication addresses this issue. The majority of solutions, however, revolve around a trusted infrastructure to provide a certied location. This thesis presents an enhanced design for a location verication system, moving verication away from infrastructure-based approaches. Instead, an ad hoc approach is presented, employing regular local devices in the role usually reserved for trusted entities - the role of the evidence provider. We begin with an introduction to the area of localization, outlining the primary techniques employed. We summarize previous approaches, highlighting the improvements and outstanding issues of each. Following this, we outline a novel metric for use with distance bounding to increase the accuracy of evidence extracted from the distance bounding process. We show through emulation that this metric is feasible within an IEEE 802.11 wireless network. We detail the Secure Location Verication Proof Gathering Protocol (SLVPGP), a protocol designed to protect the process of evidence gathering. We employ our novel metric to conrm the presence of a device in an area. We repeatedly extend the SLVPGP's basic design to form three protocols, each with increasingly stronger security. These protocols are formally veried to conrm their specied security properties. To complete the design of our verication system, we present two approaches to judging a claim based on the evidence supplied. We demonstrate the accuracy of these approach through simulation. We also include a brief outline of the concept of reputation and discuss an existing app

    Security and privacy in RFID systems

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    RFID is a leading technology that has been rapidly deployed in several daily life applications such as payment, access control, ticketing, e-passport, supply-chain, etc. An RFID tag is an electronic label that can be attached to an object/individual in order to identify or track the object/individual through radio waves. Security and privacy are two major concerns in several applications as the tags are required to provide a proof of identity. The RFID tags are generally not tamper-resistant against strong adversarial attacks. They also have limited computational resources. Therefore, the design of a privacy preserving and cost-effective RFID authentication protocol is a very challenging task for industrial applications. Moreover, RFID systems are also vulnerable to relay attacks (i.e., mafia, terrorist and distance frauds) when they are used for authentication purposes. Distance bounding protocols are particularly designed as a countermeasure against these attacks. These protocols aim to ensure that the tags are in a bounded area by measuring the round-trip delays during a rapid challenge-response exchange of short authentication messages. Several RFID distance bounding protocols have been proposed recently in the literature. However, none of them provides the ideal security against the terrorist fraud. Besides, the requirements of low resources and inefficient data management trigger to make use of cloud computing technology in RFID authentication systems. However, as more and more information on individuals and companies is placed in the cloud, concerns about data safety and privacy raise. Therefore, while integrating cloud services into RFID authentication systems, the privacy of tag owner against the cloud must also be taken into account. Motivated by this need, this dissertation contributes to the design of algorithms and protocols aimed at dealing with the issues explained above. First of all, we introduce two privacy models for RFID authentication protocols based on Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF). We propose several authentication protocols in order to demonstrate these models. Moreover, we study distance bounding protocols having bit-wise fast phases and no final signature. We give analysis for the optimal security limits of the distance bounding protocols. Furthermore, we propose a novel RFID distance bounding protocol based on PUFs and it satisfies the highest security levels. Finally, we provide a new security and privacy model for integrating cloud computing into RFID systems. For the sake of demonstration of this model, we also propose two RFID authentication protocols that require various computational resources and provide different privacy levels

    Quantum information in security protocols

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    Information security deals with the protection of our digital infrastructure. Achieving meaningful real-world security requires powerful cryptographic models that can give strong security guarantees and it requires accuracy of the model. Substantial engineering effort is required to ensure that a deployment meets the requirements imposed by the model. Quantum information impacts the field of security in two major ways. First, it allows more efficient cryptanalysis of currently widely deployed systems. New "post-quantum" cryptographic algorithms are designed to be secure against quantum attacks, but do not require quantum technology to be implemented. Since post-quantum algorithms have different properties, substantial effort is required to integrate these in the existing infrastructure. Second, quantum cryptography leverages quantum-mechanical properties to build new cryptographic systems with potential advantages, however these require a more substantial overhaul of the infrastructure. In this thesis I highlight the necessity of both the mathematical rigour and the engineering efforts that go into security protocols in the context of quantum information. This is done in three different contexts. First, I analyze the impact of key exhaustion attacks against quantum key distribution, showing that they can lead to substantial loss of security. I also provide two mitigations that thwart such key exhaustion attacks by computationally bounded adversaries, without compromising the information theoretically secure properties of the protocol output. I give various security considerations for secure implementation of the mitigations. Second, I consider how quantum adversaries can successfully attack quantum distance bounding protocols that had previously been claimed to be secure by informal reasoning. This highlights the need for mathematical rigour in the analysis of quantum adversaries. Third, I propose a post-quantum replacement for the socialist millionaire protocol in secure messaging. The protocol prevents some of the usability problems that have been observed in other key authentication ceremonies. The post-quantum replacement utilizes techniques from private set intersection to build a protocol from primitives that have seen much scrutiny from the cryptographic community

    Secure Neighbor Discovery and Ranging in Wireless Networks

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    This thesis addresses the security of two fundamental elements of wireless networking: neighbor discovery and ranging. Neighbor discovery consists in discovering devices available for direct communication or in physical proximity. Ranging, or distance bounding, consists in measuring the distance between devices, or providing an upper bound on this distance. Both elements serve as building blocks for a variety of services and applications, notably routing, physical access control, tracking and localization. However, the open nature of wireless networks makes it easy to abuse neighbor discovery and ranging, and thereby compromise overlying services and applications. To prevent this, numerous works proposed protocols that secure these building blocks. But two aspects crucial for the security of such protocols have received relatively little attention: formal verification and attacks on the physical-communication-layer. They are precisely the focus of this thesis. In the first part of the thesis, we contribute a formal analysis of secure communication neighbor discovery protocols. We build a formal model that captures salient characteristics of wireless systems such as node location, message propagation time and link variability, and we provide a specification of secure communication neighbor discovery. Then, we derive an impossibility result for a general class of protocols we term "time-based protocols", stating that no such protocol can provide secure communication neighbor discovery. We also identify the conditions under which the impossibility result is lifted. We then prove that specific protocols in the time-based class (under additional conditions) and specific protocols in a class we term "time- and location-based protocols," satisfy the neighbor discovery specification. We reinforce these results by mechanizing the model and the proofs in the theorem prover Isabelle. In the second part of the thesis, we explore physical-communication-layer attacks that can seemingly decrease the message arrival time without modifying its content. Thus, they can circumvent time-based neighbor discovery protocols and distance bounding protocols. (Indeed, they violate the assumptions necessary to prove protocol correctness in the first part of the thesis.) We focus on Impulse Radio Ultra-Wideband, a physical layer technology particularly well suited for implementing distance bounding, thanks to its ability to perform accurate indoor ranging. First, we adapt physical layer attacks reported in prior work to IEEE 802.15.4a, the de facto standard for Impulse Radio, and evaluate their performance. We show that an adversary can achieve a distance-decrease of up to hundreds of meters with an arbitrarily high probability of success, with only a minor cost in terms of transmission power (few dB). Next, we demonstrate a new attack vector that disrupts time-of-arrival estimation algorithms, in particular those designed to be precise. The distance-decrease achievable by this attack vector is in the order of the channel spread (order of 10 meters in indoor environments). This attack vector can be used in previously reported physical layer attacks, but it also creates a new type of external attack based on malicious interference. We demonstrate that variants of the malicious interference attack are much easier to mount than the previously reported external attack. We also provide design guidelines for modulation schemes and devise receiver algorithms that mitigate physical layer attacks. These countermeasures allow the system designer to trade off security, ranging precision and cost in terms of transmission power and packet length

    Computational and symbolic analysis of distance-bounding protocols

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    Contactless technologies are gaining more popularity everyday. Credit cards enabled with contactless payment, smart cards for transport ticketing, NFC-enabled mobile phones, and e-passports are just a few examples of contactless devices we are familiar with nowadays. Most secure systems meant for these devices presume physical proximity between the device and the reader terminal, due to their short communication range. In theory, a credit card should not be charged of an on-site purchase if the card is not up to a few centimeters away from the payment terminal. In practice, this is not always true. Indeed, some contactless payment protocols, such as Visa's payWave, have been shown vulnerable to relay attacks. In a relay attack, a man-in-the-middle uses one or more relay devices in order to make two distant devices believe they are close. Relay attacks have been implemented also to bypass keyless entry and start systems in various modern cars. Relay attacks can be defended against with distance-bounding protocols, which are security protocols that measure the round-trip times of a series of challenge/response rounds in order to guarantee physical proximity. A large number of these protocols have been proposed and more sophisticated attacks against them have been discovered. Thus, frameworks for systematic security analysis of these protocols have become of high interest. As traditional security models, distance-bounding security models sit within the two classical approaches: the computational and the symbolic models. In this thesis we propose frameworks for security analysis of distance-bounding protocols, within the two aforementioned models. First, we develop an automata-based computational framework that allows us to generically analyze a large class of distance-bounding protocols. Not only does the proposed framework allow us to straightforwardly deliver computational (in)security proofs but it also permits us to study problems such as optimal trade-offs between security and space complexity. Indeed, we solve this problem for a prominent class of protocols, and propose a protocol solution that is optimally secure amongst space-constrained protocols within the considered class. Second, by building up on an existing symbolic framework, we develop a causality-based characterization of distance-bounding security. This constitutes the first symbolic property that guarantees physical proximity without modeling continuous time or physical location. We extend further our formalism in order to capture a non-standard attack known as terrorist fraud. By using our definitions and the verification tool Tamarin, we conduct a security survey of over 25 protocols, which include industrial protocols based on the ISO/IEC 14443 standard such as NXP's MIFARE Plus with proximity check and Mastercard's PayPass payment protocol. For the industrial protocols we find attacks, propose fixes and deliver security proofs of the repaired versions
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