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 Mobile Secure Bluetooth-Enabled Cryptographic Provider

The use of digital X509v3 public key certificates, together with different standards for secure digital signatures are commonly adopted to establish authentication proofs between principals, applications and services. One of the robustness characteristics commonly associated with such mechanisms is the need of hardware-sealed cryptographic devices, such as Hardware-Security Modules (or HSMs), smart cards or hardware-enabled tokens or dongles. These devices support internal functions for management and storage of cryptographic keys, allowing the isolated execution of cryptographic operations, with the keys or related sensitive parameters never exposed. The portable devices most widely used are USB-tokens (or security dongles) and internal ships of smart cards (as it is also the case of citizen cards, banking cards or ticketing cards). More recently, a new generation of Bluetooth-enabled smart USB dongles appeared, also suitable to protect cryptographic operations and digital signatures for secure identity and payment applications. The common characteristic of such devices is to offer the required support to be used as secure cryptographic providers. Among the advantages of those portable cryptographic devices is also their portability and ubiquitous use, but, in consequence, they are also frequently forgotten or even lost. USB-enabled devices imply the need of readers, not always and not commonly available for generic smartphones or users working with computing devices. Also, wireless-devices can be specialized or require a development effort to be used as standard cryptographic providers. An alternative to mitigate such problems is the possible adoption of conventional Bluetooth-enabled smartphones, as ubiquitous cryptographic providers to be used, remotely, by client-side applications running in users’ devices, such as desktop or laptop computers. However, the use of smartphones for safe storage and management of private keys and sensitive parameters requires a careful analysis on the adversary model assumptions. The design options to implement a practical and secure smartphone-enabled cryptographic solution as a product, also requires the approach and the better use of the more interesting facilities provided by frameworks, programming environments and mobile operating systems services. In this dissertation we addressed the design, development and experimental evaluation of a secure mobile cryptographic provider, designed as a mobile service provided in a smartphone. The proposed solution is designed for Android-Based smartphones and supports on-demand Bluetooth-enabled cryptographic operations, including standard digital signatures. The addressed mobile cryptographic provider can be used by applications running on Windows-enabled computing devices, requesting digital signatures. The solution relies on the secure storage of private keys related to X509v3 public certificates and Android-based secure elements (SEs). With the materialized solution, an application running in a Windows computing device can request standard digital signatures of documents, transparently executed remotely by the smartphone regarded as a standard cryptographic provider

The survey on Near Field Communication

PubMed ID: 26057043Near Field Communication (NFC) is an emerging short-range wireless communication technology that offers great and varied promise in services such as payment, ticketing, gaming, crowd sourcing, voting, navigation, and many others. NFC technology enables the integration of services from a wide range of applications into one single smartphone. NFC technology has emerged recently, and consequently not much academic data are available yet, although the number of academic research studies carried out in the past two years has already surpassed the total number of the prior works combined. This paper presents the concept of NFC technology in a holistic approach from different perspectives, including hardware improvement and optimization, communication essentials and standards, applications, secure elements, privacy and security, usability analysis, and ecosystem and business issues. Further research opportunities in terms of the academic and business points of view are also explored and discussed at the end of each section. This comprehensive survey will be a valuable guide for researchers and academicians, as well as for business in the NFC technology and ecosystem.Publisher's Versio

Near Field Communication: From theory to practice

This book provides the technical essentials, state-of-the-art knowledge, business ecosystem and standards of Near Field Communication (NFC)by NFC Lab - Istanbul research centre which conducts intense research on NFC technology. In this book, the authors present the contemporary research on all aspects of NFC, addressing related security aspects as well as information on various business models. In addition, the book provides comprehensive information a designer needs to design an NFC project, an analyzer needs to analyze requirements of a new NFC based system, and a programmer needs to implement an application. Furthermore, the authors introduce the technical and administrative issues related to NFC technology, standards, and global stakeholders. It also offers comprehensive information as well as use case studies for each NFC operating mode to give the usage idea behind each operating mode thoroughly. Examples of NFC application development are provided using Java technology, and security considerations are discussed in detail. Key Features: Offers a complete understanding of the NFC technology, including standards, technical essentials, operating modes, application development with Java, security and privacy, business ecosystem analysis Provides analysis, design as well as development guidance for professionals from administrative and technical perspectives Discusses methods, techniques and modelling support including UML are demonstrated with real cases Contains case studies such as payment, ticketing, social networking and remote shopping This book will be an invaluable guide for business and ecosystem analysts, project managers, mobile commerce consultants, system and application developers, mobile developers and practitioners. It will also be of interest to researchers, software engineers, computer scientists, information technology specialists including students and graduates.Publisher's Versio

A Lightweight Security Protocol for NFC-based Mobile Payments

© 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. In this work, we describe a security solution that can be used to securely establish mobile payment transactions over the Near-Field Communication (NFC) radio interface. The proposed solution is very lightweight one; it uses symmetric cryptographic primitives on devices having memory and CPU resources limitations. We show that our approach maintains the security of NFC communications and we further demonstrate that our solution is simple, scalable, cost-effective, and incurs minimal computational processing overheads

An Investigation of Security in Near Field Communication Systems

Increasingly, goods and services are purchased over the Internet without any form of physical currency. This practice, often called e-commerce, offers sellers and buyers a convenient way to trade globally as no physical currency must change hands and buyers from anywhere in the world can browse online store fronts from around the globe. Nevertheless, many transactions still require a physical presence. For these sorts of transactions, a new technology called Near Field Communication has emerged to provide buyers with some of the conveniences of e-commerce while still allowing them to purchase goods locally. Near Field Communication (NFC), an evolution of Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID), allows one electronic device to transmit short messages to another nearby device. A buyer can store his or her payment information on a tag and a cashier can retrieve that information with an appropriate reader. Advanced devices can store payment information for multiple credit and debit cards as well as gift cards and other credentials. By consolidating all of these payment forms into a single device, the buyer has fewer objects to carry with her. Further, proper implementation of such a device can offer increased security over plastic cards in the form of advanced encryption. Using a testing platform consisting of commercial, off-the-shelf components, this dissertation investigates the security of the NFC physical-layer protocols as well as the primary NFC security protocol, NFC-SEC. In addition, it analyzes a situation in which the NFC protocols appear to break, potentially compromising sensitive data. Finally, this dissertation provides a proof of security for the NFC-SEC-1 variation of NFC-SEC