Multi-factor Physical Layer Security Authentication in Short Blocklength Communication

Lightweight and low latency security schemes at the physical layer that have recently attracted a lot of attention include: (i) physical unclonable functions (PUFs), (ii) localization based authentication, and, (iii) secret key generation (SKG) from wireless fading coefficients. In this paper, we focus on short blocklengths and propose a fast, privacy preserving, multi-factor authentication protocol that uniquely combines PUFs, proximity estimation and SKG. We focus on delay constrained applications and demonstrate the performance of the SKG scheme in the short blocklength by providing a numerical comparison of three families of channel codes, including half rate low density parity check codes (LDPC), Bose Chaudhuri Hocquenghem (BCH), and, Polar Slepian Wolf codes for n=512, 1024. The SKG keys are incorporated in a zero-round-trip-time resumption protocol for fast re-authentication. All schemes of the proposed mutual authentication protocol are shown to be secure through formal proofs using Burrows, Abadi and Needham (BAN) and Mao and Boyd (MB) logic as well as the Tamarin-prover

An Efficient Authentication Protocol for Smart Grid Communication Based on On-Chip-Error-Correcting Physical Unclonable Function

Security has become a main concern for the smart grid to move from research and development to industry. The concept of security has usually referred to resistance to threats by an active or passive attacker. However, since smart meters (SMs) are often placed in unprotected areas, physical security has become one of the important security goals in the smart grid. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) have been largely utilized for ensuring physical security in recent years, though their reliability has remained a major problem to be practically used in cryptographic applications. Although fuzzy extractors have been considered as a solution to solve the reliability problem of PUFs, they put a considerable computational cost to the resource-constrained SMs. To that end, we first propose an on-chip-error-correcting (OCEC) PUF that efficiently generates stable digits for the authentication process. Afterward, we introduce a lightweight authentication protocol between the SMs and neighborhood gateway (NG) based on the proposed PUF. The provable security analysis shows that not only the proposed protocol can stand secure in the Canetti-Krawczyk (CK) adversary model but also provides additional security features. Also, the performance evaluation demonstrates the significant improvement of the proposed scheme in comparison with the state-of-the-art

An enhanced fuzzy commitment scheme in biometric template protection

Biometric template protection consists of two approaches; Feature Transformation (FT) and Biometric Cryptography (BC). This research focuses on Key-Binding Technique based on Fuzzy Commitment Scheme (FCS) under BC approach. In FCS, the helper data should not disclose any information about the biometric data. However, literatures showed that it had dependency issue in its helper data which jeopardize security and privacy. Moreover, this also increases the probability of privacy leakage which lead to attacks such as brute-force and cross-matching attack. Thus, the aim of this research is to reduce the dependency of helper data that can caused privacy leakage. Three objectives have been set such as (1) to identify the factors that cause dependency on biometric features (2) to enhance FCS by proposing an approach that reduces this dependency, and (3) to evaluate the proposed approach based on parameters such as security, privacy, and biometric performance. This research involved four phases. Phase one, involved research review and analysis, followed by designing conceptual model and algorithm development in phase two and three respectively. Phase four, involved with the evaluation of the proposed approach. The security and privacy analysis shows that with the additional hash function, it is difficult for adversary to perform brute‐force attack on information stored in database. Furthermore, the proposed approach has enhanced the aspect of unlinkability and prevents cross-matching attack. The proposed approach has achieved high accuracy of 95.31% with Equal Error Rate (EER) of 1.54% which performs slightly better by 1.42% compared to the existing approach. This research has contributed towards the key-binding technique of biometric fingerprint template protection, based on FCS. In particular, this research was designed to create a secret binary feature that can be used in other state-of-the-art cryptographic systems by using an appropriate error-correcting approach that meets security standards

CALIPER: Continuous Authentication Layered with Integrated PKI Encoding Recognition

Architectures relying on continuous authentication require a secure way to challenge the user's identity without trusting that the Continuous Authentication Subsystem (CAS) has not been compromised, i.e., that the response to the layer which manages service/application access is not fake. In this paper, we introduce the CALIPER protocol, in which a separate Continuous Access Verification Entity (CAVE) directly challenges the user's identity in a continuous authentication regime. Instead of simply returning authentication probabilities or confidence scores, CALIPER's CAS uses live hard and soft biometric samples from the user to extract a cryptographic private key embedded in a challenge posed by the CAVE. The CAS then uses this key to sign a response to the CAVE. CALIPER supports multiple modalities, key lengths, and security levels and can be applied in two scenarios: One where the CAS must authenticate its user to a CAVE running on a remote server (device-server) for access to remote application data, and another where the CAS must authenticate its user to a locally running trusted computing module (TCM) for access to local application data (device-TCM). We further demonstrate that CALIPER can leverage device hardware resources to enable privacy and security even when the device's kernel is compromised, and we show how this authentication protocol can even be expanded to obfuscate direct kernel object manipulation (DKOM) malwares.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2016 Biometrics Worksho

GTmoPass: Two-factor Authentication on Public Displays Using Gaze-touch Passwords and Personal Mobile Devices

As public displays continue to deliver increasingly private and personalized content, there is a need to ensure that only the legitimate users can access private information in sensitive contexts. While public displays can adopt similar authentication concepts like those used on public terminals (e.g., ATMs), authentication in public is subject to a number of risks. Namely, adversaries can uncover a user's password through (1) shoulder surfing, (2) thermal attacks, or (3) smudge attacks. To address this problem we propose GTmoPass, an authentication architecture that enables Multi-factor user authentication on public displays. The first factor is a knowledge-factor: we employ a shoulder-surfing resilient multimodal scheme that combines gaze and touch input for password entry. The second factor is a possession-factor: users utilize their personal mobile devices, on which they enter the password. Credentials are securely transmitted to a server via Bluetooth beacons. We describe the implementation of GTmoPass and report on an evaluation of its usability and security, which shows that although authentication using GTmoPass is slightly slower than traditional methods, it protects against the three aforementioned threats