Mobile qualified electronic signatures and certification on demand

Despite a legal framework being in place for several years, the market share of qualified electronic signatures is disappointingly low. Mobile Signatures provide a new and promising opportunity for the deployment of an infrastructure for qualified electronic signatures. We analyzed two possible signing approaches (server based and client based signatures) and conclude that SIM-based signatures are the most secure and convenient solution. However, using the SIM-card as a secure signature creation device (SSCD) raises new challenges, because it would contain the user’s private key as well as the subscriber identification. Combining both functions in one card raises the question who will have the control over the keys and certificates. We propose a protocol called Certification on Demand (COD) that separates certification services from subscriber identification information and allows consumers to choose their appropriate certification services and service providers based on their needs. We also present some of the constraints that still have to be addressed before qualified mobile signatures are possible

Sähköisen identiteetin toteuttaminen TPM 2.0 -laitteistolla

Most of the financial, healthcare, and governmental services are available on Internet, where traditional identification methods used on face-to-face identification are not possible. Identification with username and password is a mediocre solution and therefore some services require strong authentication. Finland has three approved strong authentication methods: smart cards, bank credentials, and mobile ID. Out of the three authentication methods, only the government issued smart card is available to everyone who police can identify reliably. Bank credentials require identification with an identity document from Finland or other European Economic Area (EEA) country. Mobile ID explicitly require identification with Finnish identity document. The problem with smart cards is the requirement for a reader, slow functioning, and requirement for custom driver. A TPM could function as a replacement for a smart card with accompanying software library. In this thesis, I created a PKCS #11 software library that allows TPM to be used for browser based authentication according to draft specification by Finnish population registry. The keys used for authentication are created, stored and used securely inside the TPM. TPMs are deemed viable replacement for smart cards. The implemented system is faster to use than smart cards and has similar security properties as smart cards have. The created library contains implementations for 30% of all TPM 2.0 functions and could be used as a base for further TPM 2.0 based software.Pankki-, terveys- ja julkiset palvelut ovat suureksi osin saatavilla internetin välityksellä. Tunnistautuminen käyttäjätunnuksella ja salasanalla ei takaa riittävää luotettavuutta, vaan joissain palveluissa on käytettävä vahvaa tunnistautumista. Suomessa on tällä hetkellä käytössä kolme vahvaa tunnistautumisvälinettä: pankkien käyttämät verkkopankkitunnukset, Väestörekisterikeskuksen kansalaisvarmenne ja teleyritysten mobiilivarmenteet. Näistä kolmesta kansalaisvarmenne on ainoa, joka ei vaadi asiakkuutta ja on täten kaikille saatavilla, jotka poliisi voi luotettavasti tunnistaa. Verkkopankkitunnukset vaativat tunnistautumisen suomalaisella tai Euroopan talousalueen (ETA) valtion myöntämällä henkilötodistus. Mobiilivarmenne myönnetään vain henkilölle, joka voidaan tunnistaa suomalaisella henkilötodistuksella. Kansalaisvarmenne on kuitenkin älykortti kaikkine älykortin ongelmineen: sen käyttämiseen tarvitaan erillinen lukija, sen toiminta on hidasta ja se vaatii erillisen laiteajurin. Tämän työn tavoitteena on luoda ratkaisu, jolla älykorttipohjainen tunnistautuminen voidaan toteuttaa tietokoneissa olevan TPM-piirin avulla. Tässä diplomityössä luotiin PKCS #11 -rajapinnan täyttävä ohjelmistokirjasto, joka mahdollistaa TPM-piirin käyttämisen tunnistautumiseen selaimessa Väestörekisterikeskuksen laatiman määritelmän luonnoksen mukaan. Tunnistautumisavaimet luodaan, tallennetaan ja niitä käytetään TPM:ssa, mikä varmistaa avainten luottamuksellisuuden. Älykortin toiminnallisuudet todettiin mahdolliseksi toteuttaa TPM-piirillä. Toteutettu järjestelmä on nopeampi käyttää kuin älykortti ja se takaa älykortteja vastaavan tietoturvatason. Työn tuloksena tehty kirjasto toteuttaa 30 % kaikista TPM 2.0 -ohjelmistorajapinnoista, ja kirjastoa voidaan käyttää osana tulevia TPM 2.0 -ohjelmistoja

Challenges of Multi-Factor Authentication for Securing Advanced IoT (A-IoT) Applications

The unprecedented proliferation of smart devices together with novel communication, computing, and control technologies have paved the way for the Advanced Internet of Things~(A-IoT). This development involves new categories of capable devices, such as high-end wearables, smart vehicles, and consumer drones aiming to enable efficient and collaborative utilization within the Smart City paradigm. While massive deployments of these objects may enrich people's lives, unauthorized access to the said equipment is potentially dangerous. Hence, highly-secure human authentication mechanisms have to be designed. At the same time, human beings desire comfortable interaction with their owned devices on a daily basis, thus demanding the authentication procedures to be seamless and user-friendly, mindful of the contemporary urban dynamics. In response to these unique challenges, this work advocates for the adoption of multi-factor authentication for A-IoT, such that multiple heterogeneous methods - both well-established and emerging - are combined intelligently to grant or deny access reliably. We thus discuss the pros and cons of various solutions as well as introduce tools to combine the authentication factors, with an emphasis on challenging Smart City environments. We finally outline the open questions to shape future research efforts in this emerging field.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. The work has been accepted for publication in IEEE Network, 2019. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

A comprehensive meta-analysis of cryptographic security mechanisms for cloud computing

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 link.The concept of cloud computing offers measurable computational or information resources as a service over the Internet. The major motivation behind the cloud setup is economic benefits, because it assures the reduction in expenditure for operational and infrastructural purposes. To transform it into a reality there are some impediments and hurdles which are required to be tackled, most profound of which are security, privacy and reliability issues. As the user data is revealed to the cloud, it departs the protection-sphere of the data owner. However, this brings partly new security and privacy concerns. This work focuses on these issues related to various cloud services and deployment models by spotlighting their major challenges. While the classical cryptography is an ancient discipline, modern cryptography, which has been mostly developed in the last few decades, is the subject of study which needs to be implemented so as to ensure strong security and privacy mechanisms in today’s real-world scenarios. The technological solutions, short and long term research goals of the cloud security will be described and addressed using various classical cryptographic mechanisms as well as modern ones. This work explores the new directions in cloud computing security, while highlighting the correct selection of these fundamental technologies from cryptographic point of view

Ubic: Bridging the gap between digital cryptography and the physical world

Advances in computing technology increasingly blur the boundary between the digital domain and the physical world. Although the research community has developed a large number of cryptographic primitives and has demonstrated their usability in all-digital communication, many of them have not yet made their way into the real world due to usability aspects. We aim to make another step towards a tighter integration of digital cryptography into real world interactions. We describe Ubic, a framework that allows users to bridge the gap between digital cryptography and the physical world. Ubic relies on head-mounted displays, like Google Glass, resource-friendly computer vision techniques as well as mathematically sound cryptographic primitives to provide users with better security and privacy guarantees. The framework covers key cryptographic primitives, such as secure identification, document verification using a novel secure physical document format, as well as content hiding. To make a contribution of practical value, we focused on making Ubic as simple, easily deployable, and user friendly as possible.Comment: In ESORICS 2014, volume 8712 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 56-75, Wroclaw, Poland, September 7-11, 2014. Springer, Berlin, German

ARPA Whitepaper

We propose a secure computation solution for blockchain networks. The correctness of computation is verifiable even under malicious majority condition using information-theoretic Message Authentication Code (MAC), and the privacy is preserved using Secret-Sharing. With state-of-the-art multiparty computation protocol and a layer2 solution, our privacy-preserving computation guarantees data security on blockchain, cryptographically, while reducing the heavy-lifting computation job to a few nodes. This breakthrough has several implications on the future of decentralized networks. First, secure computation can be used to support Private Smart Contracts, where consensus is reached without exposing the information in the public contract. Second, it enables data to be shared and used in trustless network, without disclosing the raw data during data-at-use, where data ownership and data usage is safely separated. Last but not least, computation and verification processes are separated, which can be perceived as computational sharding, this effectively makes the transaction processing speed linear to the number of participating nodes. Our objective is to deploy our secure computation network as an layer2 solution to any blockchain system. Smart Contracts\cite{smartcontract} will be used as bridge to link the blockchain and computation networks. Additionally, they will be used as verifier to ensure that outsourced computation is completed correctly. In order to achieve this, we first develop a general MPC network with advanced features, such as: 1) Secure Computation, 2) Off-chain Computation, 3) Verifiable Computation, and 4)Support dApps' needs like privacy-preserving data exchange

Strong authentication based on mobile application

The user authentication in online services has evolved over time from the old username and password-based approaches to current strong authentication methodologies. Especially, the smartphone app has become one of the most important forms to perform the authentication. This thesis describes various authentication methods used previously and discusses about possible factors that generated the demand for the current strong authentication approach. We present the concepts and architectures of mobile application based authentication systems. Furthermore, we take closer look into the security of the mobile application based authentication approach. Mobile apps have various attack vectors that need to be taken under consideration when designing an authentication system. Fortunately, various generic software protection mechanisms have been developed during the last decades. We discuss how these mechanisms can be utilized in mobile app environment and in the authentication context. The main idea of this thesis is to gather relevant information about the authentication history and to be able to build a view of strong authentication evolution. This history and the aspects of the evolution are used to state hypothesis about the future research and development. We predict that the authentication systems in the future may be based on a holistic view of the behavioral patterns and physical properties of the user. Machine learning may be used in the future to implement an autonomous authentication concept that enables users to be authenticated with minimal physical or cognitive effort

Study and development of a remote biometric authentication protocol

This paper reports the phases of study and implementation of a remote biometric authentication protocol developed during my internship at the I.i.t. of the C.n.r. in Pisa. Starting from the study of authentication history we had a look from the first system used since the 60ies to the latest technology; this helped us understand how we could realize a demonstration working protocol that could achieve a web remote authentication granting good reliability: to do this we choosed to modify the SSL handshake with biometric tests and we decided to use smart-cards a secure vault for the sensible biometric data involved. In the first chapter you will find a brief definition of authentication and an introduction on how we can achieve it, with a particular focus on new biometric techniques. In the second chapter there\u27s the history of authentication from the very first password system to actual ones: new token and smart card technolgies are longer stressed in order to introduce the reader to the last chapter. In the third chapter you will find the project framework, the development of our implementation choiches and the source code of the demo project

Smart Cards to Enhance Security and Privacy in Biometrics

Smart cards are portable secure devices designed to hold personal and service information for many kind of applications. Examples of the use of smart cards are cell phone user identification (e.g. GSM SIM card), banking cards (e.g. EMV credit/debit cards) or citizen cards. Smart cards and Biometrics can be used jointly in different kinds of scenarios. Being a secure portable device, smart cards can be used for storing securely biometric references (e.g. templates) of the cardholder, perform biometric operations such as the comparison of an external biometric sample with the on-card stored biometric reference, or even relate operations within the card to the correct execution and result of those biometric operations. In order to provide the reader of the book with an overview of this technology, this chapter provides a description of smart cards, from their origin till the current technology involved, focusing especially in the security services they provide. Once the technology and the security services are introduced, the chapter will detail how smart cards can be integrated in biometric systems, which will be summarized in four different strategies: Store-on-Card, On-Card Biometric Comparison, Work-sharing Mechanism, and System-on-Card. Also the way to evaluate the joint use of smart cards and Biometrics will be described; both at the performance level, as well as its security. Last, but not least, this chapter will illustrate the collaboration of both technologies by providing two examples of current major deployments.Publicad

Security in Pervasive Computing: Current Status and Open Issues

Million of wireless device users are ever on the move, becoming more dependent on their PDAs, smart phones, and other handheld devices. With the advancement of pervasive computing, new and unique capabilities are available to aid mobile societies. The wireless nature of these devices has fostered a new era of mobility. Thousands of pervasive devices are able to arbitrarily join and leave a network, creating a nomadic environment known as a pervasive ad hoc network. However, mobile devices have vulnerabilities, and some are proving to be challenging. Security in pervasive computing is the most critical challenge. Security is needed to ensure exact and accurate confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and access control, to name a few. Security for mobile devices, though still in its infancy, has drawn the attention of various researchers. As pervasive devices become incorporated in our day-to-day lives, security will increasingly becoming a common concern for all users - - though for most it will be an afterthought, like many other computing functions. The usability and expansion of pervasive computing applications depends greatly on the security and reliability provided by the applications. At this critical juncture, security research is growing. This paper examines the recent trends and forward thinking investigation in several fields of security, along with a brief history of previous accomplishments in the corresponding areas. Some open issues have been discussed for further investigation