Cryptanalysis and improvement of password-authenticated key agreement for session initiation protocol using smart cards

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is one of the most commonly used protocols for handling sessions for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)-based communications, and the security of SIP is becoming increasingly important. Recently, Zhang et al. proposed a password authenticated key agreement protocol for SIP by using smart cards to protect the VoIP communications between users. Their protocol provided some unique features, such as mutual authentication, no password table needed, and password updating freely. In this study, we performed cryptanalysis of Zhang et al.'s protocol and found that their protocol was vulnerable to the impersonation attack although the protocol could withstand several other attacks. A malicious attacker could compute other users’ privacy keys and then impersonated the users to cheat the SIP server. Furthermore, we proposed an improved password authentication key agreement protocol for SIP, which overcame the weakness of Zhang et al.’s protocol and was more suitable for VoIP communications

Security in Key Agreement: Two-Party Certificateless Schemes

The main goal of cryptography is to enable secure communication over a public channel; often a secret shared among the communicating parties is used to achieve this. The process by which these parties agree on such a shared secret is called key agreement. In this thesis, we focus on two-party key agreement protocols in the public-key setting and study the various methods used to establish and validate public keys. We pay particular attention to certificateless key agreement schemes and attempt to formalize a relevant notion of security. To that end, we give a possible extension of the existing extended Canetti-Krawzcyk security model applicable to the certificateless setting. We observe that none of the certificateless protocols we have seen in the literature are secure in this model; it is an open question whether such schemes exist. We analyze several published certificateless key agreement protocols, demonstrating the existence of key compromise impersonation attacks and even a man-in-the-middle attack in one case, contrary to the claims of the authors. We also briefly describe weaknesses exhibited by these protocols in the context of our suggested security model

A lightweight privacy preserving authenticated key agreement protocol for SIP-based VoIP

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an essential part of most Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) architecture. Although SIP provides attractive features, it is exposed to various security threats, and so an efficient and secure authentication scheme is sought to enhance the security of SIP. Several attempts have been made to address the tradeoff problem between security and efficiency, but designing a successful authenticated key agreement protocol for SIP is still a challenging task from the viewpoint of both performance and security, because performance and security as two critical factors affecting SIP applications always seem contradictory. In this study, we employ biometrics to design a lightweight privacy preserving authentication protocol for SIP based on symmetric encryption, achieving a delicate balance between performance and security. In addition, the proposed authentication protocol can fully protect the privacy of biometric characteristics and data identity, which has not been considered in previous work. The completeness of the proposed protocol is demonstrated by Gong, Needham, and Yahalom (GNY) logic. Performance analysis shows that our proposed protocol increases efficiency significantly in comparison with other related protocols

A survey on wireless body area networks: architecture, security challenges and research opportunities.

In the era of communication technologies, wireless healthcare networks enable innovative applications to enhance the quality of patients’ lives, provide useful monitoring tools for caregivers, and allows timely intervention. However, due to the sensitive information within the Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), insecure data violates the patients’ privacy and may consequently lead to improper medical diagnosis and/or treatment. Achieving a high level of security and privacy in WBAN involves various challenges due to its resource limitations and critical applications. In this paper, a comprehensive survey of the WBAN technology is provided, with a particular focus on the security and privacy concerns along with their countermeasures, followed by proposed research directions and open issues

Biometric identity-based cryptography for e-Government environment

Government information is a vital asset that must be kept in a trusted environment and efficiently managed by authorised parties. Even though e-Government provides a number of advantages, it also introduces a range of new security risks. Sharing confidential and top-secret information in a secure manner among government sectors tend to be the main element that government agencies look for. Thus, developing an effective methodology is essential and it is a key factor for e-Government success. The proposed e-Government scheme in this paper is a combination of identity-based encryption and biometric technology. This new scheme can effectively improve the security in authentication systems, which provides a reliable identity with a high degree of assurance. In addition, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of using Finite-state machines as a formal method to analyse the proposed protocols

Modelling and simulation of a biometric identity-based cryptography

Government information is a vital asset that must be kept in a trusted environment and efficiently managed by authorised parties. Even though e-Government provides a number of advantages, it also introduces a range of new security risks. Sharing confidential and top-secret information in a secure manner among government sectors tend to be the main element that government agencies look for. Thus, developing an effective methodology is essential and it is a key factor for e-Government success. The proposed e-Government scheme in this paper is a combination of identity-based encryption and biometric technology. This new scheme can effectively improve the security in authentication systems, which provides a reliable identity with a high degree of assurance. In addition, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of using Finite-state machines as a formal method to analyse the proposed protocols

CGST: Provably Secure Lightweight Certificateless Group Signcryption Technique Based on Fractional Chaotic Maps

In recent years, there has been a lot of research interest in analyzing chaotic constructions and their associated cryptographic structures. Compared with the essential combination of encryption and signature, the signcryption scheme has a more realistic solution for achieving message confidentiality and authentication simultaneously. However, the security of a signcryption scheme is questionable when deployed in modern safety-critical systems, especially as billions of sensitive user information is transmitted over open communication channels. In order to address this problem, a lightweight, provably secure certificateless technique that uses Fractional Chaotic Maps (FCM) for group-oriented signcryption (CGST) is proposed. The main feature of the CGST-FCM technique is that any group signcrypter may encrypt data/information with the group manager (GM) and have it sent to the verifier seamlessly. This implies the legitimacy of the signcrypted information/data is verifiable using the public conditions of the group, but they cannot link it to the conforming signcrypter. In this scenario, valid signcrypted information/data cannot be produced by the GM or any signcrypter in that category alone. However, the GM is allowed to reveal the identity of the signcrypter when there is a legal conflict to restrict repudiation of the signature. Generally, the CGST-FCM technique is protected from the indistinguishably chosen ciphertext attack (IND-CCA). Additionally, the computationally difficult Diffie-Hellman (DH) problems have been used to build unlinkability, untraceability, unforgeability, and robustness of the projected CGST-FCM scheme. Finally, the security investigation of the presented CGST-FCM technique shows appreciable consistency and high efficiency when applied in real-time security applications

An enhanced certificateless cryptosystem for mobile ad hoc networks

Due to the importance of security in many critical applications in MANETs and the limitation of the resources in mobile devices, it is important to have lightweight cryptosystems. Although some lightweight certificateless cryptosystems for MANETs have been proposed, it is possible to improve them in the term of reducing the complexity of the computations. In this paper, we have tried to propose a lightweight certificateless public key cryptographic scheme based on bilinear pairings. In addition, we compared our proposed scheme with other existing certificateless pairing based and result shows that the proposed scheme is more efficient based on computational cost and the rate of growth of computational expense viewpoints