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

S-Mbank: Secure Mobile Banking Authentication Scheme Using Signcryption, Pair Based Text Authentication, and Contactless Smartcard

Nowadays, mobile banking becomes a popular tool which consumers can conduct financial transactions such as shopping, monitoring accounts balance, transferring funds and other payments. Consumers dependency on mobile needs, make people take a little bit more interest in mobile banking. The use of the one-time password which is sent to the user mobile phone by short message service (SMS) is a vulnerability which we want to solve with proposing a new scheme called S-Mbank. We replace the authentication using the one-time password with the contactless smart card to prevent attackers to use the unencrypted message which is sent to the user's mobile phone. Moreover, it deals vulnerability of spoofer to send an SMS pretending as a bank's server. The contactless smart card is proposed because of its flexibility and security which easier to bring in our wallet than the common passcode generators. The replacement of SMS-based authentication with contactless smart card removes the vulnerability of unauthorized users to act as a legitimate user to exploit the mobile banking user's account. Besides that, we use public-private key pair and PIN to provide two factors authentication and mutual authentication. We use signcryption scheme to provide the efficiency of the computation. Pair based text authentication is also proposed for the login process as a solution to shoulder-surfing attack. We use Scyther tool to analyze the security of authentication protocol in S-Mbank scheme. From the proposed scheme, we are able to provide more security protection for mobile banking service.Comment: 6 page

An Efficient QR Code Based Web Authentication Scheme

Nowadays, web authentication is the main and important measure which guarantees the information security and data privacy. Web authentication provides the basis of user accessibility and data security. In the last few years, frequent outbreaks in the password databases lead to a main concern in the data security. The default method for the web authentication is password only mechanism. There are many security problems associated with the password only approach. Many users have a tendency to reuse the same password in different websites. So when one password is being compromised, it may lead to the password break of the other websites due to the password reuse. In order to improve the security, Two factor authentication (TFA) is strongly recommended. But despite of this, TFA has not been widely accepted in the web authentication mechanism. Due to the high scale and drastic popularity of the mobile phone and an inbuilt function of the barcode scanning through camera lead to a new two factor authentication method. In this paper, the proposed two factor authentication protocol uses mobile phone with one or more camera as the second factor for the authentication. The proposed TFA in web authentication counter various attacks such as man in the middle attack (MITM), phishing attacks and so on. Here password is the first factor and mobile is used as the second factor for the web authentication. The communication between the mobile phone and the PC is with the help of visible light. Visible light communication has many advantages as compared with other communication mechanisms. There is a less cellular cost in this scheme which indicates the user does not need cellular network or Wi-Fi for the authentication

2FYSH: two-factor authentication you should have for password replacement

Password has been the most used authentication system these days. However, strong passwords are hard to remember and unique to every account. Unfortunately, even with the strongest passwords, password authentication system can still be breached by some kind of attacks. 2FYSH is two tokens-based authentication protocol designed to replace the password authentication entirely. The two tokens are a mobile phone and an NFC card. By utilizing mobile phones as one of the tokens, 2FYSH is offering third layer of security for users that lock their phone with some kind of security. 2FYSH is secure since it uses public and private key along with challenge-response protocol. 2FYSH protects the user from usual password attacks such as man-in-the-middle attack, phishing, eavesdropping, brute forcing, shoulder surfing, key logging, and verifier leaking. The secure design of 2FYSH has made 90% of the usability test participants to prefer 2FYSH for securing their sensitive information. This fact makes 2FYSH best applied to secure sensitive data needs such as bank accounts and corporate secrets

Community-Based Security for the Internet of Things

With more and more devices becoming connectable to the internet, the number of services but also a lot of threats increases dramatically. Security is often a secondary matter behind functionality and comfort, but the problem has already been recognized. Still, with many IoT devices being deployed already, security will come step-by-step and through updates, patches and new versions of apps and IoT software. While these updates can be safely retrieved from app stores, the problems kick in via jailbroken devices and with the variety of untrusted sources arising on the internet. Since hacking is typically a community effort? these days, security could be a community goal too. The challenges are manifold, and one reason for weak or absent security on IoT devices is their weak computational power. In this chapter, we discuss a community based security mechanism in which devices mutually aid each other in secure software management. We discuss game-theoretic methods of community formation and light-weight cryptographic means to accomplish authentic software deployment inside the IoT device community

Mobile Authentication with NFC enabled Smartphones

Smartphones are becoming increasingly more deployed and as such new possibilities for utilizing the smartphones many capabilities for public and private use are arising. This project will investigate the possibility of using smartphones as a platform for authentication and access control, using near field communication (NFC). To achieve the necessary security for authentication and access control purposes, cryptographic concepts such as public keys, challenge-response and digital signatures are used. To focus the investigation a case study is performed based on the authentication and access control needs of an educational institutions student ID. To gain a more practical understanding of the challenges mobile authentication encounters, a prototype has successfully been developed on the basis of the investigation. The case study performed in this project argues that NFC as a standalone technology is not yet mature to support the advanced communication required by this case. However, combining NFC with other communication technologies such as Bluetooth has proven to be effective. As a result, a general evaluation has been performed on several aspects of the prototype, such as cost-effectiveness, usability, performance and security to evaluate the viability of mobile authentication