The Review of Non-Technical Assumptions in Digital Identity Architectures

The literature on digital identity management systems (IdM) is abundant and solutions vary by technology components and non-technical requirements. In the long run, however, there is a need for exchanging identities across domains or even borders, which requires interoperable solutions and flexible architectures. This article aims to give an overview of the current research on digital identity management. We conduct a systematic literature review of digital identity solution architectures and extract their inherent non-technical assumptions. The findings show that solution designs can be based on organizational, business and trust assumptions as well as human-user assumptions. Namely, establishing the trust relationships and collaborations among participating organizations; human-users capability for maintaining private cryptographic material or the assumptions that win-win business models could be easily identified. By reviewing the key findings of solutions proposed and looking at the differences and commonalities of their technical, organizational and social requirements, we discuss their potential real-life inhibitors and identify opportunities for future research in IdM

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

Privacy in the Genomic Era

Genome sequencing technology has advanced at a rapid pace and it is now possible to generate highly-detailed genotypes inexpensively. The collection and analysis of such data has the potential to support various applications, including personalized medical services. While the benefits of the genomics revolution are trumpeted by the biomedical community, the increased availability of such data has major implications for personal privacy; notably because the genome has certain essential features, which include (but are not limited to) (i) an association with traits and certain diseases, (ii) identification capability (e.g., forensics), and (iii) revelation of family relationships. Moreover, direct-to-consumer DNA testing increases the likelihood that genome data will be made available in less regulated environments, such as the Internet and for-profit companies. The problem of genome data privacy thus resides at the crossroads of computer science, medicine, and public policy. While the computer scientists have addressed data privacy for various data types, there has been less attention dedicated to genomic data. Thus, the goal of this paper is to provide a systematization of knowledge for the computer science community. In doing so, we address some of the (sometimes erroneous) beliefs of this field and we report on a survey we conducted about genome data privacy with biomedical specialists. Then, after characterizing the genome privacy problem, we review the state-of-the-art regarding privacy attacks on genomic data and strategies for mitigating such attacks, as well as contextualizing these attacks from the perspective of medicine and public policy. This paper concludes with an enumeration of the challenges for genome data privacy and presents a framework to systematize the analysis of threats and the design of countermeasures as the field moves forward

Integration of Blockchain and Auction Models: A Survey, Some Applications, and Challenges

In recent years, blockchain has gained widespread attention as an emerging technology for decentralization, transparency, and immutability in advancing online activities over public networks. As an essential market process, auctions have been well studied and applied in many business fields due to their efficiency and contributions to fair trade. Complementary features between blockchain and auction models trigger a great potential for research and innovation. On the one hand, the decentralized nature of blockchain can provide a trustworthy, secure, and cost-effective mechanism to manage the auction process; on the other hand, auction models can be utilized to design incentive and consensus protocols in blockchain architectures. These opportunities have attracted enormous research and innovation activities in both academia and industry; however, there is a lack of an in-depth review of existing solutions and achievements. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of these two research topics. We review the existing solutions for integrating blockchain and auction models, with some application-oriented taxonomies generated. Additionally, we highlight some open research challenges and future directions towards integrated blockchain-auction models

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