Security and privacy issues of physical objects in the IoT: Challenges and opportunities

In the Internet of Things (IoT), security and privacy issues of physical objects are crucial to the related applications. In order to clarify the complicated security and privacy issues, the life cycle of a physical object is divided into three stages of pre-working, in-working, and post-working. On this basis, a physical object-based security architecture for the IoT is put forward. According to the security architecture, security and privacy requirements and related protecting technologies for physical objects in different working stages are analyzed in detail. Considering the development of IoT technologies, potential security and privacy challenges that IoT objects may face in the pervasive computing environment are summarized. At the same time, possible directions for dealing with these challenges are also pointed out

Ensuring Application Specific Security, Privacy and Performance Goals in RFID Systems

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is an automatic identification technology that uses radio frequency to identify objects. Securing RFID systems and providing privacy in RFID applications has been the focus of much academic work lately. To ensure universal acceptance of RFID technology, security and privacy issued must be addressed into the design of any RFID application. Due to the constraints on memory, power, storage capacity, and amount of logic on RFID devices, traditional public key based strong security mechanisms are unsuitable for them. Usually, low cost general authentication protocols are used to secure RFID systems. However, the generic authentication protocols provide relatively low performance for different types of RFID applications. We identified that each RFID application has unique research challenges and different performance bottlenecks based on the characteristics of the system. One strategy is to devise security protocols such that application specific goals are met and system specific performance requirements are maximized. This dissertation aims to address the problem of devising application specific security protocols for current and next generation RFID systems so that in each application area maximum performance can be achieved and system specific goals are met. In this dissertation, we propose four different authentication techniques for RFID technologies, providing solutions to the following research issues: 1) detecting counterfeit as well as ensuring low response time in large scale RFID systems, 2) preserving privacy and maintaining scalability in RFID based healthcare systems, 3) ensuring security and survivability of Computational RFID (CRFID) networks, and 4) detecting missing WISP tags efficiently to ensure reliability of CRFID based system\u27s decision. The techniques presented in this dissertation achieve good levels of privacy, provide security, scale to large systems, and can be implemented on resource-constrained RFID devices

SLEC: A Novel Serverless RFID Authentication Protocol Based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is one of the leading technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) to create an efficient and reliable system to securely identify objects in many environments such as business, health, and manufacturing areas. Since the RFID server, reader, and tag communicate via insecure channels, mutual authentication between the reader and the tag is necessary for secure communication. The central database server supports the authentication of the reader and the tag by storing and managing the network data. Recent lightweight RFID authentication protocols have been proposed to satisfy the security features of RFID communication. A serverless RFID system is a new promising solution to alternate the central database for mobile RFID models. In this model, the reader and the tag perform the mutual authentication without the support of the central database server. However, many security challenges arise from implementing the lightweight RFID authentication protocols in the serverless RFID network. We propose a new robust serverless RFID authentication protocol based on the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to prevent the security attacks on the network and maintain the confidentiality and the privacy of the authentication messages and tag information and location. While most of the current protocols assume a secure channel in the setup phase to transmit the communication data, we consider in our protocol an insecure setup phase between the server, reader, and tag to ensure that the data can be renewed from any checkpoint server along with the route of the mobile RFID network. Thus, we implemented the elliptic curve cryptography in the setup phase (renewal phase) to transmit and store the data and the public key of the server to any reader or tag so that the latter can perform the mutual authentication successfully. The proposed model is compared under the classification of the serverless model in term of computation cost and security resistance

Efficient Detection of Counterfeit Products in Large-scale RFID Systems Using Batch Authentication Protocols

RFID technology facilitates processing of product information, making it a promising technology for anti-counterfeiting. However, in large-scale RFID applications, such as supply chain, retail industry, pharmaceutical industry, total tag estimation and tag authentication are two major research issues. Though there are per-tag authentication protocols and probabilistic approaches for total tag estimation in RFID systems, the RFID authentication protocols are mainly per-tag-based where the reader authenticates one tag at each time. For a batch of tags, current RFID systems have to identify them and then authenticate each tag sequentially, one at a time. This increases the protocol execution time due to the large volume of authentication data. In this paper, we propose to detect counterfeit tags in large-scale system using efficient batch authentication protocol. We propose FSA-based protocol, FTest, to meet the requirements of prompt and reliable batch authentication in large-scale RFID applications. FTest can determine the validity of a batch of tags with minimal execution time which is a major goal of large-scale RFID systems. FTest can reduce protocol execution time by ensuring that the percentage of potential counterfeit products is under the user-defined threshold. The experimental result demonstrates that FTest performs significantly better than the existing counterfeit detection approaches, for example, existing authentication techniques

Survey on Prominent RFID Authentication Protocols for Passive Tags

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is one of the leading technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) to create an efficient and reliable system to securely identify objects in many environments such as business, health, and manufacturing areas. Recent RFID authentication protocols have been proposed to satisfy the security features of RFID communication. In this article, we identify and review some of the most recent and enhanced authentication protocols that mainly focus on the authentication between a reader and a tag. However, the scope of this survey includes only passive tags protocols, due to the large scale of the RFID framework. We examined some of the recent RFID protocols in term of security requirements, computation, and attack resistance. We conclude that only five protocols resist all of the major attacks, while only one protocol satisfies all of the security requirements of the RFID system.http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s1810358

A Survey of Lightweight Cryptosystems for Smart Home Devices

A Smart Home uses interconnected network technology to monitor the environment, control the various physical appliances, and communicate with each other in a close environment. A typical smart home is made up of a security system, intercommunication system, lighting system, and ventilation system.  Data security schemes for smart homes are ineffective due to inefficiency cryptosystems, high energy consumption, and low exchange security. Traditional cryptosystems are less-applicable because of their large block size, large key size, and complex rounds. This paper conducts a review of smart homes, and adopts Ultra-Sooner Lightweight Cryptography to secure home door. It provides extensive background of cryptography, forms of cryptography as associated issues and strengths, current trends, smart home door system design, and future works suggestions. Specifically, there are prospects of utilizing XORed lightweight cryptosystem for developing encryption and decryption algorithms in smart home devices. The Substitution Permutation Network, and Feistel Network cryptographic primitives were most advanced forms of cipher operations with security guarantees. Therefore, better security, memory and energy efficiency can be obtained with lightweight ciphers in smart home devices when compared to existing solutions. In the subsequent studies, a blockchain-based lightweight cryptography can be the next springboard in attaining the most advanced security for smart home systems and their appliances.     &nbsp

Towards Secure and Scalable Tag Search approaches for Current and Next Generation RFID Systems

The technology behind Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has been around for a while, but dropping tag prices and standardization efforts are finally facilitating the expansion of RFID systems. The massive adoption of this technology is taking us closer to the well known ubiquitous computing scenarios. However, the widespread deployment of RFID technology also gives rise to significant user security issues. One possible solution to these challenges is the use of secure authentication protocols to protect RFID communications. A natural extension of RFID authentication is RFID tag searching, where a reader needs to search for a particular RFID tag out of a large collection of tags. As the number of tags of the system increases, the ability to search for the tags is invaluable when the reader requires data from a few tags rather than all the tags of the system. Authenticating each tag one at a time until the desired tag is found is a time consuming process. Surprisingly, RFID search has not been widely addressed in the literature despite the availability of search capabilities in typical RFID tags. In this thesis, we examine the challenges of extending security and scalability issues to RFID tag search and suggest several solutions. This thesis aims to design RFID tag search protocols that ensure security and scalability using lightweight cryptographic primitives. We identify the security and performance requirements for RFID systems. We also point out and explain the major attacks that are typically launched against an RFID system. This thesis makes four main contributions. First, we propose a serverless (without a central server) and untraceable search protocol that is secure against major attacks we identified earlier. The unique feature of this protocol is that it provides security protection and searching capacity same as an RFID system with a central server. In addition, this approach is no more vulnerable to a single point-of-failure. Second, we propose a scalable tag search protocol that provides most of the identified security and performance features. The highly scalable feature of this protocol allows it to be deployed in large scale RFID systems. Third, we propose a hexagonal cell based distributed architecture for efficient RFID tag searching in an emergency evacuation system. Finally, we introduce tag monitoring as a new dimension of tag searching and propose a Slotted Aloha based scalable tag monitoring protocol for next generation WISP (Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform) tags

KALwEN: a new practical and interoperable key management scheme for body sensor networks

Key management is the pillar of a security architecture. Body sensor networks (BSNs) pose several challenges–some inherited from wireless sensor networks (WSNs), some unique to themselves–that require a new key management scheme to be tailor-made. The challenge is taken on, and the result is KALwEN, a new parameterized key management scheme that combines the best-suited cryptographic techniques in a seamless framework. KALwEN is user-friendly in the sense that it requires no expert knowledge of a user, and instead only requires a user to follow a simple set of instructions when bootstrapping or extending a network. One of KALwEN's key features is that it allows sensor devices from different manufacturers, which expectedly do not have any pre-shared secret, to establish secure communications with each other. KALwEN is decentralized, such that it does not rely on the availability of a local processing unit (LPU). KALwEN supports secure global broadcast, local broadcast, and local (neighbor-to-neighbor) unicast, while preserving past key secrecy and future key secrecy (FKS). The fact that the cryptographic protocols of KALwEN have been formally verified also makes a convincing case. With both formal verification and experimental evaluation, our results should appeal to theorists and practitioners alike