42,925 research outputs found
A Secure Authentication Scheme for RFID Systems
AbstractDay by day the importance of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems is increasing for its powerful capabilities in automatic identification, localization and access control of the objects. However, the RFID techniques are plagued to security and privacy issues due to underlying wireless communication channel. In order to come up with a solution, we propose an efficient authentication scheme which uses pseudorandom number generators (PRNG) and some simple cryptographic operations. Moreover, as the current generation tags come with in-built pseudo random generators, the implementations of these operations are possible with low complexity. The secret information stored inside the tags is communicated in a more secure way ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and authentication. The security of our proposed scheme is analyzed against different attacks on RFID and with the performance of some existing protocols. Experimental results show a significant improvement in security with average cost, when compared with the existing techniques
Secure PRNG Seeding on Commercial Off-the-Shelf Microcontrollers
The generation of high quality random numbers is crucial to many cryptographic applications, including cryptographic protocols, secret of keys, nonces or salts. Their values must contain enough randomness to be unpredictable to attackers. Pseudo-random number generators require initial data with high entropy as a seed to produce a large stream of high quality random data. Yet, despite the importance of randomness, proper high quality random number generation is often ignored. Primarily embedded devices often suffer from weak random number generators. In this work, we focus on identifying and evaluating SRAM in commercial off-the-shelf microcontrollers as an entropy source for PRNG seeding. We measure and evaluate the SRAM start-up patterns of two popular types of microcontrollers, a STMicroelectronics STM32F100R8 and a Microchip PIC16F1825. We also present an efficient software-only architecture for secure PRNG seeding. After analyzing over 1 000 000 measurements in total, we conclude that of these two devices, the PIC16F1825 cannot be used to securely seed a PRNG. The STM32F100R8, however, has the ability to generate very strong seeds from the noise in its SRAM start-up pattern. These seeds can then be used to ensure a PRNG generates high quality data
A Practical Searchable Symmetric Encryption Scheme for Smart Grid Data
Outsourcing data storage to the remote cloud can be an economical solution to
enhance data management in the smart grid ecosystem. To protect the privacy of
data, the utility company may choose to encrypt the data before uploading them
to the cloud. However, while encryption provides confidentiality to data, it
also sacrifices the data owners' ability to query a special segment in their
data. Searchable symmetric encryption is a technology that enables users to
store documents in ciphertext form while keeping the functionality to search
keywords in the documents. However, most state-of-the-art SSE algorithms are
only focusing on general document storage, which may become unsuitable for
smart grid applications. In this paper, we propose a simple, practical SSE
scheme that aims to protect the privacy of data generated in the smart grid.
Our scheme achieves high space complexity with small information disclosure
that was acceptable for practical smart grid application. We also implement a
prototype over the statistical data of advanced meter infrastructure to show
the effectiveness of our approach
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