Secure & Lightweight Distance-Bounding

Distance-bounding is a practical solution to be used in security-sensitive contexts, mainly to prevent relay attacks. The main challenge when designing such protocols is maintaining their inexpensive cryptographic nature, whilst being able to protect against as many, if not all, of the classical threats posed in their context. Moreover, in distance-bounding, some subtle security shortcomings related to the PRF (pseudorandom function) assumption and ingenious attack techniques based on observing verifiers' outputs have recently been put forward. Also, the recent terrorist-fraud by Hancke somehow recalls once more the need to account for noisy communications in the security analysis of distance-bounding. In this paper, we attempt to incorporate the lessons taught by these new developments in our distance-bounding protocol design. The result is a new class of protocols, with increasing levels of security, accommodating the latest advances; at the same time, we preserve the lightweight nature of the design throughout the whole class

Security of Ubiquitous Computing Systems

The chapters in this open access book arise out of the EU Cost Action project Cryptacus, the objective of which was to improve and adapt existent cryptanalysis methodologies and tools to the ubiquitous computing framework. The cryptanalysis implemented lies along four axes: cryptographic models, cryptanalysis of building blocks, hardware and software security engineering, and security assessment of real-world systems. The authors are top-class researchers in security and cryptography, and the contributions are of value to researchers and practitioners in these domains. This book is open access under a CC BY license

High-Security, Clone-proof RFID with Secure Distance Bounding

Wireless near-field (NFC) and short-range RFID “security” devices are ubiquitous, commonly found in vehicle security (keyless-entry, remote-start), access control (employee key cards), travel cards, point-of-sale (PoS) transactions via NFC-enabled mobile phone or credit card, among others. Whenever assets of high-value are at stake, adversaries will stop at nothing to gain access to those assets, so it should be assumed that security systems will be subjected to many forms of attack. There have already been several highly publicized successful breaches of keyless entry systems, including relay and key-cloning attacks. This poster describes a a highly-secure, distance-bounding, clone-proof RFID mechanism for protecting high-value assets. The system employs a unique combination of technologies to make it highly-resistant to relay attacks, probing, modeling, cloning and snooping

On the Security of the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast Protocol

Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) is the communications protocol currently being rolled out as part of next generation air transportation systems. As the heart of modern air traffic control, it will play an essential role in the protection of two billion passengers per year, besides being crucial to many other interest groups in aviation. The inherent lack of security measures in the ADS-B protocol has long been a topic in both the aviation circles and in the academic community. Due to recently published proof-of-concept attacks, the topic is becoming ever more pressing, especially with the deadline for mandatory implementation in most airspaces fast approaching. This survey first summarizes the attacks and problems that have been reported in relation to ADS-B security. Thereafter, it surveys both the theoretical and practical efforts which have been previously conducted concerning these issues, including possible countermeasures. In addition, the survey seeks to go beyond the current state of the art and gives a detailed assessment of security measures which have been developed more generally for related wireless networks such as sensor networks and vehicular ad hoc networks, including a taxonomy of all considered approaches.Comment: Survey, 22 Pages, 21 Figure

Security of Ubiquitous Computing Systems

The chapters in this open access book arise out of the EU Cost Action project Cryptacus, the objective of which was to improve and adapt existent cryptanalysis methodologies and tools to the ubiquitous computing framework. The cryptanalysis implemented lies along four axes: cryptographic models, cryptanalysis of building blocks, hardware and software security engineering, and security assessment of real-world systems. The authors are top-class researchers in security and cryptography, and the contributions are of value to researchers and practitioners in these domains. This book is open access under a CC BY license

A context‐aware approach to defend against unauthorized reading and relay attacks in RFID systems

Radio frequency identification (RFID) systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in both public and private domains. However, because of the inherent weaknesses of underlying wireless radio communications, RFID systems are plagued with a wide variety of security and privacy threats. A large number of these threats arise because of the tag's promiscuous response to any reader requests. This renders sensitive tag information easily subject to unauthorized reading . Promiscuous tag response also incites different forms of relay attacks whereby a malicious colluding pair, relaying messages between a tag and a reader, can successfully impersonate the tag without actually possessing it. Because of the increasing ubiquity of RFID devices, there is a pressing need for the development of security primitives and protocols to defeat unauthorized reading and relay attacks. However, currently deployed or proposed solutions often fail to satisfy the constraints and requirements of the underlying RFID applications in terms of (one or more of) efficiency, security, and usability. This paper proposes a novel research direction, one that utilizes sensing technologies, to tackle the problems of unauthorized reading and relay attacks with a goal of reconciling the requirements of efficiency, security, and usability. The premise of the proposed work is based on a current technological advancement that enables many RFID tags with low‐cost sensing capabilities. The on‐board tag sensors will be used to acquire useful contextual information about the tag's environment (or its owner, or the tag itself). For defense against unauthorized reading and relay attacks, such context information can be leveraged in two ways. First, contextual information can be used to design context‐aware selective unlocking mechanisms so that tags can selectively respond to reader interrogations and thus minimize the likelihood of unauthorized reading and “ghost‐and‐leech” relay attacks. Second, contextual information can be used as a basis for context‐aware secure transaction verification to defend against special types of relay attacks involving malicious readers. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This paper proposes a novel research direction, one that utilizes sensing technologies to tackle the challenging problems of unauthorized reading and relay attacks in radio frequency identification systems. First, contextual information is used to design context‐aware selective unlocking mechanisms, so that tags can selectively respond to reader interrogations and, thus, minimize the likelihood of unauthorized reading and “ghost‐and‐leech” relay attacks. Second, contextual information is used as a basis for context‐aware secure transaction verification to defend against special types of relay attacks involving malicious readers.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109577/1/sec404.pd