Serverless protocols for inventory and tracking with a UAV

It is widely acknowledged that the proliferation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) may lead to serious concerns regarding avionics safety, particularly when end-users are not adhering to air safety regulations. There are, however, domains in which UAVs may help to increase the safety of airplanes and the management of flights and airport resources that often require substantial human resources. For instance, Paris Charles de Gaulle airport (CDG) has more than 7,000 staff and supports 30,000 direct jobs for more than 60 million passengers per year (as of 2016). Indeed, these new systems can be used beneficially for several purposes, even in sensitive areas like airports. Among the considered applications are those that suggest using UAVs to enhance safety of on-ground airplanes; for instance, by collecting (once the aircraft has landed) data recorded by different systems during the flight (like the sensors of the Aircraft Data Networks - ADN) or by examining the state of airplane structure. In this paper, our proposal is to use UAVs, under the control of the airport authorities, to inventory and track various tagged assets, such as luggage, supplies required for the flights, and maintenance tools. The aim of our proposal is to make airport management systems more efficient for operations requiring inventory and tracking, along with increasing safety (sensitive assets such as refueling tanks, or sensitive pieces of luggage can be tracked), thus raising financial profit.Comment: 11 pages, Conference, The 36th IEEE/AIAA Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC'17

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

Analysis on the Performance of Server-less RFID Searching Protocol

Radio frequency identification (RFID) has spread into many fields. Its security and privacy has received more and more attention. Based on traditional authentication protocols, some other branches related to practical applications have been introduced including server-less authentication and searching protocols. The server-less searching protocol is extended from server-less authentication protocol and both of them are executedwithout the support from the backend servers. Through analyzing some proposed protocols, we found that the probabilistic tracking attack is one of the major threats on the serverless RFID security protocols. The probability of being tracked and the cost on computation are related with the probability of the undesired tag’s response. Based on the analysis, a practical conclusion is given which can be used in most of the server-less RFID systems

Les protocoles de sécurité serverless légers pour l’internet des objets

This thesis addresses the security and privacy challenges relevant to the resource constrained devices in the era of pervasive computing. Pervasive computing, a term coined by Schechter to describe the idea of computing services available anytime, anywhere and on demand, is characterized by seamless interactions between heterogeneous players in the Internet. This phenomenon allows intelligent chips, sensors or microcontrollers to be embedded into everyday objects to enable them generate, communicate and share information. Pervasive computing accelerates technological evolution by integrating small and resource constrained devices to the Internet arena, eventually opening doors to new services requiring seamless interactions and integrations with the existing technologies, infrastructures and services. The nature of the information generated, stored and shared by resource constrained devices may require proper security and privacy guarantees. Towards that end, the classical security solutions are not ideal candidates to solve the security and privacy challenges in pervasive systems for two reasons. First, classical security protocols require a lot of resources from the host devices while most of the pervasive devices have very strict resource constraints. Second, most classical security solutions work in a connected mode, which requires constant communication between devices and centralized servers for authentication and authorization purposes. However, pervasive devices may be working in isolated areas with intermittent network coverage and connectivity. Thus, it is ideal to come up with alternative solutions suitable for heterogeneous pervasive devices to smoothly interact, authenticate and securely share information. One of the suitable alternative solutions is the serverless protocols. The term “serverless protocol” refers to the mechanism of enabling centrally controlled devices to autonomously authenticate one another, or other heterogeneous devices, without an active participation of the centralized authentication or authorization servers. Serverless protocols prioritize on securing proximity communication between heterogeneous devices while optimizing on the little resources available. In this thesis, we tackle the challenges of pervasive systems by proposing lightweight and efficient serverless protocols for authenticating heterogeneous pervasive devices during proximity communication. Our proposed protocols derive their originality from the fact that they do not require the communicating parties to have prior relationships with each other, nor to have any previously shared authentication information with each other. Moreover, our proposed solutions incorporate context information to enforce automatic parameter expiry. This property is not supported by most of the earlier versions of the serverless protocol schemes, hence making them vulnerable to different attacks. Three novel contributions are proposed in this thesis. First, we propose a serverless lightweight mutual authentication protocol for heterogeneous devices. The first contribution includes a formal validation using the AVISPA tool. Second, we propose two complementing protocols using RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) as a core technology. The first protocol performs mass authentication between an RFID reader and a group of tags and the second protocol performs a secure search for a target tag among a group of tags. The second contribution includes two formal validations; one is done using the AVISPA tool and the other is done using the CryptoVerif tool. After a thorough study of serverless protocols, we propose our third contribution, a concise guide on how to develop secure and efficient serverless protocols relevant to the pervasive systemsLes avancées technologiques permettent d'intégrer des capteurs et des modules de communication dans les objets du quotidien pour les rendre intelligents et faciliter leur intégration sur l'Internet. L'Internet du futur sera sans nul doute celui des objets connectés. Les objets connectés génèrent, collectent, stockent et partagent des informations entre eux et aussi avec les serveurs d'authentification centralisés. La plupart des informations collectées doivent être protégées pendant le stockage et le transfert. Par le passé, divers protocoles assurant une sécurité robuste basés sur la cryptographie asymétrique et d’autres sur la cryptographie symétrique ont été proposés dans la littérature. Du fait que les objets connectés possèdent de faibles capacités de calcul, de mémoire et d'énergie, et que l'accès au medium radio est très consommateur en ressources, les protocoles cryptographiques traditionnels ne sont pas adaptés aux objets connectés. Il y a lieu donc d'adapter ou de concevoir des protocoles propres et conformes à leurs exigences. Dans cette thèse, nous abordons les défis de sécurité et de vie privée pertinents aux systèmes pervasifs avec des contraintes de ressources strictes. Nous regardons les protocoles d'authentification serverless, qui sont des mécanismes d'authentification qui ne nécessitent pas la présence du serveur central au cours de la phase d'authentification entre deux objets connectés. Tout d'abord, nous fournissons les caractéristiques et les besoins pour les protocoles serverless. Grâce à ces besoins et caractéristiques, nous avons fait des recherches, des analyses complètes et des comparaisons des protocoles serverless existants en termes de sécurité, de vie privée et de performances. Nous examinons leurs capacités à résister à diverses attaques et leurs aptitudes à minimiser l’usage des ressources. Après quoi, notre objectif est de proposer des protocoles de sécurité serverless permettant aux objets de s’authentifier tout en garantissant efficacité, passage à l’échelle et efficacité énergétique, l'énergie étant une ressource très critique qui a une influence directe sur la durée de vie d’un objet connecté. Trois nouvelles contributions sont proposées dans cette thèse. Notre première contribution est un protocole léger serverless d'authentification mutuelle pour les objets connectés hétérogènes. La première contribution fournit trois avantages par rapport aux protocoles existants. Cette contribution répond aux exigences des systèmes pervasifs. La validation de notre proposition a été faite en utilisant l'outil AVISPA et la validation informelle en utilisant sécurité et de vie privée des jeux. Notre deuxième contribution comprend deux protocoles complémentaires dans le domaine des technologies RFID. Le premier protocole vise à l'authentification de masse entre un lecteur RFID et un groupe d'étiquettes tandis que le deuxième protocole effectue une recherche sécurisée pour une étiquette cible parmi un groupe d'étiquettes dans le voisinage du lecteur. Les deux protocoles proposés tiennent compte des contraintes de ressources des étiquettes RFID. Après une étude approfondie des protocoles serverless, nous avons proposé une troisième contribution, un guide pour la conception des protocoles serverless sécurisé et efficaces pour les systèmes pervasifs. Le guide contient six principes et six meilleures pratiques en vue d'élaborer des protocoles serverless. Le guide est destiné à aider à la conception de protocoles serverless efficaces, sécurisés et simples en évitant des erreurs couramment faites dans les protocoles existant

Protecting Privacy and Ensuring Security of RFID Systems Using Private Authentication Protocols

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) systems have been studied as an emerging technology for automatic identification of objects and assets in various applications ranging from inventory tracking to point of sale applications and from healthcare applications to e-passport. The expansion of RFID technology, however, gives rise to severe security and privacy concerns. To ensure the widespread deployment of this technology, the security and privacy threats must be addressed. However, providing solutions to the security and privacy threats has been a challenge due to extremely inadequate resources of typical RFID tags. Authentication protocols can be a possible solution to secure RFID communications. In this thesis, we consider RFID authentication protocols based on symmetric key cryptography. We identify the security and privacy requirements for an RFID system. We present four protocols in this thesis. First, we propose a lightweight authentication protocol for typical tags that can perform symmetric key operations. This protocol makes use of pseudo random number generators (PRNG) and one way hash functions to ensure the security and privacy requirements of RFID systems. Second, we define the desynchronizing attack and describe the vulnerabilities of this attack in RFID systems. We propose a robust authentication protocol that can prevent the desynchronizing attack. This protocol can recover the disabled tags that are desynchronized with the reader because of this attack. Third, we introduce a novel authentication protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) to avoid the counterfeiting problem of RFID systems. This protocol is appropriate for the RFID tags that can perform the operations of ECC. Finally, to address the tradeoff between scalability and privacy of RFID systems, we propose an efficient anonymous authentication protocol. We characterize the privacy of RFID systems and prove that our protocol preserves the privacy of RFID tags and achieves better scalability as well

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

AnonPri: A Secure Anonymous Private Authentication Protocol for RFID Systems

Privacy preservation in RFID systems is a very important issue in modern day world. Privacy activists have been worried about the invasion of user privacy while using various RFID systems and services. Hence, significant efforts have been made to design RFID systems that preserve users\u27 privacy. Majority of the privacy preserving protocols for RFID systems require the reader to search all tags in the system in order to identify a single RFID tag which not efficient for large scale systems. In order to achieve high-speed authentication in large-scale RFID systems, researchers propose tree-based approaches, in which any pair of tags share a number of key components. Another technique is to perform group-based authentication that improves the tradeoff between scalability and privacy by dividing the tags into a number of groups. This novel authentication scheme ensures privacy of the tags. However, the level of privacy provided by the scheme decreases as more and more tags are compromised. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a group based anonymous private authentication protocol (AnonPri) that provides higher level of privacy than the above mentioned group based scheme and achieves better efficiency (in terms of providing privacy) than the approaches that prompt the reader to perform an exhaustive search. Our protocol guarantees that the adversary cannot link the tag responses even if she can learn the identifier of the tags. Our evaluation results demonstrates that the level of privacy provided by AnonPri is higher than that of the group based authentication technique

AnonPri: A Secure Anonymous Private Authentication Protocol for RFID Systems

Privacy preservation in RFID systems is a very important issue in modern day world. Privacy activists have been worried about the invasion of user privacy while using various RFID systems and services. Hence, significant efforts have been made to design RFID systems that preserve users\u27 privacy. Majority of the privacy preserving protocols for RFID systems require the reader to search all tags in the system in order to identify a single RFID tag which not efficient for large scale systems. In order to achieve high-speed authentication in large-scale RFID systems, researchers propose tree-based approaches, in which any pair of tags share a number of key components. Another technique is to perform group-based authentication that improves the tradeoff between scalability and privacy by dividing the tags into a number of groups. This novel authentication scheme ensures privacy of the tags. However, the level of privacy provided by the scheme decreases as more and more tags are compromised. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a group based anonymous private authentication protocol (AnonPri) that provides higher level of privacy than the above mentioned group based scheme and achieves better efficiency (in terms of providing privacy) than the approaches that prompt the reader to perform an exhaustive search. Our protocol guarantees that the adversary cannot link the tag responses even if she can learn the identifier of the tags. Our evaluation results demonstrates that the level of privacy provided by AnonPri is higher than that of the group based authentication technique