On the security of an anonymous roaming protocol in UMTS mobile networks

In this communication, we first show that the privacy-preserving roaming protocol recently proposed for mobile networks cannot achieve the claimed security level. Then we suggest an improved protocol to remedy its security problems

Secure and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Protocols for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation wireless networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to service providers. As WMNs become an increasingly popular replacement technology for last-mile connectivity to the home networking, community and neighborhood networking, it is imperative to design efficient and secure communication protocols for these networks. However, several vulnerabilities exist in currently existing protocols for WMNs. These security loopholes can be exploited by potential attackers to launch attack on WMNs. The absence of a central point of administration makes securing WMNs even more challenging. The broadcast nature of transmission and the dependency on the intermediate nodes for multi-hop communications lead to several security vulnerabilities in WMNs. The attacks can be external as well as internal in nature. External attacks are launched by intruders who are not authorized users of the network. For example, an intruding node may eavesdrop on the packets and replay those packets at a later point of time to gain access to the network resources. On the other hand, the internal attacks are launched by the nodes that are part of the WMN. On example of such attack is an intermediate node dropping packets which it was supposed to forward. This chapter presents a comprehensive discussion on the current authentication and privacy protection schemes for WMN. In addition, it proposes a novel security protocol for node authentication and message confidentiality and an anonymization scheme for privacy protection of users in WMNs.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figures. The work is an extended version of the author's previous works submitted in CoRR: arXiv:1107.5538v1 and arXiv:1102.1226v

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

An enhanced secure delegation-based anonymous authentication protocol for PCSs

Rapid development of wireless networks brings about many security problems in portable communication systems (PCSs), which can provide mobile users with an opportunity to enjoy global roaming services. In this regard, designing a secure user authentication scheme, especially for recognizing legal roaming users, is indeed a challenging task. It is noticed that there is no delegation-based protocol for PCSs, which can guarantee anonymity, untraceability, perfect forward secrecy, and resistance of denial-of-service (DoS) attack. Therefore, in this article, we put forward a novel delegation-based anonymous and untraceable authentication protocol, which can guarantee to resolve all the abovementioned security issues and hence offer a solution for secure communications for PCSs

LAAP: Lightweight anonymous authentication protocol for D2D-Aided fog computing paradigm

Fog computing is a new paradigm that extends cloud computing and services to the edge of the network. Although it has several distinct characteristics, however, the conventional fog computing model does not support some of the imperative features such as D2D communications, which can be useful for several critical IoT applications and services. Besides, fog computing faces numerous new security and privacy challenges apart from those inherited from cloud computing, however, security issues in fog computing have not been addressed properly. In this article, first we introduce a new privacy-preserving security architecture for fog computing model with the cooperative D2D communication support, which can be useful for various IoT applications. Subsequently, based on the underlying foundation of our proposed security architecture we design three lightweight anonymous authentication protocols (LAAPs) to support three distinct circumstances in D2D-Aided fog computing. In this regard, we utilize the lightweight cryptographic primitives like one-way function and EXCLUSIVE-OR operations, which will cause limited computational overhead for the resource limited edge devices

Privacy Preserving Cryptographic Protocols for Secure Heterogeneous Networks

Disertační práce se zabývá kryptografickými protokoly poskytující ochranu soukromí, které jsou určeny pro zabezpečení komunikačních a informačních systémů tvořících heterogenní sítě. Práce se zaměřuje především na možnosti využití nekonvenčních kryptografických prostředků, které poskytují rozšířené bezpečnostní požadavky, jako je například ochrana soukromí uživatelů komunikačního systému. V práci je stanovena výpočetní náročnost kryptografických a matematických primitiv na různých zařízeních, které se podílí na zabezpečení heterogenní sítě. Hlavní cíle práce se zaměřují na návrh pokročilých kryptografických protokolů poskytujících ochranu soukromí. V práci jsou navrženy celkově tři protokoly, které využívají skupinových podpisů založených na bilineárním párování pro zajištění ochrany soukromí uživatelů. Tyto navržené protokoly zajišťují ochranu soukromí a nepopiratelnost po celou dobu datové komunikace spolu s autentizací a integritou přenášených zpráv. Pro navýšení výkonnosti navržených protokolů je využito optimalizačních technik, např. dávkového ověřování, tak aby protokoly byly praktické i pro heterogenní sítě.The dissertation thesis deals with privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols for secure communication and information systems forming heterogeneous networks. The thesis focuses on the possibilities of using non-conventional cryptographic primitives that provide enhanced security features, such as the protection of user privacy in communication systems. In the dissertation, the performance of cryptographic and mathematic primitives on various devices that participate in the security of heterogeneous networks is evaluated. The main objectives of the thesis focus on the design of advanced privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols. There are three designed protocols which use pairing-based group signatures to ensure user privacy. These proposals ensure the protection of user privacy together with the authentication, integrity and non-repudiation of transmitted messages during communication. The protocols employ the optimization techniques such as batch verification to increase their performance and become more practical in heterogeneous networks.

LCDMA: Lightweight Cross-domain Mutual Identity Authentication scheme for Internet of Things

With the widespread popularity of mobile terminals in the Internet of things (IoT), the demand for cross-domain access of mobile terminals between different regions has also increased significantly. The nature of wireless communication media makes mobile terminals vulnerable to security threats in cross-domain access. Identity authentication is a prerequisite for secure data transmission in cross-domain, and it is also the first step to guarantee the credibility of data sources. Most existing authentication schemes are based on bilinear pairing or public key encryption and decryption with high computation overhead, which are not suitable for the resource-limited mobile IoT terminals. Moreover, these schemes have some security drawbacks and cannot meet the security requirements of cross-domain access. In this paper, we propose a lightweight cross-domain mutual identity authentication (LCDMA) for mobile IoT environments. LCDMA uses symmetric polynomials instead of high-complexity bilinear pairing in the traditional schemes. We theoretically analyze the security performance under the random oracle model. Our results show that LCDMA not only resists common attacks but also preserves secure traceability while guaranteeing anonymity. Performance evaluation further demonstrates that our scheme has better performance in terms of computation and communication overhead, compared with other existing representative schemes

Authentication Protocols for Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey

In this paper, a comprehensive survey of authentication protocols for Internet of Things (IoT) is presented. Specifically more than forty authentication protocols developed for or applied in the context of the IoT are selected and examined in detail. These protocols are categorized based on the target environment: (1) Machine to Machine Communications (M2M), (2) Internet of Vehicles (IoV), (3) Internet of Energy (IoE), and (4) Internet of Sensors (IoS). Threat models, countermeasures, and formal security verification techniques used in authentication protocols for the IoT are presented. In addition a taxonomy and comparison of authentication protocols that are developed for the IoT in terms of network model, specific security goals, main processes, computation complexity, and communication overhead are provided. Based on the current survey, open issues are identified and future research directions are proposed

SECURITY AND PRIVACY ISSUES IN MOBILE NETWORKS, DIFFICULTIES AND SOLUTIONS

Mobile communication is playing a vital role in the daily life for the last two decades; in turn its fields gained the research attention, which led to the introduction of new technologies, services and applications. These new added facilities aimed to ease the connectivity and reachability; on the other hand, many security and privacy concerns were not taken into consideration. This opened the door for the malicious activities to threaten the deployed systems and caused vulnerabilities for users, translated in the loss of valuable data and major privacy invasions. Recently, many attempts have been carried out to handle these concerns, such as improving systems’ security and implementing different privacy enhancing mechanisms. This research addresses these problems and provides a mean to preserve privacy in particular. In this research, a detailed description and analysis of the current security and privacy situation in the deployed systems is given. As a result, the existing shortages within these systems are pointed out, to be mitigated in development. Finally a privacy preserving prototype model is proposed. This research has been conducted as an extensive literature review about the most relevant references and researches in the field, using the descriptive and evaluative research methodologies. The main security models, parameters, modules and protocols are presented, also a detailed description of privacy and its related arguments, dimensions and factors is given. The findings include that mobile networks’ security along with users are vulnerable due to the weaknesses of the key exchange procedures, the difficulties that face possession, repudiation, standardization, compatibility drawbacks and lack of configurability. It also includes the need to implement new mechanisms to protect security and preserve privacy, which include public key cryptography, HIP servers, IPSec, TLS, NAT and DTLS-SRTP. Last but not least, it shows that privacy is not absolute and it has many conflicts, also privacy requires sophisticated systems, which increase the load and cost of the system.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format