20,858 research outputs found
H2B: Heartbeat-based Secret Key Generation Using Piezo Vibration Sensors
We present Heartbeats-2-Bits (H2B), which is a system for securely pairing
wearable devices by generating a shared secret key from the skin vibrations
caused by heartbeat. This work is motivated by potential power saving
opportunity arising from the fact that heartbeat intervals can be detected
energy-efficiently using inexpensive and power-efficient piezo sensors, which
obviates the need to employ complex heartbeat monitors such as
Electrocardiogram or Photoplethysmogram. Indeed, our experiments show that
piezo sensors can measure heartbeat intervals on many different body locations
including chest, wrist, waist, neck and ankle. Unfortunately, we also discover
that the heartbeat interval signal captured by piezo vibration sensors has low
Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) because they are not designed as precision
heartbeat monitors, which becomes the key challenge for H2B. To overcome this
problem, we first apply a quantile function-based quantization method to fully
extract the useful entropy from the noisy piezo measurements. We then propose a
novel Compressive Sensing-based reconciliation method to correct the high bit
mismatch rates between the two independently generated keys caused by low SNR.
We prototype H2B using off-the-shelf piezo sensors and evaluate its performance
on a dataset collected from different body positions of 23 participants. Our
results show that H2B has an overwhelming pairing success rate of 95.6%. We
also analyze and demonstrate H2B's robustness against three types of attacks.
Finally, our power measurements show that H2B is very power-efficient
Securing Cyber-Physical Social Interactions on Wrist-worn Devices
Since ancient Greece, handshaking has been commonly practiced between two people as a friendly gesture to express trust and respect, or form a mutual agreement. In this article, we show that such physical contact can be used to bootstrap secure cyber contact between the smart devices worn by users. The key observation is that during handshaking, although belonged to two different users, the two hands involved in the shaking events are often rigidly connected, and therefore exhibit very similar motion patterns. We propose a novel key generation system, which harvests motion data during user handshaking from the wrist-worn smart devices such as smartwatches or fitness bands, and exploits the matching motion patterns to generate symmetric keys on both parties. The generated keys can be then used to establish a secure communication channel for exchanging data between devices. This provides a much more natural and user-friendly alternative for many applications, e.g., exchanging/sharing contact details, friending on social networks, or even making payments, since it doesn’t involve extra bespoke hardware, nor require the users to perform pre-defined gestures. We implement the proposed key generation system on off-the-shelf smartwatches, and extensive evaluation shows that it can reliably generate 128-bit symmetric keys just after around 1s of handshaking (with success rate >99%), and is resilient to different types of attacks including impersonate mimicking attacks, impersonate passive attacks, or eavesdropping attacks. Specifically, for real-time impersonate mimicking attacks, in our experiments, the Equal Error Rate (EER) is only 1.6% on average. We also show that the proposed key generation system can be extremely lightweight and is able to run in-situ on the resource-constrained smartwatches without incurring excessive resource consumption
A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends
This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the
inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense
mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the
security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity,
confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive
overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in
view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats
are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing
security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless
network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term
evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in
physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open
communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer.
We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their
counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive
jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the
integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and
cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some
technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are
summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201
BAN-GZKP: Optimal Zero Knowledge Proof based Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks
BANZKP is the best to date Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) based secure
lightweight and energy efficient authentication scheme designed for Wireless
Area Network (WBAN). It is vulnerable to several security attacks such as the
replay attack, Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks at sink and
redundancy information crack. However, BANZKP needs an end-to-end
authentication which is not compliant with the human body postural mobility. We
propose a new scheme BAN-GZKP. Our scheme improves both the security and
postural mobility resilience of BANZKP. Moreover, BAN-GZKP uses only a
three-phase authentication which is optimal in the class of ZKP protocols. To
fix the security vulnerabilities of BANZKP, BAN-GZKP uses a novel random key
allocation and a Hop-by-Hop authentication definition. We further prove the
reliability of our scheme to various attacks including those to which BANZKP is
vulnerable. Furthermore, via extensive simulations we prove that our scheme,
BAN-GZKP, outperforms BANZKP in terms of reliability to human body postural
mobility for various network parameters (end-to-end delay, number of packets
exchanged in the network, number of transmissions). We compared both schemes
using representative convergecast strategies with various transmission rates
and human postural mobility. Finally, it is important to mention that BAN-GZKP
has no additional cost compared to BANZKP in terms memory, computational
complexity or energy consumption
REISCH: incorporating lightweight and reliable algorithms into healthcare applications of WSNs
Healthcare institutions require advanced technology to collect patients' data accurately and continuously. The tradition technologies still suffer from two problems: performance and security efficiency. The existing research has serious drawbacks when using public-key mechanisms such as digital signature algorithms. In this paper, we propose Reliable and Efficient Integrity Scheme for Data Collection in HWSN (REISCH) to alleviate these problems by using secure and lightweight signature algorithms. The results of the performance analysis indicate that our scheme provides high efficiency in data integration between sensors and server (saves more than 24% of alive sensors compared to traditional algorithms). Additionally, we use Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) to validate the security procedures in our scheme. Security analysis results confirm that REISCH is safe against some well-known attacks
An Authentication Protocol for Future Sensor Networks
Authentication is one of the essential security services in Wireless Sensor
Networks (WSNs) for ensuring secure data sessions. Sensor node authentication
ensures the confidentiality and validity of data collected by the sensor node,
whereas user authentication guarantees that only legitimate users can access
the sensor data. In a mobile WSN, sensor and user nodes move across the network
and exchange data with multiple nodes, thus experiencing the authentication
process multiple times. The integration of WSNs with Internet of Things (IoT)
brings forth a new kind of WSN architecture along with stricter security
requirements; for instance, a sensor node or a user node may need to establish
multiple concurrent secure data sessions. With concurrent data sessions, the
frequency of the re-authentication process increases in proportion to the
number of concurrent connections, which makes the security issue even more
challenging. The currently available authentication protocols were designed for
the autonomous WSN and do not account for the above requirements. In this
paper, we present a novel, lightweight and efficient key exchange and
authentication protocol suite called the Secure Mobile Sensor Network (SMSN)
Authentication Protocol. In the SMSN a mobile node goes through an initial
authentication procedure and receives a re-authentication ticket from the base
station. Later a mobile node can use this re-authentication ticket when
establishing multiple data exchange sessions and/or when moving across the
network. This scheme reduces the communication and computational complexity of
the authentication process. We proved the strength of our protocol with
rigorous security analysis and simulated the SMSN and previously proposed
schemes in an automated protocol verifier tool. Finally, we compared the
computational complexity and communication cost against well-known
authentication protocols.Comment: This article is accepted for the publication in "Sensors" journal. 29
pages, 15 figure
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