A two‐step authentication framework for Mobile ad hoc networks

The lack of fixed infrastructure in ad hoc networks causes nodes to rely more heavily on peer nodes for communication. Nevertheless, establishing trust in such a distributed environment is very difficult, since it is not straightforward for a node to determine if its peer nodes can be trusted. An additional concern in such an environment is with whether a peer node is merely relaying a message or if it is the originator of the message. In this paper, we propose an authentication approach for protecting nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. The security requirements for protecting data link and network layers are identified and the design criteria for creating secure ad hoc networks using several authentication protocols are analyzed. Protocols based on zero knowledge and challenge response techniques are presented and their performance is evaluated through analysis and simulation

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

Attacks on quantum key distribution protocols that employ non-ITS authentication

We demonstrate how adversaries with unbounded computing resources can break Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocols which employ a particular message authentication code suggested previously. This authentication code, featuring low key consumption, is not Information-Theoretically Secure (ITS) since for each message the eavesdropper has intercepted she is able to send a different message from a set of messages that she can calculate by finding collisions of a cryptographic hash function. However, when this authentication code was introduced it was shown to prevent straightforward Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks against QKD protocols. In this paper, we prove that the set of messages that collide with any given message under this authentication code contains with high probability a message that has small Hamming distance to any other given message. Based on this fact we present extended MITM attacks against different versions of BB84 QKD protocols using the addressed authentication code; for three protocols we describe every single action taken by the adversary. For all protocols the adversary can obtain complete knowledge of the key, and for most protocols her success probability in doing so approaches unity. Since the attacks work against all authentication methods which allow to calculate colliding messages, the underlying building blocks of the presented attacks expose the potential pitfalls arising as a consequence of non-ITS authentication in QKD-postprocessing. We propose countermeasures, increasing the eavesdroppers demand for computational power, and also prove necessary and sufficient conditions for upgrading the discussed authentication code to the ITS level.Comment: 34 page

Using quantum key distribution for cryptographic purposes: a survey

The appealing feature of quantum key distribution (QKD), from a cryptographic viewpoint, is the ability to prove the information-theoretic security (ITS) of the established keys. As a key establishment primitive, QKD however does not provide a standalone security service in its own: the secret keys established by QKD are in general then used by a subsequent cryptographic applications for which the requirements, the context of use and the security properties can vary. It is therefore important, in the perspective of integrating QKD in security infrastructures, to analyze how QKD can be combined with other cryptographic primitives. The purpose of this survey article, which is mostly centered on European research results, is to contribute to such an analysis. We first review and compare the properties of the existing key establishment techniques, QKD being one of them. We then study more specifically two generic scenarios related to the practical use of QKD in cryptographic infrastructures: 1) using QKD as a key renewal technique for a symmetric cipher over a point-to-point link; 2) using QKD in a network containing many users with the objective of offering any-to-any key establishment service. We discuss the constraints as well as the potential interest of using QKD in these contexts. We finally give an overview of challenges relative to the development of QKD technology that also constitute potential avenues for cryptographic research.Comment: Revised version of the SECOQC White Paper. Published in the special issue on QKD of TCS, Theoretical Computer Science (2014), pp. 62-8