Secure Mutual Self-Authenticable Mechanism for Wearable Devices

YesDue to the limited communication range of wearable devices, there is the need for wearable devices to communicate amongst themselves, supporting devices and the internet or to the internet. Most wearable devices are not internet enabled and most often need an internet enabled broker device or intermediate device in order to reach the internet. For a secure end to end communication between these devices security measures like authentication must be put in place in other to prevent unauthorised access to information given the sensitivity of the information collected and transmitted. Therefore, there are other existing authentication solutions for wearable devices but these solutions actively involve from time to time the user of the device which is prone to a lot of challenges. As a solution to these challenges, this paper proposes a secure point-to-point Self-authentication mechanism that involves device to device interaction. This work exploits existing standards and framework like NFC, PPP, EAP etc. in other to achieve a device compatible secure authentication protocol amongst wearable device and supporting devices.

Multiprotocol Authentication Device for HPC and Cloud Environments Based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Multifactor authentication is a relevant tool in securing IT infrastructures combining two or more credentials. We can find smartcards and hardware tokens to leverage the authentication process, but they have some limitations. Users connect these devices in the client node to log in or request access to services. Alternatively, if an application wants to use these resources, the code has to be amended with bespoke solutions to provide access. Thanks to advances in system-on-chip devices, we can integrate cryptographically robust, low-cost solutions. In this work, we present an autonomous device that allows multifactor authentication in client–server systems in a transparent way, which facilitates its integration in High-Performance Computing (HPC) and cloud systems, through a generic gateway. The proposed electronic token (eToken), based on the system-on-chip ESP32, provides an extra layer of security based on elliptic curve cryptography. Secure communications between elements use Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) to facilitate their interconnection. We have evaluated different types of possible attacks and the impact on communications. The proposed system offers an efficient solution to increase security in access to services and systems.Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MICINN) PGC2018-096663-B-C44European Union (EU

A Method for Authentication Services in Wireless Networks

With the widespread use of wireless network services and applications, security is a major concern. From wireless network security aspects, authentication for services is very important especially in Internet banking. In this paper, an authentication method for wireless networks using dynamic key theory is presented. The dynamic key theory is used to produce “one time keys” for authentication. These one time keys will improve the efficiency and security of wireless authentication. It can be applied for Internet banking and services in wireless networks

Towards mobile cloud computing with single sign-on access

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Journal of Grid Computing. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10723-017-9413-3The low computing power of mobile devices impedes the development of mobile applications with a heavy computing load. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) has emerged as the solution to this by connecting mobile devices with the “infinite” computing power of the Cloud. As mobile devices typically communicate over untrusted networks, it becomes necessary to secure the communications to avoid privacy-sensitive data breaches. This paper presents work on implementing MCC applications with secure communications. For that purpose, we built on COMPSs-Mobile, a redesigned implementation of the COMP Superscalar (COMPSs) framework aiming to MCC platorms. COMPSs-Mobile automatically exploits the parallelism inherent in an application and orchestrates its execution on loosely-coupled distributed environment. To avoid a vendor lock-in, this extension leverages on the Generic Security Services Application Program Interface (GSSAPI) (RFC2743) as a generic way to access security services to provide communications with authentication, secrecy and integrity. Besides, GSSAPI allows applications to take profit of more advanced features, such as Federated Identity or Single Sign-On, which the underlying security framework could provide. To validate the practicality of the proposal, we use Kerberos as the security services provider to implement SSO; however, applications do not authenticate themselves and require users to obtain and place the credentials beforehand. To evaluate the performance, we conducted some tests running an application on a smartphone offloading tasks to a private cloud. Our results show that the overhead of securing the communications is acceptable.This work has been supported by the Spanish Government (contracts TIN2012-34557, TIN2015-65316-P and grants BES-2013-067167, EEBB-I-15-09808 of the Research Training Program and SEV-2011-00067 of Severo Ochoa Program), by Generalitat de Catalunya (contract 2014-SGR-1051) and by the European Commission (ASCETiC project, FP7-ICT-2013.1.2 contract 610874). The second author was partially supported by the European Commission's Horizon2020 programme under grant agreement 653965 (AARC).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

{SoK}: {An} Analysis of Protocol Design: Avoiding Traps for Implementation and Deployment

Today's Internet utilizes a multitude of different protocols. While some of these protocols were first implemented and used and later documented, other were first specified and then implemented. Regardless of how protocols came to be, their definitions can contain traps that lead to insecure implementations or deployments. A classical example is insufficiently strict authentication requirements in a protocol specification. The resulting Misconfigurations, i.e., not enabling strong authentication, are common root causes for Internet security incidents. Indeed, Internet protocols have been commonly designed without security in mind which leads to a multitude of misconfiguration traps. While this is slowly changing, to strict security considerations can have a similarly bad effect. Due to complex implementations and insufficient documentation, security features may remain unused, leaving deployments vulnerable. In this paper we provide a systematization of the security traps found in common Internet protocols. By separating protocols in four classes we identify major factors that lead to common security traps. These insights together with observations about end-user centric usability and security by default are then used to derive recommendations for improving existing and designing new protocols---without such security sensitive traps for operators, implementors and users