Weaknesses of Password Authentication Scheme Based on Geometric Hashing

We show that a recently proposed password authentication scheme based on geometric hashing has several security weaknesses, and that the use of this scheme should be avoided in practice

Improved Internet Security Protocols Using Cryptographic One-Way Hash Chains

In this dissertation, new approaches that utilize the one-way cryptographic hash functions in designing improved network security protocols are investigated. The proposed approaches are designed to be scalable and easy to implement in modern technology. The first contribution explores session cookies with emphasis on the threat of session hijacking attacks resulting from session cookie theft or sniffing. In the proposed scheme, these cookies are replaced by easily computed authentication credentials using Lamport\u27s well-known one-time passwords. The basic idea in this scheme revolves around utilizing sparse caching units, where authentication credentials pertaining to cookies are stored and fetched once needed, thereby, mitigating computational overhead generally associated with one-way hash constructions. The second and third proposed schemes rely on dividing the one-way hash construction into a hierarchical two-tier construction. Each tier component is responsible for some aspect of authentication generated by using two different hash functions. By utilizing different cryptographic hash functions arranged in two tiers, the hierarchical two-tier protocol (our second contribution) gives significant performance improvement over previously proposed solutions for securing Internet cookies. Through indexing authentication credentials by their position within the hash chain in a multi-dimensional chain, the third contribution achieves improved performance. In the fourth proposed scheme, an attempt is made to apply the one-way hash construction to achieve user and broadcast authentication in wireless sensor networks. Due to known energy and memory constraints, the one-way hash scheme is modified to mitigate computational overhead so it can be easily applied in this particular setting. The fifth scheme tries to reap the benefits of the sparse cache-supported scheme and the hierarchical scheme. The resulting hybrid approach achieves efficient performance at the lowest cost of caching possible. In the sixth proposal, an authentication scheme tailored for the multi-server single sign-on (SSO) environment is presented. The scheme utilizes the one-way hash construction in a Merkle Hash Tree and a hash calendar to avoid impersonation and session hijacking attacks. The scheme also explores the optimal configuration of the one-way hash chain in this particular environment. All the proposed protocols are validated by extensive experimental analyses. These analyses are obtained by running simulations depicting the many scenarios envisioned. Additionally, these simulations are supported by relevant analytical models derived by mathematical formulas taking into consideration the environment under investigation

State of the Art in Biometric Key Binding and Key Generation Schemes

Direct storage of biometric templates in databases exposes the authentication system and legitimate users to numerous security and privacy challenges. Biometric cryptosystems or template protection schemes are used to overcome the security and privacy challenges associated with the use of biometrics as a means of authentication. This paper presents a review of previous works in biometric key binding and key generation schemes. The review focuses on key binding techniques such as biometric encryption, fuzzy commitment scheme, fuzzy vault and shielding function. Two categories of key generation schemes considered are private template and quantization schemes. The paper also discusses the modes of operations, strengths and weaknesses of various kinds of key-based template protection schemes. The goal is to provide the reader with a clear understanding of the current and emerging trends in key-based biometric cryptosystems

Printed document integrity verification using barcode

Printed documents are still relevant in our daily life and information in it must be protected from threats and attacks such as forgery, falsification or unauthorized modification. Such threats make the document lose its integrity and authenticity. There are several techniques that have been proposed and used to ensure authenticity and originality of printed documents. But some of the techniques are not suitable for public use due to its complexity, hard to obtain special materials to secure the document and expensive. This paper discuss several techniques for printed document security such as watermarking and barcode as well as the usability of two dimensional barcode in document authentication and data compression with the barcode. A conceptual solution that are simple and efficient to secure the integrity and document sender's authenticity is proposed that uses two dimensional barcode to carry integrity and authenticity information in the document. The information stored in the barcode contains digital signature that provides sender's authenticity and hash value that can ensure the integrity of the printed document

Platforms and Protocols for the Internet of Things

Building a general architecture for the Internet of Things (IoT) is a very complex task, exacerbated by the extremely large variety of devices, link layer technologies, and services that may be involved in such a system. In this paper, we identify the main blocks of a generic IoT architecture, describing their features and requirements, and analyze the most common approaches proposed in the literature for each block. In particular, we compare three of the most important communication technologies for IoT purposes, i.e., REST, MQTT, and AMQP, and we also analyze three IoT platforms: openHAB, Sentilo, and Parse. The analysis will prove the importance of adopting an integrated approach that jointly addresses several issues and is able to flexibly accommodate the requirements of the various elements of the system. We also discuss a use case which illustrates the design challenges and the choices to make when selecting which protocols and technologies to use

Fingerprint template protection schemes: A literature review

The fingerprint is the most widely used technology for identification or authentication systems, which can be known as fingerprint authentication systems (FAS).In addition to providing security, the fingerprint is also easy to use, very reliable and has a high accuracy for identity recognition. FAS is still exposed to security attacks because fingerprint information is unencrypted.Therefore, fingerprint information requires protection known as fingerprint template protection (FTP).This paper aims to provide an organized literature on FTP.Three research questions were formulated to guide the literature analysis.First, this analysis focuses on the types of FTP schemes; second, the metrics used for evaluating the FTP schemes; and finally, the common datasets used for evaluating the FTP schemes. The latest information and references are analysed and classified based on FTP methods and publication year to obtain information related to the development and application of FTP.This study mainly surveyed 62 documents reported on FTP schemes between the year 2000 and 2017.The results of this survey can be a source of reference for other researchers in finding literature relevant to the FTP

Privacy-aware Security Applications in the Era of Internet of Things

In this dissertation, we introduce several novel privacy-aware security applications. We split these contributions into three main categories: First, to strengthen the current authentication mechanisms, we designed two novel privacy-aware alternative complementary authentication mechanisms, Continuous Authentication (CA) and Multi-factor Authentication (MFA). Our first system is Wearable-assisted Continuous Authentication (WACA), where we used the sensor data collected from a wrist-worn device to authenticate users continuously. Then, we improved WACA by integrating a noise-tolerant template matching technique called NTT-Sec to make it privacy-aware as the collected data can be sensitive. We also designed a novel, lightweight, Privacy-aware Continuous Authentication (PACA) protocol. PACA is easily applicable to other biometric authentication mechanisms when feature vectors are represented as fixed-length real-valued vectors. In addition to CA, we also introduced a privacy-aware multi-factor authentication method, called PINTA. In PINTA, we used fuzzy hashing and homomorphic encryption mechanisms to protect the users\u27 sensitive profiles while providing privacy-preserving authentication. For the second privacy-aware contribution, we designed a multi-stage privacy attack to smart home users using the wireless network traffic generated during the communication of the devices. The attack works even on the encrypted data as it is only using the metadata of the network traffic. Moreover, we also designed a novel solution based on the generation of spoofed traffic. Finally, we introduced two privacy-aware secure data exchange mechanisms, which allow sharing the data between multiple parties (e.g., companies, hospitals) while preserving the privacy of the individual in the dataset. These mechanisms were realized with the combination of Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC) and Differential Privacy (DP) techniques. In addition, we designed a policy language, called Curie Policy Language (CPL), to handle the conflicting relationships among parties. The novel methods, attacks, and countermeasures in this dissertation were verified with theoretical analysis and extensive experiments with real devices and users. We believe that the research in this dissertation has far-reaching implications on privacy-aware alternative complementary authentication methods, smart home user privacy research, as well as the privacy-aware and secure data exchange methods

A New Approach To Public-Key Cryptosystem Based On Mandelbrot And Julia Fractal Sets.

Kajian ini mencadangkan primitif baru kekunci-awam berasaskan kepada set Fraktal Mandelbrot dan Julia. Penciptaan kekunci-awam primitif berasas Fraktal boleh dilakukan kerana perkaitan yang kuat di antara set Fraktal Mandelbrot dan set Fraktal Julia. This study proposes new public-key primitives based on Mandelbrot and Julia Fractal sets. The creation of the Fractal based public-key primitives is possible because of the strong connection between the Mandelbrot and Julia Fractal sets