As a variant of the HB authentication protocol for RFID systems, which relies on the complexity of decoding linear codes against passive attacks, Madhavan et al. presented Non-Linear HB(NLHB) protocol. In contrast to HB, NLHB relies on the complexity of decoding a class of non-linear codes to render the passive attacks proposed against HB ineffective. In this paper, we show that passive attacks against HB protocol can still be applicable to NLHB and this protocol does not provide the desired security margin. In our attack, we first linearize the non-linear part of NLHB to obtain a HB equivalent for NLHB, and then exploit the passive attack techniques proposed for the HB to evaluate the security margin of NLHB. The results show that although NLHB's security margin is relatively higher than HB against similar passive attack techniques, it has been overestimated and, in contrary to what is claimed, NLHB is vulnerable to passive attacks against HB, especially when the noise vector in the protocol has a low weight.
In this paper, we propose a light-weight provably-secure authentication protocol called the NLHB protocol, which is a variant of the HB protocol. The HB protocol uses the complexity of decoding linear codes for security against passive attacks. In contrast, security for the NLHB protocol is proved by reducing passive attacks to the problem of decoding a class of non-linear codes that are provably hard. We demonstrate that the existing passive attacks on the HB protocol family, which have contributed to considerable reduction in its effective key-size, are ineffective against the NLHB protocol.…
Recently, Alomair et al. proposed the first UnConditionally Secure mutual authentication protocol for low-cost RFID systems(UCS-RFID). The security of the UCS-RFID relies on five dynamic secret keys which are updated at every protocol run using a fresh random number (nonce) secretly transmitted from a reader to tags. Our results show that, at the highest security level of the protocol (security parameter= 256), inferring a nonce is feasible with the probability of 0.99 by eavesdropping(observing) about 90 runs of the protocol. Finding a nonce enable a passive attacker to recover all five secre…
Recently, we have witnessed the emergence of intermittently powered computational devices, an early example is the Intel WISP (Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform). How we engineer basic security services to realize mutual authentication, confidentiality and preserve privacy of information collected, stored and transmitted by, and establish the veracity of measurements taken from, such devices remain an open challenge; especially for batteryless and intermittently powered devices. While the cryptographic community has significantly progressed lightweight (in terms of area overhead) se…
Internet traffic is increasingly encrypted. While this protects the confidentiality and integrity of communication, it prevents network monitoring systems (NMS) and intrusion detection systems (IDSs) from effectively analyzing the now encrypted payloads. Therefore, many enterprise networks have deployed man-in-the-middle (MitM) proxies that intercept TLS connections at the network border to examine packet payloads and thus retain some visibility. However, recent studies have shown that TLS interception often reduces connection security and potentially introduces additional attack vectors to th…
The Domain Name System (DNS) was created to resolve the IP addresses of the web servers to easily remembered names. When it was initially created, security was not a major concern; nowadays, this lack of inherent security and trust has exposed the global DNS infrastructure to malicious actors. The passive DNS data collection process creates a database containing various DNS data elements, some of which are personal and need to be protected to preserve the privacy of the end users. To this end, we propose the use of distributed ledger technology. We use Hyperledger Fabric to create a permission…
The starting point of securing a network is having a concise overview of it. As networks are becoming more and more complex both in general and with the introduction of IoT technology and their topological peculiarities in particular, this is increasingly difficult to achieve. Especially in cyber-physical environments, such as smart factories, gaining a reliable picture of the network can be, due to intertwining of a vast amount of devices and different protocols, a tedious task. Nevertheless, this work is necessary to conduct security audits, compare documentation with actual conditions or fo…
In recent years, radio frequency identification technology has moved into the mainstream applications that help to speed up handling of manufactured goods and materials. RFID tags are divided into two classes: active and passive. Active tag requires a power source that's why its cost is more than passive tags. However, the low-cost RFID tags are facing new challenges to security and privacy. Some solutions utilize expensive cryptographic primitives such as hash or encryption functions, and some lightweight approaches have been reported to be not secure. This paper describes a lightweight Mutua…
We study linking attacks on communication protocols. We show that an active attacker is strictly more powerful in this setting than previously-considered passive attackers. We introduce a formal model to reason about active linkability attacks, formally define security against these attacks and give very general conditions for both security and insecurity of protocols. In addition, we introduce a composition-like technique that allows to obtain security proofs by only studying small components of a protocol.
In a one-way secret key agreement (OW-SKA) protocol in source model, Alice and Bob have private samples of two correlated variables X and Y that are partially leaked to Eve through Z, and use a single message from Alice to Bob to obtain a secret shared key. We propose an efficient secure OW-SKA when the sent message can be tampered with by an active adversary. The construction follows the approach of an existing OW-SKA with security against passive adversaries, and uses a specially designed secure Message Authentication Code (MAC) that is secure when the key is partially leaked, to achieve sec…
Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation Techniques for Enhanced Efficiency and Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Comprehensive Analysis and Evaluation
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm that can tremendously revolutionize health care thus benefiting both hospitals, doctors and patients. In this context, protecting the IoT in health care against interference, including service attacks and malwares, is challenging. Opacity is a confidentiality property capturing a system's ability to keep a subset of its behavior hidden from passive observers. In this work, we seek to introduce an IoT-based heart attack detection system, that could be life-saving for patients without risking their need for privacy through the verification and enforceme…
Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology that provides audio and data links between personal smartphones and playback devices, such as speakers, headsets and car entertainment systems. Since its introduction in 2001, security researchers have suggested that the protocol is weak, and prone to a variety of attacks against its authentication, link management and encryption schemes. Key researchers in the field have suggested that reliable passive sniffing of Bluetooth traffic would enable the practical application of a range of currently hypothesised attacks. Restricting Bluetooth's frequen…
With rapid advancements in electronic gadgets, the security and privacy aspects of these devices are significant. For the design of secure systems, physical unclonable function (PUF) and true random number generator (TRNG) are critical hardware security primitives for security applications. This paper proposes novel implementations of PUF and TRNGs on the RRAM crossbar structure. Firstly, two techniques to implement the TRNG in the RRAM crossbar are presented based on write-back and 50% switching probability pulse. The randomness of the proposed TRNGs is evaluated using the NIST test suite. Ne…
Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks raise major concerns about users' privacy. They employ Machine Learning (ML) to allow a local passive adversary to uncover the Web browsing behavior of a user, even if she browses through an encrypted tunnel (e.g. Tor, VPN). Numerous defenses have been proposed in the past; however, it is typically difficult to have formal guarantees on their security, which is most often evaluated empirically against state-of-the-art attacks. In this paper, we present a practical method to derive security bounds for any WF defense, which depend on a chosen feature set. This…
Privacy preservation in Ride Hailing Services is intended to protect privacy of drivers and riders. ORide is one of the early RHS proposals published at USENIX Security Symposium 2017. In the ORide protocol, riders and drivers, operating in a zone, encrypt their locations using a Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption scheme (SHE) and forward them to the Service Provider (SP). SP homomorphically computes the squared Euclidean distance between riders and available drivers. Rider receives the encrypted distances and selects the optimal rider after decryption. In order to prevent a triangulation attack,…
Channel-reciprocity based key generation (CRKG) has gained significant importance as it has recently been proposed as a potential lightweight security solution for IoT devices. However, the impact of the attacker's position in close range has only rarely been evaluated in practice, posing an open research problem about the security of real-world realizations. Furthermore, this would further bridge the gap between theoretical channel models and their practice-oriented realizations. For security metrics, we utilize cross-correlation, mutual information, and a lower bound on secret-key capacity. …
In this work, we focus on the classical optical channel having Poissonian statistical behavior and propose a novel secrecy coding-based physical layer protocol. Our protocol is different but complementary to both (computationally secure) quantum immune cryptographic protocols and (information theoretically secure) quantum cryptographic protocols. Specifically, our (information theoretical) secrecy coding protocol secures classical digital information bits at photonic level exploiting the random nature of the Poisson channel. It is known that secrecy coding techniques for the Poisson channel ba…
Repair operations in distributed storage systems potentially expose the data to malicious acts of passive eavesdroppers or active adversaries, which can be detrimental to the security of the system. This paper presents erasure codes and repair algorithms that ensure security of the data in the presence of passive eavesdroppers and active adversaries, while maintaining high availability, reliability and efficiency in the system. Our codes are optimal in that they meet previously proposed lower bounds on the storage, network-bandwidth, and reliability requirements for a wide range of system para…
A plethora of contact tracing apps have been developed and deployed in several countries around the world in the battle against Covid-19. However, people are rightfully concerned about the security and privacy risks of such applications. To this end, the contribution of this work is twofold. First, we present an in-depth analysis of the security and privacy characteristics of the most prominent contact tracing protocols, under both passive and active adversaries. The results of our study indicate that all protocols are vulnerable to a variety of attacks, mainly due to the deterministic nature …
In this paper, a joint relay selection and power allocation (JRP) scheme is proposed to enhance the physical layer security of a cooperative network, where a multiple antennas source communicates with a single-antenna destination in presence of untrusted relays and passive eavesdroppers (Eves). The objective is to protect the data confidentially while concurrently relying on the untrusted relays as potential Eves to improve both the security and reliability of the network. To realize this objective, we consider cooperative jamming performed by the destination while JRP scheme is implemented. W…
IoT devices are increasingly utilized in critical infrastructure, enterprises, and households. There are several sophisticated cyber-attacks that have been reported and many networks have proven vulnerable to both active and passive attacks by leaking private information, allowing unauthorized access, and being open to denial of service attacks. This paper aims firstly, to assist network operators to understand the need for an IoT network security solution, and then secondly, to survey IoT network attack vectors, cyber threats, and countermeasures with a focus on improving the robustness of ex…
Reasoning about security properties involves reasoning about where the information of a system is located, and how it evolves over time. While most security analysis techniques need to cope with some notions of information locality and knowledge propagation, usually they do not provide a general language for expressing arbitrary properties involving local knowledge and knowledge transfer. Building on this observation, we introduce a framework for security protocol analysis based on dynamic spatial logic specifications. Our computational model is a variant of existing pi-calculi, while specific…
TLS 1.3 marks a significant departure from previous versions of the Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS). The new version offers a simplified protocol flow, more secure cryptographic primitives, and new features to improve performance, among other things. In this paper, we conduct the first study of TLS 1.3 deployment and use since its standardization by the IETF. We use active scans to measure deployment across more than 275M domains, including nearly 90M country-code top-level domains. We establish and investigate the critical contribution that hosting services and CDNs make to the fast, …
In this work we provide a suite of protocols for group key management based on general semigroup actions. Construction of the key is made in a distributed and collaborative way. Examples are provided that may in some cases enhance the security level and communication overheads of previous existing protocols. Security against passive attacks is considered and depends on the hardness of the semigroup action problem in any particular scenario.
The problem in which one of three pairwise interacting parties is required to securely compute a function of the inputs held by the other two, when one party may arbitrarily deviate from the computation protocol (active behavioral model), is studied. An information-theoretic characterization of unconditionally secure computation protocols under the active behavioral model is provided. A protocol for Hamming distance computation is provided and shown to be unconditionally secure under both active and passive behavioral models using the information-theoretic characterization. The difference betw…
In this paper, we present two practical ARQ-Based security schemes for Wi-Fi and RFID networks. Our proposed schemes enhance the confidentiality and authenticity functions of these networks, respectively. Both schemes build on the same idea; by exploiting the statistical independence between the multipath fading experienced by the legitimate nodes and potential adversaries, secret keys are established and then are continuously updated. The continuous key update property of both schemes makes them capable of defending against all of the passive eavesdropping attacks and most of the currently-kn…
Inspired by our earlier work on Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) secrecy, we propose a simple, yet efficient, security overlay protocol to existing 802.11 networks. Our work targets networks secured by the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol because of its widespread use and vulnerability to a multitude of security threats. By exploiting the existing ARQ protocol in the 802.11 standard, our proposed opportunistic secrecy scheme is shown to defend against all known passive WEP attacks. Moreover, our implementation on the madwifi-ng driver is used to establish the achievability of a vanishing …
We point out that arguments for the security of Kish's noise-based cryptographic protocol have relied on an unphysical no-wave limit, which if taken seriously would prevent any correlation from developing between the users. We introduce a noiseless version of the protocol, also having illusory security in the no-wave limit, to show that noise and thermodynamics play no essential role. Then we prove generally that classical electromagnetic protocols cannot establish a secret key between two parties separated by a spacetime region perfectly monitored by an eavesdropper. We note that the original…
