In a Public Safety (PS) situation, agents may require critical and personally identifiable information. Therefore, not only does context and location-aware information need to be available, but also the privacy of such information should be preserved. Existing solutions do not address such a problem in a PS environment. This paper proposes a framework in which anonymized Personal Information (PI) is accessible to authorized public safety agents under a PS circumstance. In particular, we propose a secure data storage structure along with privacy-preserving mobile search framework, suitable for Public Safety Networks (PSNs). As a result, availability and privacy of PI are achieved simultaneously. However, the design of such a framework encounters substantial challenges, including scalability, reliability of the data, computation and communication and storage efficiency, etc. We leverage Secure Indexing (SI) methods and modify Bloom Filters (BFs) to create a secure data storage structure to store encrypted meta-data. As a result, our construction enables secure and privacy-preserving multi-keyword search capability. In addition, our system scales very well, maintains availability of data, imposes minimum delay, and has affordable storage overhead. We provide extensive security analysis, simulation studies, and performance comparison with the state-of-the-art solutions to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to address such issues in the context of PSNs.
The plummeting cost of Bluetooth tags and the ubiquity of mobile devices are revolutionizing the traditional lost-and-found service. This paper presents SecureFind, a secure and privacy-preserving object-finding system via mobile crowdsourcing. In SecureFind, a unique Bluetooth tag is attached to every valuable object, and the owner of a lost object submits an object-finding request to many mobile users via the SecureFind service provider. Each mobile user involved searches his vicinity for the lost object on behalf of the object owner who can infer the location of his lost object based on the…
In the age of cloud computing, cloud users with limited storage can outsource their data to remote servers. These servers, in lieu of monetary benefits, offer retrievability of their clients' data at any point of time. Secure cloud storage protocols enable a client to check integrity of outsourced data. In this work, we explore the possibility of constructing a secure cloud storage for dynamic data by leveraging the algorithms involved in secure network coding. We show that some of the secure network coding schemes can be used to construct efficient secure cloud storage protocols for dynamic d…
With the rapidly changing technological realm, there is an urgent need to provide and protect the confidentiality of confidential images when stored in a cloud environment. To overcome the security risks associated with single cloud, multiple clouds offered by unrelated cloud providers have to be used. This paper outlines an integrated encryption scheme for the secure storage of confidential images on multiple clouds based on DNA sequences.
Discrete exponential operation, such as modular exponentiation and scalar multiplication on elliptic curves, is a basic operation of many public-key cryptosystems. However, the exponential operations are considered prohibitively expensive for resource-constrained mobile devices. In this paper, we address the problem of secure outsourcing of exponentiation operations to one single untrusted server. Our proposed scheme (ExpSOS) only requires very limited number of modular multiplications at local mobile environment thus it can achieve impressive computational gain. ExpSOS also provides a secure …
The emergence of mobile applications to execute sensitive operations has brought a myriad of security threats to both enterprises and users. In order to benefit from the large potential in smartphones there is a need to manage the risks arising from threats, while maintaining an easy interface for the users. In this paper we investigate the use of Trusted Platform Model (TPM) 2.0 to develop a secure application for smartphones using Windows Phone 8.1. In particular, we suggest a framework based on remote attestation as a proxy to authenticate remote services, where the device is associated to …
Many emerging applications in mobile adhoc networks involve group-oriented communication. Multicast is an efficient way of supporting group oriented applications, mainly in mobile environment with limited bandwidth and limited power. For using such applications in an adversarial environment as military, it is necessary to provide secure multicast communication. Key management is the fundamental challenge in designing secure multicast communications. In many multicast interactions, new member can join and current members can leave at any time and existing members must communicate securely using…
This research in progress paper describes the role of cyber security measures undertaken in an ICT system for integrating electric storage technologies into the grid. To do so, it defines security requirements for a communications gateway and gives detailed information and hands-on configuration advice on node and communication line security, data storage, coping with backend M2M communications protocols and examines privacy issues. The presented research paves the road for developing secure smart energy communications devices that allow enhancing energy efficiency. The described measures are …
Mobile computing devices have been used broadly to store, manage and process sensitive or even mission critical data. To protect confidentiality of data stored in mobile devices, major mobile operating systems use full disk encryption, which relies on traditional encryption mechanisms and requires that decryption keys will not be disclosed. This however, is not necessarily true, since an active attacker may coerce victims for decryption keys. Plausibly deniable encryption (PDE) can defend against such a coercive attacker by disguising the true secret key with a decoy key. Leveraging concept of…
Cloud computing systems, in which clients rent and share computing resources of third party platforms, have gained widespread use in recent years. Furthermore, cloud computing for mobile systems (i.e., systems in which the clients are mobile devices) have too been receiving considerable attention in technical literature. We propose a new method of delegating computations of resource-constrained mobile clients, in which multiple servers interact to construct an encrypted program known as garbled circuit. Next, using garbled inputs from a mobile client, another server executes this garbled circu…
The emerging threats to user privacy over the internet are increasing at an alarming rate. Signing in from an unreliable terminal into a web account may result in compromising private details of a user such as username and password, by means of keylogger software. Such software are capable of recording keystrokes secretly, via covert channels without the knowledge of the user. In this paper we propose a secure method for signing in using Quick Response (QR) codes with mobile authentication. Through this method, the user can securely sign-in into a web account by authenticating the user session…
Medical data involves a large amount of personal information and is highly privacy sensitive. In the age of big data, the increasing informatization of healthcare makes it vital that medical information is stored securely and accurately. However, current medical information is subject to the risk of privacy leakage and difficult to share. To address these issues, this paper proposes a healthcare information security storage solution based on Hyperledger Fabric and the Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) framework. The scheme first utilizes attribute-based access control, which allows dynamic…
The paper describes several original cryptographic cipher modules (VSEM) that are based on using one time pseudorandom pad and pseudorandom transpositions. The VSEM includes 4 modules of encryption that can be applied in combinations. We studied ability of these modules to secure the private data against attacks and their speed of encryption. The VSEM encryption was implemented in Fendoff applications for mobile devices on iOS and Android platforms as well as in computer application running Window or Mac OS. We describe these applications designed to encrypt/decrypt various personal data such …
Cloud computing enables users (clients) to outsource large volume of their data to cloud servers. Secure distributed cloud storage schemes ensure that multiple servers store these data in a reliable and untampered fashion. We propose an idea to construct such a scheme for static data by encoding data blocks (using error-correcting codes) and then attaching authentication information (tags) to these encoded blocks. We identify some challenges while extending this idea to accommodate append-only data. Then, we propose our secure distributed cloud storage scheme for append-only data that addresse…
A mobile agent is a software code with mobility which can be move from a computer into another computers through network. The mobile agent paradigm provides many benefits in developments of distributed application at the same time introduce new requirements for security issues with these systems. In this article we present a solution for protection agent from other agents attacks with loging patterns of malicious agent and useing this log for communication. We implemented our resolution by JADE.
Previous Web access authentication systems often use either the Web or the Mobile channel individually to confirm the claimed identity of the remote user. This paper proposes a new protocol using multifactor authentication system that is both secure and highly usable. It uses a novel approach based on Transaction Identification Code and SMS to enforce extra security level with the traditional Login/password system. The system provides a highly secure environment that is simple to use and deploy, that does not require any change in infrastructure or protocol of wireless networks. This Protocol …
Supply chain finance(SCF) is committed to providing credit for small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs) with low credit lines and small financing scales. The resulting financial credit data and related business transaction data are highly confidential and private. However, traditional SCF management schemes mostly use third-party platforms and centralized designs, which cannot achieve highly reliable secure storage and fine-grained access control. To fill this gap, this paper designs and implements Fabric-SCF, a secure storage and access control system based on blockchain and attribute-based a…
With the rapid spread of various mobile terminals in our society, the importance of secure positioning is growing for wireless networks in adversarial settings. Recently, several authors have proposed a secure positioning mechanism of mobile terminals which is based on the geometric property of wireless node placement, and on the postulate of modern physics that a propagation speed of information never exceeds the velocity of light. In particular, they utilize the measurements of the round-trip time of radio signal propagation and bidirectional communication for variants of the challenge-and-r…
With the advent of mobile computing, location-based services have recently gained popularity. Many applications use the location provenance of users, i.e., the chronological history of the users' location for purposes ranging from access control, authentication, information sharing, and evaluation of policies. However, location provenance is subject to tampering and collusion attacks by malicious users. In this paper, we examine the secure location provenance problem. We introduce a witness-endorsed scheme for generating collusion-resistant location proofs. We also describe two efficient and p…
This paper uses a scenario-based role-play experiment based on the usage of QR codes to detect how mobile users respond to social engineering attacks conducted via mobile devices. The results of this experiment outline a guided mobile phone forensics investigation method which could facilitate the work of digital forensics investigators while analysing the data from mobile devices. The behavioural response of users could be impacted by several aspects, such as impulsivity, smartphone usage and security or simply awareness that QR codes could contain malware. The findings indicate that the impu…
This paper presents a multi-platform, open-source application that aims to protect data stored and shared in existing cloud storage services. The access to the cryptographic material used to protect data is implemented using the identification and authentication functionalities of national electronic identity (eID) tokens. All peer to peer dialogs to exchange cryptographic material is implemented using the cloud storage facilities. Furthermore, we have included a set of mechanisms to prevent files from being permanently lost or damaged due to concurrent modification, deletion and malicious tam…
Privacy of the outsourced data is one of the major challenge.Insecurity of the network environment and untrustworthiness of the service providers are obstacles of making the database as a service.Collection and storage of personally identifiable information is a major privacy concern.On-line public databases and resources pose a significant risk to user privacy, since a malicious database owner may monitor user queries and infer useful information about the customer.The challenge in data privacy is to share data with third-party and at the same time securing the valuable information from unaut…
Cloud computing is often utilized for file storage. Clients of cloud storage services want to ensure the privacy of their data, and both clients and servers want to use as little storage as possible. Cross-user deduplication is one method to reduce the amount of storage a server uses. Deduplication and privacy are naturally conflicting goals, especially for nearly-identical (``fuzzy'') deduplication, as some information about the data must be used to perform deduplication. Prior solutions thus utilize multiple servers, or only function for exact deduplication. In this paper, we present a singl…
Performing machine learning tasks in mobile applications yields a challenging conflict of interest: highly sensitive client information (e.g., speech data) should remain private while also the intellectual property of service providers (e.g., model parameters) must be protected. Cryptographic techniques offer secure solutions for this, but have an unacceptable overhead and moreover require frequent network interaction. In this work, we design a practically efficient hardware-based solution. Specifically, we build Offline Model Guard (OMG) to enable privacy-preserving machine learning on the pr…
Sensitive data protection is essential for mobile users. Plausibly Deniable Encryption (PDE) systems provide an effective manner to protect sensitive data by hiding them on the device. However, existing PDE systems can lose data due to overriding the hidden volume, waste physical storage because of the reserved area used for avoiding data loss, and require device reboot when using the hidden volume. This paper presents MobiGyges, a hidden volume-based mobile PDE system, to fill the gap. MobiGyges addresses the problem of data loss by restricting each storage block used only by one volume, and …
Nowadays companies are increasingly adopting the technology ofcloud computing. This technology is subject to a lot of research and continuousadvances are made. The use of cloud computing in the companies advantagessuch as: reducing costs, sharing and exchange of information between institutions,but the data in the Cloud computing are susceptible to be compromisedand the companies are exposing to see their data loss. In this study, we addressthe subject of security in cloud computing; we expose and discuss someresearches that had been proposed to secure the data stored in the cloud. Andthen we …
In this letter we propose Meta-key, a data-sharing mechanism that enables users share their encrypted data under a blockchain-based decentralized storage architecture. All the data-encryption keys are encrypted by the owner's public key and put onto the blockchain for safe and secure storage and easy key-management. Encrypted data are stored in dedicated storage nodes and proxy re-encryption mechanism is used to ensure secure data-sharing in the untrusted environment. Security analysis of our model shows that the proxy re-encryption adopted in our system is naturally free from collusion-attack…
The unique identities of every mobile user (phone number,IMSI) and device (IMEI) are far from secure and are increasingly vulnerable to a variety of network-level threats. The exceedingly high reliance on the weak SIM authentication layer does not present any notion of end-to-end security for mobile users. We propose the design and implementation of Secure Mobile Identities (SMI), a repetitive key-exchange protocol that uses this weak SIM authentication as a foundation to enable mobile users to establish stronger identity authenticity. The security guarantees of SMI are directly reliant on the…
In this paper we define the overflow problem of a network coding storage system in which the encoding parameter and the storage parameter are mismatched. Through analyses and experiments, we first show the impacts of the overflow problem in a network coding scheme, which not only waste storage spaces, but also degrade coding efficiency. To avoid the overflow problem, we then develop the network coding based secure storage (NCSS) scheme. Thanks to considering both security and storage requirements in encoding procedures and distributed architectures, the NCSS can improve the performance of a cl…
An increasing amount of sensitive information today is stored electronically and a substantial part of this information (e.g., health records, tax data, legal documents) must be retained over long time periods (e.g., several decades or even centuries). When sensitive data is stored, then integrity and confidentiality must be protected to ensure reliability and privacy. Commonly used cryptographic schemes, however, are not designed for protecting data over such long time periods. Recently, the first storage architecture combining long-term integrity with long-term confidentiality protection was…
Most critical sensor readings (Top-k Monitoring) in environment monitoring system are important to many wireless sensor applications. In such applications, sensor nodes transmit the data continuously for a specific time period to the storage nodes. It is responsible for transferring the received results to the Authority on Top-k Query request from them. Dummy data's were added into the original text data to secure the data against adversary in case of hacking the sensor and storage nodes. If storage node gets hacked by adversary, false details will be sent to the authority. An effective techni…
This paper presents a secure communication application called DiscoverFriends. Its purpose is to securely communicate to a group of online friends while bypassing their respective social networking servers under a mobile ad hoc network environment. DiscoverFriends leverages Bloom filters and a hybrid encryption technique with a self-organized public-key management scheme to securely identify friends and provide authentication. Additionally, DiscoverFriends enables anonymous location check-ins by utilizing a new cryptographic primitive called Function Secret Sharing. Finally, to the best of our…
The 5G mobile communication network provides seamless communications between users and service providers and promises to achieve several stringent requirements, such as seamless mobility and massive connectivity. Although 5G can offer numerous benefits, security and privacy issues still need to be addressed. For example, the inclusion of small cell networks (SCN) into 5G brings the network closer to the connected users, providing a better quality of services (QoS), resulting in a significant increase in the number of Handover procedures (HO), which will affect the security, latency and efficie…
Nowadays, mobile devices have been used broadly to store and process sensitive data. To ensure confidentiality of the sensitive data, Full Disk Encryption (FDE) is often integrated in mainstream mobile operating systems like Android and iOS. FDE however cannot defend against coercive attacks in which the adversary can force the device owner to disclose the decryption key. To combat the coercive attacks, Plausibly Deniable Encryption (PDE) is leveraged to plausibly deny the very existence of sensitive data. However, most of the existing PDE systems for mobile devices are deployed at the block l…
While personal cloud storage services such as Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and iCloud have become very popular in recent years, these services offer few security guarantees to users. These cloud services are aimed at end users, whose applications often assume a local file system storage, and thus require strongly consistent data. In addition, users usually access these services using personal computers and portable devices such as phones and tablets, which are upload bandwidth constrained and in many cases battery powered. Unity is a system that provides confidentiality, integrity, durabili…
We present SMAUG (Secure Mobile Authentication Using Gestures), a novel biometric assisted authentication algorithm for mobile devices that is solely based on data collected from multiple sensors that are usually installed on modern devices -- touch screen, gyroscope and accelerometer. As opposed to existing approaches, our system supports a fully flexible user input such as free-form gestures, multi-touch, and arbitrary amount of strokes. Our experiments confirm that this approach provides a high level of robustness and security. More precisely, in 77% of all our test cases over all gestures …
The secure command and control (C&C) of mobile agents arises in various settings including unmanned aerial vehicles, single pilot operations in commercial settings, and mobile robots to name a few. As more and more of these applications get integrated into aerospace and defense use cases, the security of the communication channel between the ground station and the mobile agent is of increasing importance. The development of quantum computing devices poses a unique threat to secure communications due to the vulnerability of asymmetric ciphers to Shor's algorithm. Given the active development of…
Secure communication between two nodes in a network depends on reliable key management systems that generate and distribute keys between communicating nodes and a secure routing protocol that establishes a route between them. But due to lack of central server and infrastructure in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs), this is major problem to manage the keys in the network. Dynamically changes in network's topology causes weak trust relationship among the nodes in the network. In MANETs a mobile node operates as not only end terminal but also as an intermediate router. Therefore, a multi-hop scenar…
With the rapid development of the Internet of things (IoT), more and more IoT devices are connected and communicate frequently. In this background, the traditional centralized security architecture of IoT will be limited in terms of data storage space, data reliability, scalability, operating costs and liability judgment. In this paper, we propose an new key information storage framework based on a small distributed database generated by blockchain technology and cloud storage. Specifically, all encrypted key communication data will be upload to public could server for enough storage, but the …
Nowadays, mobile banking becomes a popular tool which consumers can conduct financial transactions such as shopping, monitoring accounts balance, transferring funds and other payments. Consumers dependency on mobile needs, make people take a little bit more interest in mobile banking. The use of the one-time password which is sent to the user mobile phone by short message service (SMS) is a vulnerability which we want to solve with proposing a new scheme called S-Mbank. We replace the authentication using the one-time password with the contactless smart card to prevent attackers to use the une…
The information technology and security stakeholders like CIOs, CISOs and CTOs in financial services organization are often asked to identify the risks with mobile computing channel for financial services that they support. They are also asked to come up with approaches for handling risks, define risk acceptance level and mitigate them. This requires them to articulate strategy for supporting a huge variety of mobile devices from various vendors with different operating systems and hardware platforms and at the same time stay within the accepted risk level. These articulations should be captur…
The electronic mail plays an unavoidable role in the humankind communications. With the great interest for the connection via mobile platforms, and the growing number of vulnerabilities and attacks, it is essential to provide suitable security solutions regarding the limitations of resource restricted platforms. Although some solutions such as PGP and S/MIME are currently available for the secure e-mail over the Internet, they are based on traditional public key cryptography that involves huge computational costs. In this paper, a new secure application-layer protocol, called SMEmail, is intro…
Passwords are widely used for client to server authentication as well as for encrypting data stored in untrusted environments, such as cloud storage. Both, authentication and encrypted cloud storage, are usually discussed in isolation. In this work, we propose AuthStore, a flexible authentication framework that allows users to securely reuse passwords for authentication as well as for encrypted cloud storage at a single or multiple service providers. Users can configure how secure passwords are protected using password stretching techniques. We present a compact password-authenticated key exch…
In the secure group communication, data is transmitted in such a way that only the group members are able to receive the messages. The main problem in the solution using symmetric key is heavy re-keying cost. To reduce re-keying cost tree based architecture is used. But it requires extra overhead to balance the key- tree in order to achieve logarithmic re-keying cost. The main challenging issue in dynamic and secure multimedia multicast communication is to design a centralized group key management scheme with minimal computational, communicational and storages complexities without breaching se…
We present CDStore, which disperses users' backup data across multiple clouds and provides a unified multi-cloud storage solution with reliability, security, and cost-efficiency guarantees. CDStore builds on an augmented secret sharing scheme called convergent dispersal, which supports deduplication by using deterministic content-derived hashes as inputs to secret sharing. We present the design of CDStore, and in particular, describe how it combines convergent dispersal with two-stage deduplication to achieve both bandwidth and storage savings and be robust against side-channel attacks. We eva…
In this paper, we present an identity (ID) based protocol that secures AODV and TCP so that it can be used in dynamic and attack prone environments of mobile ad hoc networks. The proposed protocol protects AODV using Sequential Aggregate Signatures (SAS) based on RSA. It also generates a session key for each pair of source-destination nodes of a MANET for securing the end-to-end transmitted data. Here each node has an ID which is evaluated from its public key and the messages that are sent are authenticated with a signature/ MAC. The proposed scheme does not allow a node to change its ID throu…
In recent years, it has come to attention that governments have been doing mass surveillance of personal communications without the consent of the citizens. As a consequence of these revelations, developers have begun releasing new protocols for end-to-end encrypted conversations, extending and making popular the old Off-the-Record protocol. Several new implementations of such end-to-end encrypted messaging protocols have appeared, and commonly used chat applications have been updated with these implementations as well. In this survey, we compare the existing implementations, where most of the…
