Authentication is the first step toward establishing a service provider and customer (C-P) association. In a mobile network environment, a lightweight and secure authentication protocol is one of the most significant factors to enhance the degree of service persistence. This work presents a secure and lightweight keying and authentication protocol suite termed TAP (Time-Assisted Authentication Protocol). TAP improves the security of protocols with the assistance of time-based encryption keys and scales down the authentication complexity by issuing a re-authentication ticket. While moving across the network, a mobile customer node sends a re-authentication ticket to establish new sessions with service-providing nodes. Consequently, this reduces the communication and computational complexity of the authentication process. In the keying protocol suite, a key distributor controls the key generation arguments and time factors, while other participants independently generate a keychain based on key generation arguments. We undertake a rigorous security analysis and prove the security strength of TAP using CSP and rank function analysis.
Secure Shell (SSH) protocol requires all implementations to support public key authentication method ("publickey") for authentication purposes, so web applications which provide a SSH client over the web browser need to support "publickey". However, restrictions in Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), such as same origin policy, and limited access to local resources, make it difficult to perform such authentications. In this document, a system to perform "publickey" authentication over HTTP is provided. It is ensured that no compromise is made that would pose a security risk to SSH protocol.
Authentication is one of the essential security services in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for ensuring secure data sessions. Sensor node authentication ensures the confidentiality and validity of data collected by the sensor node, whereas user authentication guarantees that only legitimate users can access the sensor data. In a mobile WSN, sensor and user nodes move across the network and exchange data with multiple nodes, thus experiencing the authentication process multiple times. The integration of WSNs with Internet of Things (IoT) brings forth a new kind of WSN architecture along with s…
Mobile communication touches every aspect of our life, it become one of the major dependencies that the 21st Century civilizations rely on. Thereby, security is a major issue that should be targeted by communication technologies. In this paper we will target authentication and encryption in GSM and 3G/UMTS. In order to understand clearly how things work, we will start by presenting the architecture of each network, its major components, its authentication algorithms, protocols used, and KASUMI Block Cipher.
A number of authentication protocols have been proposed recently, where at least some part of the authentication is performed during a phase, lasting $n$ rounds, with no error correction. This requires assigning an acceptable threshold for the number of detected errors. This paper describes a framework enabling an expected loss analysis for all the protocols in this family. Furthermore, computationally simple methods to obtain nearly optimal value of the threshold, as well as for the number of rounds is suggested. Finally, a method to adaptively select both the number of rounds and the thresho…
This paper describes a new password-based mutual authentication protocol for Web systems which prevents various kinds of phishing attacks. This protocol provides a protection of user's passwords against any phishers even if dictionary attack is employed, and prevents phishers from imitating a false sense of successful authentication to users. The protocol is designed considering interoperability with many recent Web applications which requires many features which current HTTP authentication does not provide. The protocol is proposed as an Internet Draft submitted to IETF, and implemented in bo…
A GNSS signal authentication concept named semi-assisted authentication is proposed. It is based on the re-encryption and publication of keystream sequences of some milliseconds from an already existing encrypted signal. Some seconds after the keystreams are transmitted in the signal-in-space, the signal broadcasts the key allowing to decrypt the sequences and the a-posteriori correlation at the receiver. The concept is particularized as Galileo Assisted Commercial Authentication Service, or ACAS, for Galileo E1-B, with OSNMA used for the decryption keys, and E6C, assumed to be encrypted in th…
This paper describes a new protocol for authentication in ad-hoc networks. The protocol has been designed to meet specialized requirements of ad-hoc networks, such as lack of direct communication between nodes or requirements for revocable anonymity. At the same time, a ad-hoc authentication protocol must be resistant to spoofing, eavesdropping and playback, and man-in-the-middle attacks. The article analyzes existing authentication methods based on the Public Key Infrastructure, and finds that they have several drawbacks in ad-hoc networks. Therefore, a new authentication protocol, basing on …
Home automation Internet of Things (IoT) systems have recently become a target for several types of attacks. In this paper, we present an authentication and key agreement protocol for a home automation network based on the ZigBee standard, which connects together a central controller and several end devices. Our scheme performs mutual authentication between end devices and the controller, which is followed by device-to-device communication. The scheme achieves confidentiality, message integrity, anonymity, unlinkability, forward and backward secrecy, and availability. Our scheme uses only simp…
This paper modifies Kak's three-stage protocol so that it can guarantee secure transmission of information. Although avoiding man-in-the-middle attack is our primary objective in the introduction of classical authentication inside the three-stage protocol, we also benefit from the inherent advantages of the chosen classical authentication protocol. We have tried to implement ideas like key distribution center, session key, time-stamp, and nonce, within the quantum cryptography protocol.
Creating a secure environment for communications is becoming a significantly challenging task in 5G Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) given the stringent latency and high capacity requirements of 5G networks. This is particularly factual knowing that the infrastructure tends to be highly diversified especially with the continuous deployment of small cells. In fact, frequent handovers in these cells introduce unnecessarily recurring authentications leading to increased latency. In this paper, we propose a software-defined wireless network (SDWN)-enabled fast cross-authentication scheme which com…
Recently, Li et al. proposed a dynamic identity based authentication protocol for multi-server architecture. They claimed their protocol is secure and can withstand various attacks. But we found some security loopholes in the protocol. Accordingly, the current paper demonstrates that Li et al.'s protocol is vulnerable to the replay attack, the password guessing attack and the masquerade attack.
The pervasiveness of wireless communication recently gave mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) a significant researchers' attention, due to its innate capabilities of instant communication in many time and mission critical applications. However, its natural advantages of networking in civilian and military environments make them vulnerable to security threats. Support for an anonymity in MANET is an orthogonal to security critical challenge we faced in this paper. We propose a new anonymous authentication protocol for mobile ad hoc networks enhanced with a distributed reputation system. The main its…
This paper discusses a new protocol implementing authentication in a multi-located environment that avoids man-in-the-middle (MIM) attack, replay attack and provides privacy, integrity of a message for multi-located parties. The protocol uses the concept that each party is associated with a subsidiary agent.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has found its applications in a variety of environments ranging from data science to cybersecurity. AI helps break through the limitations of traditional algorithms and provides more efficient and flexible methods for solving problems. In this paper, we focus on the applications of artificial intelligence in authentication, which is used in a wide range of scenarios including facial recognition to access buildings, keystroke dynamics to unlock smartphones. With the emerging AI-assisted authentication schemes, our comprehensive survey provides an overall understandi…
As mobile devices pervade physical space, the familiar authentication patterns are becoming insufficient: besides entity authentication, many applications require, e.g., location authentication. Many interesting protocols have been proposed and implemented to provide such strengthened forms of authentication, but there are very few proofs that such protocols satisfy the required security properties. The logical formalisms, devised for reasoning about security protocols on standard computer networks, turn out to be difficult to adapt for reasoning about hybrid protocols, used in pervasive and h…
This paper compares the popular quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol BB84 with the more recent Kak's three-stage protocol and the latter is shown to be more secure. A theoretical representation of an authentication-aided version of Kak's three-stage protocol is provided that makes it possible to deal with the man-in-the-middle attack.
In this paper, we have proposed a multi factor biometric-based remote authentication protocol. Our proposal overcomes the vulnerabilities of some previous works. At the same time, the protocol also obtains a low false accept rate (FAR) and false reject rate (FRR).
One-time login process in conventional authentication systems does not guarantee that the identified user is the actual user throughout the session. However, it is necessary to re-verify the user identity periodically throughout a login session without reducing the user convenience. Continuous authentication can address this issue. However, existing methods are either not reliable or not usable. In this paper, we introduce a usable and reliable method called Wearable Assisted Continuous Authentication (WACA). WACA relies on the sensor based keystroke dynamics, where the authentication data is …
Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques allow for multiplexing and/or diversity gain, and will be widely deployed in future wireless systems. In this paper, we propose a MIMO-assisted channel-based authentication scheme, exploiting current channel estimation mechanisms in MIMO systems to detect spoofing attacks with very low overhead. In this scheme, the use of multiple antennas provides extra dimensions of channel estimation data, and thus leads to a "security gain" over single-input single-output (SISO) systems. We investigate the security gain of MIMO systems in several system conf…
Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a key technology for next generation wireless broadband networks showing rapid progress and inspiring numerous compelling applications. A WMN comprises of a set of mesh routers (MRs) and mesh clients (MCs), where MRs are connected to the Internet backbone through the Internet gateways (IGWs). The MCs are wireless devices and communicate among themselves over possibly multi-hop paths with or without the involvement of MRs. User privacy and security have been primary concerns in WMNs due to their peer-to-peer network topology, shared wireless medium,…
In this note we propose an encryption communication protocol which also provides database security. For the encryption of the data communication we use a transformation similar to the Cubic Public-key transformation. This method represents a many-to-one mapping which increases the complexity for any brute force attack. Some interesting properties of the transformation are also included which are basic in the authentication protocol.
In this paper we present the first practical attack on the shifted conjugacy-based authentication protocol proposed by P. Dehornoy. We discuss the weaknesses of that primitive and propose ways to improve the protocol.
Song \cite{Song10} proposed very recently a password-based authentication and key establishment protocol using smart cards which attempts to solve some weaknesses found in a previous scheme suggested by Xu, Zhu, and Feng \cite{XZF09}. In this paper, we present attacks on the improved protocol, showing that it fails to achieve the claimed security goals.
Vajda and Buttyan (VB) proposed a set of five lightweight RFID authentication protocols. Defend, Fu, and Juels (DFJ) did cryptanalysis on two of them - XOR and SUBSET. To the XOR protocol, DFJ proposed repeated keys attack and nibble attack. In this paper, we identify the vulnerability existed in the original VB's successive session key permutation algorithm. We propose three enhancements to prevent DFJ's attacks and make XOR protocol stronger without introducing extra resource cost.
The emergence of various technologies has since pushed researchers to develop new protocols that support high density data transmissions in Wide Area Networks. Many of these protocols are TCP protocol variants, which have demonstrated better performance in simulation and several limited network experiments but have limited practical applications because of implementation and installation difficulties. On the other hand, users who need to transfer bulk data (e.g., in grid/cloud computing) usually turn to application level solutions where these variants do not fair well. Among protocols consider…
Security and privacy are the inherent problems in RFID communications. There are several protocols have been proposed to overcome those problems. Hash chain is commonly employed by the protocols to improve security and privacy for RFID authentication. Although the protocols able to provide specific solution for RFID security and privacy problems, they fail to provide integrated solution. This article is a survey to closely observe those protocols in terms of its focus and limitations.
Along with the development of internet of things and pervasive computing, researchers are increasingly focusing on server-less RFID authentication and searching protocols, which utilize mobile RFID readers. However, revealing privacy of mobile reader holders is a widely neglected problem in current research. This paper concentrates on preserving privacy of mobile reader holders in server-less RFID authentication and searching protocols. We propose a detailed requirement as a principle for future protocol designs, and a scheme to enhance most current protocols. We apply our scheme to two classi…
In this paper, we propose an HB-like protocol for privacy-preserving authentication of RFID tags, whereby a tag can remain anonymous and untraceable to an adversary during the authentication process. Previous proposals of such protocols were based on PRF computations. Our protocol can instead be used on low-cost tags that may be incapable of computing standard PRFs. Moreover, since the underlying computations in HB protocols are very efficient, our protocol also reduces reader load compared to PRF-based protocols. We suggest a tree-based approach that replaces the PRF-based authentication from…
In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of authentication protocols for Internet of Things (IoT). Specifically, we select and in-detail examine more than forty authentication protocols developed for or applied in the context of the IoT under four environments, including: (1) Machine to machine communications (M2M), (2) Internet of Vehicles (IoV), (3) Internet of Energy (IoE), and (4) Internet of Sensors (IoS). We start by reviewing all survey articles published in the recent years that focusing on different aspects of the IoT idea. Then, we review threat models, countermeasures, and f…
In this paper, we present a simple bare-bones solution of a Zero-Knowledge authentication protocol which uses non-commutative algebra and a variation of the generalized symmetric decomposition problem (GSDP) as a one-way function. The cryptographic security is assured as long the GSDP problem is computationally hard to solve in non-commutative algebraic structures and belongs currently to the PQC category as no quantum computer attack is likely to exists.
This paper presents a survey on several RFID authentication protocols under low cost restrictions. Low cost RFID are mainly addressed with limited security and privacy protections. In this study, we explore several protocols with various authentication mechanisms found in literature that satisfy low cost restrictions. Assessments of these protocols are based on data protection, tracking protection, forward security. Finally, it is concluded that no single low cost RFID protocol fully meets the requirement of the given assessments. While a protocol satisfies one or two assessments, it fails to …
In this paper, facts existing in different domains are explored, which are comparable by their end result. Properties of various domains and the facts that are part of such a unit are also presented, examples of comparison and methods of usage as means of zero-knowledge protocols are given, finally a zero-knowledge protocol based on afore-mentioned concept is given.
We study the 5G-AKA authentication protocol described in the 5G mobile communication standards. This version of AKA tries to achieve a better privacy than the 3G and 4G versions through the use of asymmetric randomized encryption. Nonetheless, we show that except for the IMSI-catcher attack, all known attacks against 5G-AKA privacy still apply. Next, we modify the 5G-AKA protocol to prevent these attacks, while satisfying the cost and efficiency constraints of the 5G-AKA protocol. We then formally prove that our protocol is sigma-unlinkable. This is a new security notion, which allows for a fi…
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and biometric technologies saw fast evolutions during the last years and which are used in several applications, such as access control. Among important characteristics in the RFID tags, we mention the limitation of resources (memory, energy, ...). Our work focuses on the design of a RFID authentication protocol which uses biometric data and which confirms the secrecy, the authentication and the privacy. Our protocol requires a PRNG (Pseud-Random Number Generator), a robust hash function and Biometric hash function. The Biometric hash function is used to o…
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 …
In this paper, we introduce an efficient and trustworthy conditional privacy-preserving communication protocol for VANETs based on proxy re-signature. The proposed protocol is characterized by the Trusted Authority (TA) designating the Roadside Units (RSUs) to translate signatures computed by the On-Board Units (OBUs) into one that are valid with respect to TA's public key. In addition, the proposed protocol offers both a priori and a posteriori countermeasures: it can not only provide fast anonymous authentication and privacy tracking, but guarantees message trustworthiness for vehicle-to-veh…
In this paper, we analyze four authentication protocols of Bindu et al., Goriparthi et al., Wang et al. and Hölbl et al.. After investigation, we reveal several weaknesses of these schemes. First, Bindu et al.'s protocol suffers from an insider impersonation attack if a malicious user obtains a lost smart card. Second, both Goriparthi et al.'s and Wang et al.'s protocols cannot withstand a DoS attack in the password change phase, i.e. an attacker can involve the phase to make user's password never be used in subsequent authentications. Third, Hölbl et al.'s protocol is vulnerable to an insider…
In this paper, we use the ten security requirements proposed by Liao et al. for a smart card based authentication protocol to examine five recent work in this area. After analyses, we found that the protocols of Juang et al.'s , Hsiang et al.'s, Kim et al.'s, and Li et al.'s all suffer from offline password guessing attack if the smart card is lost, and the protocol of Xu et al.'s is subjected to an insider impersonation attack.
Group communication can benefit from Internet Protocol (IP) multicast protocol to achieve efficient exchange of messages. However, IP multicast does not provide any mechanisms for authentication. In literature, many solutions to solve this problem were presented. It has been shown that Wong and Lam protocol is the only protocol that can resist both packet loss and pollution attacks. In contrast, it has high computation and communication overheads. In the present paper, an efficient design for the implementation of Wong and Lam multicast authentication protocol is proposed. In order to solve th…
The Denial-of-service (DoS) attack is considered one of the largest threats to the availability of cloud-computing services. Due to the unique architecture of cloud-computing systems, the methods for detecting and preventing DoS attacks are quite different from those used in traditional network systems. A main target for DoS attackers is the authentication protocol because it is considered a gateway to accessing cloud resources. In this work, we propose a cloud-based authentication protocol - one that securely authenticates the cloud user and effectively prevents DoS attack on the cloud-comput…
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is appearing as a favorite technology for automated identification, which can be widely applied to many applications such as e-passport, supply chain management and ticketing. However, researchers have found many security and privacy problems along RFID technology. In recent years, many researchers are interested in RFID authentication protocols and their security flaws. In this paper, we analyze two of the newest RFID authentication protocols which proposed by Fu et al. and Li et al. from several security viewpoints. We present different attacks such as d…
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology one of the most promising technologies in the field of ubiquitous computing. Indeed, RFID technology may well replace barcode technology. Although it offers many advantages over other identification systems, there are also associated security risks that are not easy to be addressed. When designing a real lightweight authentication protocol for low cost RFID tags, a number of challenges arise due to the extremely limited computational, storage and communication abilities of Low-cost RFID tags. This paper proposes a real mutual authentication prot…
Yeh et al. recently have proposed a mutual authentication protocol based on EPC Class-1 Gen.-2 standard [1]. They have claimed that their protocol is secure against adversarial attacks and also provides forward secrecy. In this paper we will show that the proposed protocol does not have proper security features. A powerful and practical attack is presented on this protocol whereby the whole security of the protocol is broken. Furthermore, Yeh et al. protocol does not assure the untraceabilitiy and backward untraceabilitiy aspects. Namely, all past and next transactions of a compromised tag wil…
Cloud-based services have become part of our day-to-day software solutions. The identity authentication process is considered to be the main gateway to these services. As such, these gates have become increasingly susceptible to aggressive attackers, who may use Denial of Service (DoS) attacks to close these gates permanently. There are a number of authentication protocols that are strong enough to verify identities and protect traditional networked applications. However, these authentication protocols may themselves introduce DoS risks when used in cloud-based applications. This risk introduc…
Authentication schemes are practised globally to verify the legitimacy of users and servers for the exchange of data in different facilities. Generally, the server verifies a user to provide resources for different purposes. But due to the large network system, the authentication process has become complex and therefore, time-to-time different authentication protocols have been proposed for the multi-server architecture. However, most of the protocols are vulnerable to various security attacks and their performance is not efficient. In this paper, we propose a secure and energy-efficient remot…
In recent times, a necessity has been raised in order to distribute computing applications often across grids. These applications are dependent on the services like data transfer or data portal services as well as submission of jobs. Security is of utmost importance in grid computing applications as grid resources are heterogeneous, dynamic, and multidomain. Authentication remains as the significant security challenge in grid environment. In traditional authentication protocol a single server stores the sensitive user credentials, like username and password. When such a server is compromised, …
Key Assignment Schemes (KASs) have been extensively studied in the context of cryptographically-enforced access control, where derived keys are used to decrypt protected resources. In this paper, we explore the use of KASs in entity authentication protocols, where we use derived keys to encrypt challenges. This novel use of KASs permits the efficient authentication of an entity in accordance with an authentication policy by associating entities with security labels representing specific services. Cryptographic keys are associated with each security label and demonstrating knowledge of an appro…
