This paper presents a dual-factor authentication protocol and its low-power implementation for security of implantable medical devices (IMDs). The protocol incorporates traditional cryptographic first-factor authentication using Datagram Transport Layer Security - Pre-Shared Key (DTLS-PSK) followed by the user's touch-based voluntary second-factor authentication for enhanced security. With a low-power compact always-on wake-up timer and touch-based wake-up circuitry, our test chip consumes only 735 pW idle state power at 20.15 Hz and 2.5 V. The hardware accelerated dual-factor authentication unit consumes 8 $μ$W at 660 kHz and 0.87 V. Our test chip was coupled with commercial Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) transceiver, DC-DC converter, touch sensor and coin cell battery to demonstrate standalone implantable operation and also tested using in-vitro measurement setup.
With the rapid development of health equipments, increasingly more patients have installed the implantable medical devices (IMD) in their bodies for diagnostic, monitoring, and therapeutic purposes. IMDs are extremely limited in computation power and battery capacity. Meanwhile, IMDs have to communicate with an external programmer device (i.e., IMD programmer) through the wireless channel, which put them under the risk of unauthorized access and malicious wireless attacks. In this paper, we propose a proxy-based fine-grained access control scheme for IMDs, which can prolong the IMD's lifetime …
Modern Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) feature wireless connectivity, which makes them vulnerable to security attacks. Particular to IMDs is the battery Denial-of-Service attack whereby attackers aim to fully deplete the battery by occupying the IMD with continuous authentication requests. Zero-Power Defense (ZPD) based on energy harvesting is known to be an excellent protection against these attacks. This paper establishes essential design specifications for employing ZPD techniques in IMDs, offers a critical review of ZPD techniques found in literature and, subsequently, gives crucial rec…
Implantable medical devices (IMDs), such as pacemakers, implanted cardiac defibrillators, and neurostimulators are medical devices implanted into patients' bodies for monitoring physiological signals and performing medical treatments. Many IMDs have built-in wireless communication modules to facilitate data collecting and device reprogramming by external programmers. The wireless communication brings significant conveniences for advanced applications such as real-time and remote monitoring but also introduces the risk of unauthorized wireless access. The absence of effective access control mec…
Over the past decade, focus on the security and privacy aspects of implantable medical devices (IMDs) has intensified, driven by the multitude of cybersecurity vulnerabilities found in various existing devices. However, due to their strict computational, energy and physical constraints, conventional security protocols are not directly applicable to IMDs. Custom-tailored schemes have been proposed instead which, however, fail to cover the full spectrum of security features that modern IMDs and their ecosystems so critically require. In this paper we propose IMDfence, a security protocol for IMD…
To facilitate monitoring and management, modern Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) are often equipped with wireless capabilities, which raise the risk of malicious access to IMDs. Although schemes are proposed to secure the IMD access, some issues are still open. First, pre-sharing a long-term key between a patient's IMD and a doctor's programmer is vulnerable since once the doctor's programmer is compromised, all of her patients suffer; establishing a temporary key by leveraging proximity gets rid of pre-shared keys, but as the approach lacks real authentication, it can be exploited by nearby…
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.
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).
In conventional cryptography, information-theoretically secure message authentication can be achieved by means of universal hash functions, and requires that the two legitimate users share a random secret key, which is twice as long as the message. We address the question as of whether quantum resources can offer any advantage over classical unconditionally secure message authentication codes. It is shown that passive prepare-and-measure quantum message-authentication schemes cannot do better than their classical counterparts. Subsequently we present an interactive entanglement-assisted scheme…
We consider the problem of constructing optimal authentication codes with splitting. New infinite families of such codes are obtained. In particular, we establish the first known infinite family of optimal authentication codes with splitting that are secure against spoofing attacks of order two.
In todays world of technology and gadgets almost every person is having a portable device, be it a laptop or the smart phones. The user would like to have all the services at his fingertips and access them through the portable device he owns. Maybe he wants some data from the fellow user or from the service provider or maybe he wants to control his smart devices at home from wherever he is. In the present era of mobile environments, interactions between the user device and the service provider must be secure enough regardless of the type of device used to access or utilize the services. In thi…
Recently, Mun et al. analyzed Wu et al.'s authentication scheme and proposed a enhanced anonymous authentication scheme for roaming service in global mobility networks. However, through careful analysis, we find that Mun et al.'s scheme is vulnerable to impersonation attacks, off-line password guessing attacks and insider attacks, and cannot provide user friendliness, user's anonymity, proper mutual authentication and local verification. To remedy these weaknesses, in this paper we propose a novel anonymous authentication scheme for roaming service in global mobility networks. Security and per…
Motivated by an increasing need for privacy-preserving voice communications, we investigate here the original idea of sending encrypted data and speech in the form of pseudo-speech signals in the audio domain. Being less constrained than military ``Crypto Phones'' and allowing genuine public evaluation, this approach is quite promising for public unsecured voice communication infrastructures, such as 3G cellular network and VoIP.A cornerstone of secure voice communications is the authenticated exchange of cryptographic keys with sole resource the voice channel, and neither Public Key Infrastru…
In this paper, we generalize a secured direct communication process between N users with partial and full cooperation of quantum server. The security analysis of authentication and communication processes against many types of attacks proved that the attacker cannot gain any information during intercepting either authentication or communication processes. Hence, the security of transmitted message among N users is ensured as the attacker introduces an error probability irrespective of the sequence of measurement.
With the rapid development of MANET, secure and practical authentication is becoming increasingly important. The existing works perform the research from two aspects, i.e., (a)secure key division and distributed storage, (b)secure distributed authentication. But there still exist several unsolved problems. Specifically, it may suffer from cheating problems and fault authentication attack, which can result in authentication failure and DoS attack towards authentication service. Besides, most existing schemes are not with satisfactory efficiency due to exponential arithmetic based on Shamir's sc…
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 …
The piggy bank idea allows one-way encryption of information that can be accessed only by authorized parties. Here we show how the piggy bank idea can be used to authenticate parties to counter man-in-the-middle (MIM) attack that can jeopardize the double-lock cryptography protocol. We call this method double-signature double lock cryptography and it can be implemented in ways that go beyond hash-based message authentication.
Recently, Yan et al. proposed a quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol with authentication using single photons and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pairs (Yan et al., CMC-Computers, Materials \& Continua, 63(3), 2020). In this work, we show that the QSDC protocol is not secure against intercept-and-resend attack and impersonation attack. An eavesdropper can get the full secret message by applying these attacks. We propose a modification of this protocol, which defeats the above attacks along with all the familiar attacks.
The paper presents an authentication scheme for remote systems using smart card. The scheme prevents the scenario of many logged in users with the same login identity, and does not require password/verifier table to validate the users' login request. The scheme provides a user-friendly password change option, and withstands the replay, impersonation, stolen-verifier, guessing, and denial-of-service attacks.
Password security can no longer provide enough security in the area of remote user authentication. Considering this security drawback, researchers are trying to find solution with multifactor remote user authentication system. Recently, three factor remote user authentication using biometric and smart card has drawn a considerable attention of the researchers. However, most of the current proposed schemes have security flaws. They are vulnerable to attacks like user impersonation attack, server masquerading attack, password guessing attack, insider attack, denial of service attack, forgery att…
Immersive technologies, including augmented and virtual reality (AR & VR) devices, have enhanced digital communication along with a considerable increase in digital threats. Thus, authentication becomes critical in AR & VR technology, particularly in shared spaces. In this paper, we propose applying the ZeTA protocol that allows secure authentication even in shared spaces for the AR & VR context. We explain how it can be used with the available interaction methods provided by Head-Mounted Displays. In future work, our research goal is to evaluate different designs of ZeTA (e.g., interaction mo…
In this paper, we investigate multi-message authentication to combat adversaries with infinite computational capacity. An authentication framework over a wiretap channel $(W_1,W_2)$ is proposed to achieve information-theoretic security with the same key. The proposed framework bridges the two research areas in physical (PHY) layer security: secure transmission and message authentication. Specifically, the sender Alice first transmits message $M$ to the receiver Bob over $(W_1,W_2)$ with an error correction code; then Alice employs a hash function (i.e., $\varepsilon$-AWU$_2$ hash functions) to…
Electric energy systems are undergoing significant changes to improve system reliability and accommodate increasing power demands. The penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) including roof-top solar panels, energy storage, electric vehicles, etc., enables the on-site generation of economically dispatchable power curtailing operational costs. The effective control of DERs requires communication between utilities and DER system operators. The communication protocols employed for DER management and control lack sophisticated cybersecurity features and can compromise power systems secu…
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…
Smart card based authentication schemes are used in various fields like e-banking, e-commerce, wireless sensor networks, medical system and so on to authenticate the both remote user and the application server during the communication via internet. Recently, Karuppiah and Saravanan proposed an authentication scheme which is based on password and one-way cryptographic hash function. They have used a secure identity mechanism i.e., users' and server's identity are not public. Thus, the user and the server do not send their identity directly to each other during communications. In this paper, we …
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…
Recently, the number of requests for multicast services through the wireless networks has been increased. However, for successful deployment, security and efficiency of content delivery must be provided at first. This paper presents a new approach for secure multicast in wireless networks. This approach, CRAW (Combination of Re-keying and Authentication in Wireless networks) combines member authentication procedure with group key management protocol to provide an efficient group re-keying process. One-time password is proposed for member authentication and CKC (Code for Key Calculation) is sug…
A physical unclonable function (PUF) generates hardware intrinsic volatile secrets by exploiting uncontrollable manufacturing randomness. Although PUFs provide the potential for lightweight and secure authentication for increasing numbers of low-end Internet of Things devices, practical and secure mechanisms remain elusive. We aim to explore simulatable PUFs (SimPUFs) that are physically unclonable but efficiently modeled mathematically through privileged one-time PUF access to address the above problem. Given a challenge, a securely stored SimPUF in possession of a trusted server computes the…
With the rapid development of various emerging technologies such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), there is a need to secure communications between such devices. Communication system delays are one of the factors that adversely affect the performance of an authentication system. 5G networks enable greater data throughput and lower latency, which presents new opportunities for the secure authentication of business transactions between IIoT devices. We evaluate an approach to developing a flexible and secure model for authenticating IIoT components in dynamic 5G environments.
We consider a setup in which the channel from Alice to Bob is less noisy than the channel from Eve to Bob. We show that there exist encoding and decoding which accomplish error correction and authentication simultaneously; that is, Bob is able to correctly decode a message coming from Alice and reject a message coming from Eve with high probability. The system does not require any secret key shared between Alice and Bob, provides information theoretic security, and can safely be composed with other protocols in an arbitrary context.
With the ubiquitous advancement in smart medical devices and systems, the potential of Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) network is evolving in modern healthcare systems. The medical professionals (doctors, nurses, or medical experts) can access vitals and sensitive physiological information about the patients and provide proper treatment to improve the quality of life through the RPM network. However, the wireless nature of communication in the RPM network makes it challenging to design an efficient mechanism for secure communication. Many authentication schemes have been proposed in recent yea…
Metaverse is a vast virtual environment parallel to the physical world in which users enjoy a variety of services acting as an avatar. To build a secure living habitat, it's vital to ensure the virtual-physical traceability that tracking a malicious player in the physical world via his avatars in virtual space. In this paper, we propose a two-factor authentication framework based on chameleon signature and biometric-based authentication. First, aiming at disguise in virtual space, we propose a chameleon collision signature algorithm to achieve the verifiability of the avatar's virtual identity…
We propose the use of PAKE for achieving and enhancing entity authentication (EA) and key management (KM) in the context of decentralized end-to-end encrypted email and secure messaging, i.e., where neither a public key infrastructure nor trusted third parties are used. This approach not only simplifies the EA process by requiring users to share only a low-entropy secret, e.g., a memorable word, but it also allows us to establish a high-entropy secret key; this key enables a series of cryptographic enhancements and security properties, which are hard to achieve using out-of-band (OOB) authenti…
Secure spontaneous authentication between devices worn at arbitrary location on the same body is a challenging, yet unsolved problem. We propose BANDANA, the first-ever implicit secure device-to-device authentication scheme for devices worn on the same body. Our approach leverages instantaneous variation in acceleration patterns from gait sequences to extract always-fresh secure secrets. It enables secure spontaneous pairing of devices worn on the same body or interacted with. The method is robust against noise in sensor readings and active attackers. We demonstrate the robustness of BANDANA o…
We revisit the problem of entity authentication in decentralized end-to-end encrypted email and secure messaging to propose a practical and self-sustaining cryptographic solution based on password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE). This not only allows users to authenticate each other via shared low-entropy secrets, e.g., memorable words, without a public key infrastructure or a trusted third party, but it also paves the way for automation and a series of cryptographic enhancements; improves security by minimizing the impact of human error and potentially improves usability. First, we study a …
Biometrics deal with automated methods of identifying a person or verifying the identity of a person based on physiological or behavioral characteristics. Visual cryptography is a secret sharing scheme where a secret image is encrypted into the shares which independently disclose no information about the original secret image. As biometric template are stored in the centralized database, due to security threats biometric template may be modified by attacker. If biometric template is altered authorized user will not be allowed to access the resource. To deal this issue visual cryptography schem…
User authentication is one of the most important part of information security. Computer security most commonly depends on passwords to authenticate human users. Password authentication systems will be either been usable but not secure, or secure but not usable. While there are different types of authentication systems available alphanumeric password is the most commonly used authentication mechanism. But this method has significant drawbacks. An alternative solution to the text based authentication is Graphical User Authentication based on the fact that humans tends to remember images better t…
Currently, due to the high scalability and global coverage of space information network (SIN), more service providers and users are willing to provide or subscribe to personal services through the satellite network. However, the messages are transmitted in public satellite-ground links, which makes access users vulnerable to various forms of attacks. Existing authentication protocols do not meet the expected security and short delay requirements to ensure the security of real-time user access and the confidentiality of communication content. Moreover, with the development of quantum computers,…
The rapid growth of the Internet of Things technology in healthcare domain led to the appearance of many security threats and risks. It became very challenging to provide full protection with the expansion in using sensor objects in medical field, this led to the Internet of Medical Things definition, the security part in IoMT poses a perilous problem that keeps growing, because of the data sensitivity and critical information. The lack of providing a secure environment in IoMT may lead to patients privacy issues, not only leaving the data privacy of the patients at risk but also their lives c…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is giving a boost to a plethora of new opportunities for the robust and sustainable deployment of cyber physical systems. The cornerstone of any IoT system is the sensing devices. These sensing devices have considerable resource constraints, including insufficient battery capacity, CPU capability, and physical security. Because of such resource constraints, designing lightweight cryptographic protocols is an opportunity. Remote User Authentication ensures that two parties establish a secure and durable session key. This study presents a lightweight and safe authent…
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 …
In this paper, we propose a new theoretical scheme for quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) with user authentication. Different from the previous QSDC protocols, the present protocol uses only one orthogonal basis of single-qubit states to encode the secret message. Moreover, this is a one-time and one-way communication protocol, which uses qubits prepared in a randomly chosen arbitrary basis, to transmit the secret message. We discuss the security of the proposed protocol against some common attacks and show that no eaves-dropper can get any information from the quantum and classical ch…
Biometrics security is a dynamic research area spurred by the need to protect personal traits from threats like theft, non-authorised distribution, reuse and so on. A widely investigated solution to such threats consists in processing the biometric signals under encryption, to avoid any leakage of information towards non-authorised parties. In this paper, we propose to leverage on the superior performance of multimodal biometric recognition to improve the efficiency of a biometric-based authentication protocol operating on encrypted data under the malicious security model. In the proposed prot…
With the advancement of technology, devices, which are considered non-traditional in terms of internet capabilities, are now being embedded in microprocessors to communicate and these devices are known as IoT devices. This technology has enabled household devices to have the ability to communicate with the internet and a network comprising of such device can create a home IoT network. Such IoT devices are resource constrained and lack high-level security protocols. Thus, security becomes a major issue for such network systems. One way to secure the networks is through reliable authentication p…
We propose Secure Pick Up (SPU), a convenient, lightweight, in-device, non-intrusive and automatic-learning system for smartphone user authentication. Operating in the background, our system implicitly observes users' phone pick-up movements, the way they bend their arms when they pick up a smartphone to interact with the device, to authenticate the users. Our SPU outperforms the state-of-the-art implicit authentication mechanisms in three main aspects: 1) SPU automatically learns the user's behavioral pattern without requiring a large amount of training data (especially those of other users) …
Very recently, Barman et al. proposed a multi-server authentication protocol using fuzzy commitment. The authors claimed that their protocol provides anonymity while resisting all known attacks. In this paper, we analyze that Barman et al.'s protocol is still vulnerable to anonymity violation attack and impersonation based on the stolen smart attack; moreover, it has scalability issues. We then propose an improved and enhanced protocol to overcome the security weaknesses of Barman et al.'s scheme. The security of the proposed protocol is verified using BAN logic and widely accepted automated A…
Post-quantum cryptography studies the security of classical, i.e. non-quantum cryptographic protocols against quantum attacks. Until recently, the considered adversaries were assumed to use quantum computers and behave like classical adversaries otherwise. A more conservative approach is to assume that also the communication between the honest parties and the adversary is (partly) quantum. We discuss several options to define secure encryption and authentication against these stronger adversaries who can carry out 'superposition attacks'. We re-prove a recent result of Boneh and Zhandry, stati…
The integration of air and ground smart vehicles is becoming a new paradigm of future transportation. A decent number of smart unmanned vehicles or UAS will be sharing the national airspace for various purposes, such as express delivery, surveillance, etc. However, the proliferation of UAS also brings challenges considering the safe integration of them into the current Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems. Especially when the current Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcasting (ADS-B) systems do not have message authentication mechanisms, it can not distinguish whether an authorized UAS is u…
