Especially in context of critical urban infrastructures, trust in IoT data is of utmost importance. While most technology stacks provide means for authentication and encryption of device-to-cloud traffic, there are currently no mechanisms to rule out physical tampering with an IoT device's sensors. Addressing this gap, we introduce a new method for extracting a hardware fingerprint of an IoT sensor which can be used for secret-free authentication. By comparing the fingerprint against reference measurements recorded prior to deployment, we can tell whether the sensing hardware connected to the IoT device has been changed by environmental effects or with malicious intent. Our approach exploits the characteristic behavior of analog circuits, which is revealed by applying a fixed-frequency alternating current to the sensor, while recording its output voltage. To demonstrate the general feasibility of our method, we apply it to four commercially available temperature sensors using laboratory equipment and evaluate the accuracy. The results indicate that with a sensible configuration of the two hyperparameters we can identify individual sensors with high probability, using only a few recordings from the target device.
Tardos codes are currently the state-of-the-art in the design of practical collusion-resistant fingerprinting codes. Tardos codes rely on a secret vector drawn from a publicly known probability distribution in order to generate each Buyer's fingerprint. For security purposes, this secret vector must not be revealed to the Buyers. To prevent an untrustworthy Provider forging a copy of a Work with an innocent Buyer's fingerprint, previous asymmetric fingerprinting algorithms enforce the idea of the Buyers generating their own fingerprint. Applying this concept to Tardos codes is challenging sinc…
Radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting is a tool which allows for authentication by utilizing distinct and random distortions in a received signal based on characteristics of the transmitter. We introduce a deep learning-based authentication method for a novel RF fingerprinting system called Physically Unclonable Wireless Systems (PUWS). An element of PUWS is based on the concept of Chaotic Antenna Arrays (CAAs) that can be cost effectively manufactured by utilizing mask-free laser-enhanced direct print additive manufacturing (LE-DPAM). In our experiments, using simulation data of 300 CAAs each e…
In this demonstration, we put ourselves in the place of a website manager who seeks to use browser fingerprinting for web authentication. The first step is to choose the attributes to implement among the hundreds that are available. To do so, we developed BrFAST, an attribute selection platform that includes FPSelect, an algorithm that rigorously selects the attributes according to a trade-off between security and usability. BrFAST is configured with a set of parameters for which we provide values for BrFAST to be usable as is. We notably include the resources to use two publicly available bro…
Physical layer authentication relies on detecting unique imperfections in signals transmitted by radio devices to isolate their fingerprint. Recently, deep learning-based authenticators have increasingly been proposed to classify devices using these fingerprints, as they achieve higher accuracies compared to traditional approaches. However, it has been shown in other domains that adding carefully crafted perturbations to legitimate inputs can fool such classifiers. This can undermine the security provided by the authenticator. Unlike adversarial attacks applied in other domains, an adversary h…
Group oriented applications are getting more and more popular in mobile Internet and call for secure and efficient secret sharing (SS) scheme to meet their requirements. A $(t,n)$ threshold SS scheme divides a secret into $n$ shares such that any $t$ or more than $t$ shares can recover the secret while less than $t$ shares cannot. However, an adversary, even without a valid share, may obtain the secret by impersonating a shareholder to recover the secret with $t$ or more legal shareholders. Therefore, this paper uses linear code to propose a threshold changeable secret sharing (TCSS) scheme, i…
The paper is aimed for a wavelet based steganographic or watermarking technique in frequency domain termed as WASTIR for secret message or image transmission or image authentication. Number system conversion of the secret image by changing radix form decimal to quaternary is the pre-processing of the technique. Cover image scaling through inverse discrete wavelet transformation with false Horizontal and vertical coefficients are embedded with quaternary digits through hash function and a secret key. Experimental results are computed and compared with the existing steganographic techniques like…
The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has brought in new challenges in, device identification --what the device is, and, authentication --is the device the one it claims to be. Traditionally, the authentication problem is solved by means of a cryptographic protocol. However, the computational complexity of cryptographic protocols and/or scalability problems related to key management, render almost all cryptography based authentication protocols impractical for IoT. The problem of device identification is, on the other hand, sadly neglected. We believe that device fingerprinting can be used to solve bot…
We consider problems of authentication using secret key generation under a privacy constraint on the enrolled source data. An adversary who has access to the stored description and correlated side information tries to deceive the authentication as well as learn about the source. We characterize the optimal tradeoff between the compression rate of the stored description, the leakage rate of the source data, and the exponent of the adversary's maximum false acceptance probability. The related problem of secret key generation with a privacy constraint is also studied where the optimal tradeoff be…
The problem of secret-key based authentication under a privacy constraint on the source sequence is considered. The identifier measurements during authentication are assumed to be controllable via a cost-constrained "action" sequence. Single-letter characterizations of the optimal trade-off among the secret-key rate, storage rate, privacy-leakage rate, and action cost are given for the four problems where noisy or noiseless measurements of the source are enrolled to generate or embed secret keys. The results are relevant for several user-authentication scenarios including physical and biometri…
For conventional secret sharing, if cheaters can submit possibly forged shares after observing shares of the honest users in the reconstruction phase then they cannot only disturb the protocol but also only they may reconstruct the true secret. To overcome the problem, secret sharing scheme with properties of cheater-identification have been proposed. Existing protocols for cheater-identifiable secret sharing assumed non-rushing cheaters or honest majority. In this paper, we remove both conditions simultaneously, and give its universal construction from any secret sharing scheme. To resolve th…
In this paper, we describe ongoing work that focuses on improving the strength of the answers to security questions. The ultimate goal of the proposed research is to evaluate the possibility of nudging users towards strong answers for ubiquitous security questions. In this research we are proposing a user interface design for fallback authentication to encourage users to design stronger answers. The proposed design involves visual feedback to the user based on mnemonics which attempts to give visual feedback to the user on the strength of the answer provided and guide the user to creatively de…
Browser fingerprinting consists into collecting attributes from a web browser. Hundreds of attributes have been discovered through the years. Each one of them provides a way to distinguish browsers, but also comes with a usability cost (e.g., additional collection time). In this work, we propose FPSelect, an attribute selection framework allowing verifiers to tune their browser fingerprinting probes for web authentication. We formalize the problem as searching for the attribute set that satisfies a security requirement and minimizes the usability cost. The security is measured as the proportio…
Prairie View A&M University（普雷里维尤农工大学）；Texas A&M University System（德州农工大学系统）
In this paper, we propose Device Authentication Code (DAC), a novel method for authenticating IoT devices with wireless interface by exploiting their radio frequency (RF) signatures. The proposed DAC is based on RF fingerprinting, information theoretic method, feature learning, and discriminatory power of deep learning. Specifically, an autoencoder is used to automatically extract features from the RF traces, and the reconstruction error is used as the DAC and this DAC is unique to the device and the particular message of interest. Then Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test is used to match the distri…
We consider the problem of identification and authentication based on secret key generation from some user-generated source data (e.g., a biometric source). The goal is to reliably identify users pre-enrolled in a database as well as authenticate them based on the estimated secret key while preserving the privacy of the enrolled data and of the generated keys. We characterize the optimal tradeoff between the identification rate, the compression rate of the users' source data, information leakage rate, and secret key rate. In particular, we provide a coding strategy based on layered random binn…
We analyze the fundamental trade-off of secret key-based authentication systems in the presence of an eavesdropper for correlated Gaussian sources. A complete characterization of trade-off among secret-key, storage, and privacy-leakage rates of both generated and chosen secret models is provided. One of the main contributions is revealing that unlike the known results for discrete sources, there is no need for the second auxiliary random variable in characterizing the capacity regions for the Gaussian cases. In addition, it is shown that the strong secrecy for secrecy-leakage of the systems ca…
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.
Browser fingerprinting consists in collecting attributes from a web browser to build a browser fingerprint. In this work, we assess the adequacy of browser fingerprints as an authentication factor, on a dataset of 4,145,408 fingerprints composed of 216 attributes. It was collected throughout 6 months from a population of general browsers. We identify, formalize, and assess the properties for browser fingerprints to be usable and practical as an authentication factor. We notably evaluate their distinctiveness, their stability through time, their collection time, and their size in memory. We sho…
In an open network environment, privacy of group communication and integrity of the communication data are the two major issues related to secured information exchange. The required level of security may be achieved by authenticating a group key in the communication channel, where contribution from each group member becomes a part of the overall group key. In the current work, we have developed an authentication system through Central Administrative Server (CAS) for automatic integration and validation of the group key. For secured group communication, the CAS generates a secret alphanumeric g…
We present a practical methodology for securing the password-based authentication scheme. We propose a solution based on the well-known (k,n) threshold scheme of Shamir for sharing a secret, where in our case the secret is the password itself and (k,n) threshold scheme means that n password-derived secrets (shares) are created and k less than n shares are necessary and sufficient for reconstructing the password, while k-1 are not sufficient. The scheme is information-theoretic secure. Since each of the n shares is stored on a different host (shareholder), an attacker will need to compromise k …
Mobile devices store a diverse set of private user data and have gradually become a hub to control users' other personal Internet-of-Things devices. Access control on mobile devices is therefore highly important. The widely accepted solution is to protect access by asking for a password. However, password authentication is tedious, e.g., a user needs to input a password every time she wants to use the device. Moreover, existing biometrics such as face, fingerprint, and touch behaviors are vulnerable to forgery attacks. We propose a new touch-based biometric authentication system that is passiv…
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 …
In this paper, we propose a very secure and reliable owner-self-managed private key recovery method. In recent years, Public Key Authentication (PKA) method has been identified as the most feasible online security solution. However, losing the private key also implies the risk of losing the ownership of the assets associated with the private key. For key protection, the commonly adopted something-you-x solutions require a new secret to protect the target secret and fall into a circular protection issue as the new secret has to be protected too. To resolve the circular protection issue and prov…
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…
We introduce a new type of cryptographic primitive that we call hiding fingerprinting. A (quantum) fingerprinting scheme translates a binary string of length $n$ to $d$ (qu)bits, typically $d\ll n$, such that given any string $y$ and a fingerprint of $x$, one can decide with high accuracy whether $x=y$. Classical fingerprinting schemes cannot hide information very well: a classical fingerprint of $x$ that guarantees error at most $ε$ necessarily reveals $Ω(\log(1/ epsilon))$ bits about $x$. We call a scheme hiding if it reveals $o(\log(1/ε))$ bits; accordingly, no classical scheme is hiding. F…
While the literature on RF fingerprinting-based authentication and key distillation is vast, the two topics have customarily been studied separately. In this paper, starting from the observation that the wireless channel is a composite, deterministic / stochastic process, we propose a power domain decomposition that allows performing the two tasks simultaneously. We devise intelligent pre-processing schemes to decompose channel state information (CSI) observation vectors into "predictable" and "unpredictable" components. The former, primarily due to large-scale fading, can be used for node aut…
In this work we present the first passive attack over the SASI lightweight authentication protocol with modular rotations. This can be used to fully recover the secret $ID$ of the RFID tag, which is the value the protocol is designed to conceal. The attack is described initially for recovering $\lfloor log_2(96) \rfloor=6$ bits of the secret value $ID$, a result that by itself allows to mount traceability attacks on any given tag. However, the proposed scheme can be extended to obtain any amount of bits of the secret $ID$, provided a sufficiently large number of successful consecutive sessions…
Privacy preserving RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) authentication has been an active research area in recent years. Both forward security and backward security are required to maintain the privacy of a tag, i.e., exposure of a tag's secret key should not reveal the past or future secret keys of the tag. We envisage the need for a formal model for backward security for RFID protocol designs in shared key settings, since the RFID tags are too resource-constrained to support public key settings. However, there has not been much research on backward security for shared key environment since …
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…
Wallet may be described as container application used for configuring, accessing and analysing data from underlying payment application(s). There are two dominant types of digital wallet applications, proximity wallet and remote wallet. In the payment industry, one often hears about authentication approach for proximity or remote wallets or the underlying payment applications separately, but there is no such approach, as per our knowledge, for combined wallet, the holder application. While Secure Element (SE) controlled by the mobile network operator (i.e., SIM card) may ensure strong authenti…
Many password alternatives for web authentication proposed over the years, despite having different designs and objectives, all predominantly rely on the knowledge of some secret. This motivates us, herein, to provide the first detailed exploration of the integration of a fundamentally different element of defense into the design of web authentication schemes: a mimicry-resistance dimension. We analyze web authentication mechanisms with respect to new usability and security properties related to mimicry-resistance (augmenting the UDS framework), and in particular evaluate invisible techniques …
In this paper, we show a "direct" equivalence between certain authentication codes and robust secret sharing schemes. It was previously known that authentication codes and robust secret sharing schemes are closely related to similar types of designs, but direct equivalences had not been considered in the literature. Our new equivalences motivate the consideration of a certain "key-substitution attack." We study this attack and analyze it in the setting of "dual authentication codes." We also show how this viewpoint provides a nice way to prove properties and generalizations of some known const…
The IoT (Internet of Things) technology has been widely adopted in recent years and has profoundly changed the people's daily lives. However, in the meantime, such a fast-growing technology has also introduced new privacy issues, which need to be better understood and measured. In this work, we look into how private information can be leaked from network traffic generated in the smart home network. Although researchers have proposed techniques to infer IoT device types or user behaviors under clean experiment setup, the effectiveness of such approaches become questionable in the complex but re…
Observation Resilient Authentication Schemes (ORAS) are a class of shared secret challenge-response identification schemes where a user mentally computes the response via a cognitive function to authenticate herself such that eavesdroppers cannot readily extract the secret. Security evaluation of ORAS generally involves quantifying information leaked via observed challenge-response pairs. However, little work has evaluated information leaked via human behavior while interacting with these schemes. A common way to achieve observation resilience is by including a modulus operation in the cogniti…
RFID tags are heavily constrained in computational and storage capabilities, and raise numerous privacy concerns in everyday life due to their vulnerability to different attacks. Both forward security and backward security are required to maintain the privacy of a tag i.e., exposure of a tag's secret key should not reveal the past or future secret keys of the tag. We envisage the need for a formal model for backward security for RFID protocol designs in shared key settings, since the RFID tags are too resource-constrained to support public key settings. However, there has not been much researc…
In the scope of VANETs, nature of exchanged safety/warning messages renders itself highly location dependent as it is usually for incident reporting. Thus, vehicles are required to periodically exchange beacon messages that include speed, time and GPS location information. In this paper paper, we present a physical layer assisted message authentication scheme that uses Angle of Arrival (AoA) estimation to verify the message originator location based on the claimed location information. Within the considered vehicular communication settings, fundamental limits of AoA estimation are developed in…
Radio Frequency Fingerprinting through Deep Learning (RFFDL) is a data-driven IoT authentication technique that leverages the unique hardware-level manufacturing imperfections associated with a particular device to recognize (fingerprint) the device based on variations introduced in the transmitted waveform. The proposed SignCRF is a scalable, channel-agnostic, data-driven radio authentication platform with unmatched precision in fingerprinting wireless devices based on their unique manufacturing impairments and independent of the dynamic channel irregularities caused by mobility. SignCRF cons…
Shamir or Blakley secret sharing schemes are used for the authentication process in the studies before, but still secure group authentication and hand-over process remain as challenges in group authentication approaches. In this study, a novel method is proposed to provide a secure group authentication. The proposed approach also enables a hand-over process between groups by using Lagrange's polynomial interpolation and Weil pairing in elliptic curve groups for wireless networks with mobility support. One of the advantages of our proposed scheme is that the computational load for a member in t…
By expanding the connection of objects to the Internet and their entry to human life, the issue of security and privacy has become important. In order to enhance security and privacy on the Internet, many security protocols have been developed. Unfortunately, the security analyzes that have been carried out on these protocols show that they are vulnerable to one or few attacks, which eliminates the use of these protocols. Therefore, the need for a security protocol on the Internet of Things (IoT) has not yet been resolved. Recently, Khor and Sidorov cryptanalyzed the Wang et al. protocol and p…
Physical-layer security is regaining traction in the research community, due to the performance boost introduced by deep learning classification algorithms. This is particularly true for sender authentication in wireless communications via radio fingerprinting. However, previous research efforts mainly focused on terrestrial wireless devices while, to the best of our knowledge, none of the previous work took into consideration satellite transmitters. The satellite scenario is generally challenging because, among others, satellite radio transducers feature non-standard electronics (usually aged…
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…
Rapid LoRA Aggregation for Wireless Channel Adaptation in Open-Set Radio Frequency Fingerprinting
School of Internet of Things, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学物联网学院）；School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学网络空间安全学院）；National Mobile Communications Research Lab, Southeast University（东南大学国家移动通信研究中心）
Authentication proxies, which store users' secret credentials and submit them to servers on their behalf, offer benefits with respect to security of the authentication and usability of credential management. However, as being a service that is not in control of users, one important problem they suffer is the trust problem; how users trust that their secrets are handled securely in the proxy and not revealed to third parties. In this paper, we present a solution called Trust-in-the-Middle, a TPM based proxy system which ensures that user credentials are securely stored and submitted without dis…
The problem of secret-key based authentication under privacy and storage constraints on the source sequence is considered. The identifier measurement channels during authentication are assumed to be controllable via a cost-constrained action sequence. Single-letter inner and outer bounds for the key-leakage-storage-cost regions are derived for a generalization of a classic two-terminal key agreement model with an eavesdropper that observes a sequence that is correlated with the sequences observed by the legitimate terminals. The additions to the model are that the encoder observes a noisy vers…
