Securing Offline Delivery Services by Using Kerberos Authentication

Abstract

With the rise of crowdsourcing economies, the home delivery business is now undergoing rapid development. The authentication schemes that are currently used in the home delivery business remain unanalyzed from the provable authenticity perspective. In this paper, we generalize the “cross-realm authentication path” of the Kerberos protocol and apply it to the online ordering and offline delivery business. We design a Kerberos-based scheme for the crowdsourcing delivery model to establish authenticity for principals, including customers, suppliers, and deliverymen. Then we extend it to some more complex models, such as the receiving agent model, the unified service of franchised chain model, and the relay delivery model. The authentication schemes can also be incorporated into the door access and guard system to enhance the physical security in smart cities.