Authentication Credentials Research Articles

Multi-Factor Authentication for Secured Financial Transactions in Cloud Environment

The rise of the digital economy and the comfort of accessing by way of user mobile devices expedite human endeavors in financial transactions over the Virtual Private Network (VPN) backbone. This prominent application of VPN evades the hurdles involved in physical money exchange. The VPN acts as a gateway for the authorized user in accessing the banking server to provide mutual authentication between the user and the server. The security in the cloud authentication server remains vulnerable to the results of threat in JP Morgan Data breach in 2014, Capital One Data Breach in 2019, and many more cloud server attacks over and over again. These attacks necessitate the demand for a strong framework for authentication to secure from any class of threat. This research paper, propose a framework with a base of Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) to perform secure financial transactions through Virtual Private Network (VPN) by implementing strong Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) using authentication credentials and biometric identity. The research results prove that the proposed model is to be an ideal scheme for real-time implementation. The security analysis reports that the proposed model exhibits high level of security with a minimal response time of 12 s on an average of 1000 users.

A Lightweight authentication scheme for IoT against Rogue Base Station Attacks.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices supporting intelligent cloud applications such as healthcare for hospitals rely on connecting with local base stations and access points to provide rich data analysis and real-time services to users. Devices authenticate with local base stations and perform handover operations to connect with access points with higher signal strength. Attackers disguise as valid base stations and access points using publicly accessible SSID information connect with local IoT devices during the handover process and give rise to data integrity and privacy concerns. This paper proposes a lightweight authentication scheme for private blockchain-based networks for securing devices from rogue base stations during the handover process. An authentication certificate is designed for base stations and machines in local clusters using SHA256 and modulo operations for enabling quick handover operations. The keys assigned to each device and base station joining the network are hashed, and their sizes are reduced using modulo operations. Furthermore, the compressed key size forms a certificate, which is used by the machines and the base stations to authenticate mutually. In comparison with existing studies, the performance analysis of the proposed scheme is based on the transmission of three messages required for completing the authentication process. Evaluation based on the Communication Overhead demonstrates a minimum improvement of 99.30% fewer bytes exchanged during the handover process and 89.58% reduced Storage Overhead compared with existing studies.

Paranoid OS: Wearable Trackers

The use of wearable devices in conjunction with smartphone applications is at an all-time high, still growing daily. These devices are used to transmit and fetch sensitive user information to a remote server, but perhaps all these communications generate issues related to the security and privacy of the transmissions. This paper will discuss issues related to the X.509 certificate authentication and validation methods that may lead to MitM exploits (data intercepted and relayed). The certificate pinning technique will be discussed and reviewed as a means of mitigating this problem.

Lightweight Direct Acyclic Graph Blockchain for Enhancing Resource-Constrained IoT Environment

Blockchain technology is regarded as the emergent security solution for many applications related to the Internet of Things (<i>IoT</i>). In concept, blockchain has a linear structure that grows with the number of transactions entered. This growth in size is the main obstacle to the blockchain, which makes it unsuitable for resource-constrained IoT environments. Moreover, conventional consensus algorithms such as PoW, PoS are very computationally heavy. This paper solves these problems by introducing a new lightweight blockchain structure and lightweight consensus algorithm. The Multi-Zone Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG) Blockchain (<i>Multizone-DAG-Blockchain</i>) framework is proposed for the fog-based IoT environment. In this context, fog computing technology is integrated with the IoT to offload IoT tasks to the fog nodes, thus preserving the energy consumption of the IoT devices. Both IoT and fog nodes are initially authenticated using a non-cloneable physical function- based validation mechanism (<i>DPUF-VM</i>) in which multiple authentication certificates are verified in the blockchain. Each transaction is stored in a hash function in the blockchain using the lightweight CubeHash algorithm and signed by the Four-Q- Curve algorithm. In the cloud, sensitive data is stored as ciphertext. Fog nodes provide data security to avoid the energy consumption and complexity of IoT nodes. The fog node first performs a redundancy analysis using the Jaccard Similarity (JS) measure and sensitivity analysis using the Neutrosophic Neural Intelligent Network (<i>N2IN</i>) algorithm. A lightweight proof-of-authentication (<i>PoAh</i>) algorithm is presented and executed by the optimal consensus node selected by the bi- objective spiral optimization (<i>BoSo</i>) algorithm for transaction validation. The proposed work is modeled in Network Simulator 3.26 (ns-3.26), and the performance is evaluated in terms of energy consumption, storage cost, response time, and throughput.

Research on mapping algorithm of distributed virtual storage space based on digital certificate authentication

Research on mapping algorithm of distributed virtual storage space based on digital certificate authentication

Intelligent support and command system based on WAPI terminal equipment

In order to solve the problem that the process of WAPI terminal connection is troublesome, this paper proposes an intelligent support and command system of WAPI terminal equipment based on centralized control AC + AP architecture. The system stores WAPI certificate on AC (centralized controller), WAPI terminal equipment is associated with AP (wireless access point), and AP equipment notifies AC of the associated events of the terminal, AC equipment and terminal equipment enter authentication and complete certificate authentication. Complete access authentication through AC and terminal equipment, and store the unicast and multicast keys generated by authentication negotiation on AC. This method is more convenient to maintain the certificate. At the same time, on the premise of ensuring the security of the certificate, it also improves the encryption and decryption efficiency and improves the user’s business experience.

A Secure CDM-Based Data Analysis Platform (SCAP) in Multi-Centered Distributed Setting

Hospitals have their own database structures and maintain their data in a closed manner. For this reason, it is difficult for researchers outside of institutions to access multi-center data. Therefore, if the data maintained by all hospitals follow a commonly shared format, researchers can analyze multi-center data using the same method. To safely analyze data using a common data model (CDM) in a distributed multi-center network environment, the objective of this study is to propose and implement the processes for distribution, executing the analysis codes, and returning the results. A secure CDM-based data analysis platform (SCAP) consists of a certificate authority (CA), authentication server (AS), code signer (CS), ticket-granting server (TGS), relaying server (RS), and service server (SS). The AS, CS, TGS, and RS form the central server group of the platform. An SS is stored on a hospital server as an agent for communication with the server group. We designed the functionalities and communication protocols among servers. To safely conduct the intended functions, the proposed protocol was implemented based on a cryptographic algorithm. An SCAP was developed as a web application running on this protocol. Users accessed the platform through a web-based interface.

Automated State-Machine-Based Analysis of Hostname Verification in IPsec Implementations

Owing to the advent and rapid development of Internet communication technology, network security protocols with cryptography as their core have gradually become an important means of ensuring secure communications. Among numerous security protocols, certificate authentication is a common method of identity authentication, and hostname verification is a critical but easily neglected process in certificate authentication. Hostname verification validates the identity of a remote target by checking whether the hostname of the communication partner matches any name in the X.509 certificate. Notably, errors in hostname verification may cause security problems with regard to identity authentication. In this study, we use a model-learning method to conduct security testing for hostname verification in internet protocol security (IPsec). This method can analyze the problems entailed in implementing hostname verification in IPsec by effectively inferring the deterministic finite automaton model that can describe the matching situation between the certificate subject name and the hostname for different rules. We analyze two popular IPsec implementations, Strongswan and Libreswan, and find five violations. We use some of these violations to conduct actual attack tests on the IPsec implementation. The results show that under certain conditions, attackers can use these flaws to carry out identity impersonation attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks.

Context-Aware Authentication with Dynamic Credentials using Electricity Consumption Data

AbstractIndustrial IoT (IIoT) era is evolving rapidly in parallel to the progress in Industry 4.0, which leads factories to increase the engagement with external parties through different communication infrastructures. This brings a larger attack surface and requires the development of new security solutions suitable for IIoT systems. Authentication is a key enabler to prevent the attacks that come from the interactions with the outside world components. Though there are proposed authentication schemes for IoT or machine-to-machine (M2M) applications, they cannot be readily applied for IIoT since manufacturing machines have different features and requirements than generic IT and IoT devices. In this paper, context information is proposed to be used for enhancing the authentication process in the IIoT, where instantaneous electricity consumption measured by smart meters is the main context information used as a dynamic authentication credential. Besides, in our method, existing smart meter infrastructure is utilized for both exchanging credentials over an industrial network and verification of the credentials by trusted components like Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) or Energy Management System (EMS). The proposed method also allows the use of other context information as authentication credentials such as temperature and humidity collected by sensors in the manufacturing environment.

A Case of Arrowroot Starch Adulteration: Importance of Independent Testing of Dietary Supplements in Clinical Nutrition Research

ObjectivesAdulteration of dietary supplements is widespread and can affect the quality and credibility of clinical nutrition research. In this case report, we describe the difficulties encountered with identity testing of one of our dietary supplements – arrowroot starch – chosen as the placebo for our nutrition intervention trial. MethodsTo test the effect of protein and alkali on skeletal muscle health, we planned a randomized controlled trial using a high protein diet supplement with or without an alkaline salt supplement. The study selected Maranta arundinacea L. (arrowroot) starch as placebo because of its neutral potential renal acid load compared to some other starches. Commercially available samples of arrowroot starch were purchased from three different US distributors. Independent identity testing was conducted by digital microscopy by Alkemist Labs (Garden Grove, CA). ResultsAll three commercially available arrowroot starch samples came with an authentication certificate stating that the starch was derived from the Maranta arundinacea L. plant. On gross examination, the appearance, odor, and consistency of all three samples was similar. On microscopy with digital photo documentation, starch granules from the Maranta arundinacea L. plant range in shape from ovoid, pear-shaped to triangular. The expected size would be 40–75 um and the distinct pattern would have concentric striations and a hilum that resembles a bird or “M”. Surprisingly, we found that only one of the three commercially available arrowroot starch samples was characteristic of Maranta arundinacea L. granules on microscopy. The starch granules from samples from the other two US distributors could not be identified. ConclusionsThis case study reveals the extensive adulteration of commercially available arrowroot starch in the US. It also highlights the importance of third-party, independent testing of dietary supplements to confirm authentication of the product composition especially for clinical nutrition trials. Funding SourcesNIA R01AG055443–03 (Ceglia).

A Seamless Pseudonymization and Randomization Workflow for REDCap.

The interaction of multiple computer systems during multi-center randomized controlled trials (RCTs) is a hurdle for IT-specialists as well as medical staff. A common workflow for the initial registration of a patient requires the generation of a pseudonym by a pseudonymization service, a manual transmission of the pseudonym to a randomization service, and a manual transfer of the pseudonym and assigned study arm into an electronic data capture (EDC) system. This interaction is often time consuming and error prone due to multiple system changes. Objective of this work is to enhance a commonly used EDC system, Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap), as a single source of interaction for multi-center RCTs. This is achieved by providing two modules for a seamless integration of a pseudonymization service, i.e., Mainzelliste, and a randomization service, i.e., RandIMI. Thus, no site-specific system changes are required, which increases time efficiency and reduces errors. From a technical perspective, only authentication credentials and firewall exposure for a single system must be managed. To evaluate the usability of our implementation, the system usability scale was employed. The increase of time efficiency was measured in laboratory conditions by a comparison of the time for patient registrations with and without our modules. An "excellent" usability was shown and an average time reduction by nearly 64 %. Both open-source modules are available from the REDCap Repository of External Modules.

Retail change in a context of an overtourism city. The case of Lisbon

Purpose The excess of tourism in some destinations has led to the discussion of overtourism. One of the sectors that most interacts with tourism is retail, a key element in the experience lived by tourists. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how retail evolves in a context of an overtourism city, how it relates with touristification and what are the elements that best characterise such evolution and relation. Design/methodology/approach This research is based on a case study, using the main historic city centre of Lisbon for that purpose. Fieldwork was developed by the author to collect information about the commercial fabric and its main characteristics. Findings The findings show a clear adaptation of the commercial fabric of the analysed area to the tourism industry. Furthermore, the author unfolded that the change of retail is towards a consumption environment based on leisure, involving the adaptation of the public space into terraces, and on the thematisation of stores, using elements seen as “authentically” Portuguese, which bestows on theses spaces a sort of certification of quality and authenticity. Originality/value The mere reference to the homogenisation of the retail fabric is too simple to explain the richness and variety of elements imbedded in the process of retail change in a context of excessive tourism and touristification. In this paper, the author produced novel knowledge by analysing the elements that embody the evolution of retail in such a context.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Analysing the User Actions and Location for Identifying Online Scam in Internet Banking on Cloud

Although money laundering does seem to be a new problem, the financial crisis generally occurs during an economic recession compared with standard economic development periods. Due to user fraud transactions and tolerance, they encountered numerous issues, particularly with internet banking fraud. Modernization and an enormous impact on online shopping have caused a significant increase in card payments (like credit, debit) worldwide. Increased acceptance and affordability of i-Banking services for online ordering have benefited customers personally, but it has also increased hackers' number. Fraud entails a significant financial level of risk that can adversely affect an economic entity's profit margins and image. In-fractions of a second, the system is capable of Online Transaction Fraud Detection. This method recommends an unchecked method for dynamically profiling a customer's behavioral patterns. This method's importance is that secure authentication credentials are not exposed to banks and cloud authorization servers but enable them to authenticate their remote access. The received transactions are then evaluated by comparing to the customer ID to identify abnormalities, upon which the appropriate warnings are output. This paper aims to provide such a high-level outline of how new technologies can enhance fraud observation within a publicly or privately economic unit.

Small Business Mobile App An Analytical Approach for Car Spare Parts

The project entitled “Car Spare Parts Shopping Application” enables customer to buy car spare parts using mobile application. This application advertises a collection of branded and high-quality car spare parts available for shopping. For shopping, the intended customers must have an authentication. The customers with authentication will avail the entire benefits offer on the application. Customers who do not have the authentication credentials, such customers can access the application and view the products details and services for the customers. Necessary, a user must have an account to become a customer, meanwhile the intended customer can shop the items and place in the available shopping cart. Importantly, the application facilitates the users or customers with billing details and tracks the customers’ orders with successful shipment acknowledgement.

LightLedger: A Novel Blockchain-Based Domain Certificate Authentication and Validation Scheme

Nowadays, existing public key infrastructures (PKIs) certificate authentication suffers from many security failures. Trusted certificate authorities (CAs) can issue a valid certificate for any domain name. Although CA is supposed to be trusted by a client if the certificate issued to the client links to the chain of trust (e.g., root CA or subordinate CA). By compromising any of the latter (e.g., root CAs or subordinate CAs) an attacker can jeopardize the security of the entire system. Moreover, third-party CAs have to be trusted by domain owners. Currently, the trust is not balanced among the entities involved in the certificate authentication and issuance process (i.e., CAs and domain owners). To counter this problem approaches such as Domain authentication name entity (DANE) and Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) offer additional securities for domain authentication. However, these approaches depend upon DNS/DNSSEC infrastructure which requires complex requirements for deployment as well as the adoption rate has been low. In this paper, we design, implement a robust and scalable domain authentication scheme based on blockchain technology with privacy-preserving features for low-constrained devices (e.g., mobile, browser, and IoT devices). The proposed system records a set of trusted CAs each associated with a specific domain in the blockchain. That is, each CA has to first verify if it is trusted to perform the actual issuance process. We compare our scheme with existing authentication methods and show that it requires less storage capacity and low bandwidth to authenticate certificates than other methods.

Der „Mantel des Paulus“ (2 Tim 4,13): vergessen, zurückgelassen, deponiert?

Abstract The short demand to bring Paul’s coat in 2 Timothy 4:13 has been a part of exegetical discussion for a long time. Especially the intention, the text pragmatics and the meaning of this verse are a matter of academic dispute. The point is: The interpretation of this verse has an important impact on the question of the authentic or pseudepigraphic character of 2 Tim. The following article focusses on an aspect that hasn’t been looked at much so far: the legal business of depositum as a possible historical backdrop. A third person’s (i.e. Timothy’s) mandate to pick up something deposited tells us much about his legitimacy as an authorized representative of the person who made the depositum (i.e. Paul). And possibly we also learn something about 2 Tim: 2 Tim as a letter could function as an authorizing document for the person sent out to pick up the coat – then 2 Tim 4:13 would work as a kind of certificate of authenticity of 2 Tim as an allegedly original Pauline letter.

AuthCODE: A privacy-preserving and multi-device continuous authentication architecture based on machine and deep learning

The authentication field is evolving towards mechanisms able to keep users continuously authenticated without the necessity of remembering or possessing authentication credentials. While relevant limitations of continuous authentication systems -high false positives rates (FPR) and difficulty to detect behaviour changes- have been demonstrated in realistic single-device scenarios, the Internet of Things and next generation of mobile networks (5G) are enabling novel multi-device scenarios, such as Smart Offices, that can help to reduce or address the previous challenges. The paper at hand presents an AI-based, privacy-preserving and multi-device continuous authentication architecture called AuthCODE. AuthCODE seeks to improve single-device solutions limitations by considering additional behavioural data coming from heterogeneous devices. AuthCODE proposes a novel set of features that combine the interactions of users with different devices. The features relevance has been demonstrated in a realistic Smart Office scenario with several users that interact with their mobile devices and personal computers. In this context, a set of single- and multi-device datasets have been generated and published to compare the performance of our multi-device solution against single-device approaches. A pool of experiments with machine and deep learning classifiers measured the impact of time in authentication accuracy and improved the results of single-device approaches by considering multi-device behaviour profiles. Specifically, the multi-device approach using XGBoost with 1-minute window of aggregated features, achieved a 69.33%, 59,65% and 89,35% improvement in the FPR when compared to the single-device approach for computer, mobile applications and mobile sensors respectively. Finally, temporal information classified by a Long-Short Term Memory Network, allowed the identification of additional complex behaviour patterns.

Authentication Database Leakage Detection

Authentication is the first step for any important applications. Password verification is widely employed in the Internet. Some advanced mechanisms including bio features, such as fingerprints or retina. However, digital password authentication credential is commonly used in the public. In other words, traditional password verification is still an important authentication credential mechanism for today's online services. Password database may be compromised. Once if the database is stolen, it is dangerous and critical for any services. Consequently, password database leakage becomes an important issue. Detection and countermeasure are essential for such a disaster. Our research proposing a scheme based on a authentication database storage mapping method to detect possible leakage of authentication database. By multiple mapping mechanism, if the authentication database is stolen, an attacker could not know any user's correct password. This method can reduce additional space of storing passwords with ability to detect security event for stolen authentication databases. Keywords:Application Security; System Security; Leakage Detection; Authentication database, Password DOI: 10.7176/NCS/12-01 Publication date: January 31 st 2021

Blockchain Based Architecture for Certificate Authentication

Certificate Verification is the process of verifying a certificate issued by an institution and verifying that it is genuine and authentic Certificate issuing authorities appear to have compromised for student data protection certificates. Data is being disposed of and dishonest peoples can use this for their advantage. In preparation for solving this problem of forge certificates, the digital certificates are based on the BlockChain term. It is one of the recent technology which is able to be affected for data security. To verify the fidelity of those data, we relate a blockchain hash affirmative method. This prominence of blockchain helps to stricken the thing of the fake certificates. Authors have used two platforms of blockchain ehtereum and bitcoin for certificate verification. But those two platforms are permission-less blockchain where anyone can join the network. For making it more secured we can use the Hyper-Ledger platform which is more secured and only the present participants can join the network. This application demonstrates that blockchain-based hash validity has been developed to identify baleful and temporary changes in data. The technique that is discussed is that the main data is stored severally from the blockchain, then it allows a sense accessory and a hash of those data that presented to the blockchain, The original information is going to be verified against the hash in the block-chain at any moment.

Fire Equipment Information Traceability System based on Blockchain

To solve the problems of centralization, tampering, incomplete storage, and privacy of fire fighting equipment traceability system, this paper proposes a fire fighting equipment information traceability system based on blockchain. The system is developed on the Fabric blockchain platform of Hyperledger. The system environment is equipped with three organizations: manufacturer, dealer, and consumers, and the query request is initiated with the traceability function of fire fighting equipment in the chaincode. Finally, through the certificate authentication user account can realize the fire fighting equipment information inquiry, and the query response time average value is 19.5 ms. The characteristics of blockchain are difficult to tamper with, timestamp and transaction traceability, which can be well applied to the traceability system of fire fighting equipment, which makes the traceability function of the system more perfect, and consumers can get all traceability information, including production information, logistics information and usage information of fire fighting equipment.