Cryptographic Key Generation Research Articles

A Cryptographic Key Binding Method Based on Fingerprint Features and the Threshold Scheme

The biometric cryptographic system can provide a secure integration of the biometric features and the traditional cryptology. The application of biometrics based key binding method or biometric keys can not only hide the information of the users’ biometric features, but can also securely realize secret key production, key recovery and authentication. This paper first proposes a general model for biometrics based key binding algorithm, and then presents a novel (cryptographic) key generation method based on fingerprint features and the Shamir threshold scheme. Our method can not only protect the legitimate user's secret key but can also effectively prevent his biometric features from being revealed. Our experimental results show that our fingerprint features based key binding method is efficient and the key success recovery rite may approach to 91 percent. But the key recovery is not so much successful as for our method to be applied for practical cryptographic system. Hence, more work has to do for our method’s optimization.

Trust Key Management Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks

With recent advances in wireless sensor networks and embedded computing technologies, miniaturized pervasive health monitoring devices have become practically feasible. In addition to providing continuous monitoring and analysis of physiological parameters, the recently pro- posed Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) incorporates context aware sensing for increased sensitivity and specificity. A number of tiny wireless sensors, strategically placed on the human body, create a WBAN that can monitor various vital signs, providing real-time feed-back to the user and medical personnel. The wireless body area networks promise to revolutionize health monitoring. Since the sensors collect personal medical data, security and privacy are important components in this kind of networks. It is a challenge to implement traditional security infrastructures in these types of lightweight networks, since they are by design limited in both computational and communication resources. A key enabling technology for secure communications in WBANs has emerged to be biometrics. In this paper, we present an approach that exploits physiological signals (electrocardiogram (ECG)) to address security issues in WBAN: a Trust Key Management Scheme for Wireless Body Area Network. This approach manages the generation and distribution of symmetric cryptographic keys to constituent sensors in a WBAN (using ECG signal) and protects the privacy.

A fingerprint based bio‐cryptographic security protocol designed for client/server authentication in mobile computing environment

AbstractWith fast evolution of mobile devices and mobile network, the need of protecting user sensitive information locally and performing secure user authentication remotely become evermore increasing. Bio‐cryptography is emerging as a powerful solution which can combine the advantages of conventional cryptography and biometric security. In this paper, we present an efficient bio‐cryptographic security protocol designed for client/server authentication in current mobile computing environment, with a reasonable assumption that server is secure. In this protocol, fingerprint biometric is used in user verification, protected by a computationally efficient Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) scheme, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). The genuine fingerprint information is hidden in the feature vault which is the mixture of genuine and chaff features. Fingerprint features are not only used for biometric verification but also for cryptographic key generation. Our security analysis shows that the proposed protocol can provide a secure and trustworthy authentication of remote mobile users over insecure network. Experimental results on public domain database show an acceptable verification performance. We also tested the computational costs and efficiency of our protocol on the CLDC emulator using Java ME (previous J2ME) programming technology. The simulation results prove that the proposed protocol suits current mobile environment. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Cryptographic Key Generation from Multiple Biometric Modalities: Fusing Minutiae with Iris Feature

Human users find difficult to remember long cryptographic keys. Therefore, researchers, for a long time period, have been investigating ways to use biometric features of the user rather than memorable password or passphrase, in an attempt to produce tough and repeatable cryptographic keys. Our goal is to integrate the volatility of the user's biometric features into the generated key, so as to construct the key unpredictable to a hacker who is deficient of important knowledge about the user's biometrics. In our earlier research, we have incorporated multiple biometric modalities into the cryptographic key generation to provide better security. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach based on multimodal biometrics (Iris and fingerprint) for generating a secure cryptographic key, where the security is further enhanced with the difficulty of factoring large numbers. At first, the features, minutiae points and texture properties are extracted from the fingerprint and iris images respectively. Then, the extracted features are fused at the feature level to obtain the multi-biometric template. Finally, a multi-biometric template is used for generating a 256-bit cryptographic key. For experimentation, we have used the fingerprint images obtained from publicly available sources and the iris images from CASIA Iris Database. The experimental results have showed that the generated 256-bit cryptographic key is capable of providing better user authentication and better security.

Key Extraction From General Nondiscrete Signals

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> We address the problem of designing optimal schemes for the generation of secure cryptographic keys from continuous noisy data. We argue that, contrary to the discrete case, a universal fuzzy extractor does not exist. This implies that in the continuous case, key extraction schemes have to be designed for particular probability distributions. We extend the known definitions of the correctness and security properties of fuzzy extractors. Our definitions apply to continuous as well as discrete variables. We propose a generic construction for fuzzy extractors from noisy continuous sources, using independent partitions. The extra freedom in the choice of discretization, which does not exist in the discrete case, is advantageously used to give the extracted key a uniform distribution. We analyze the privacy properties of the scheme and the error probabilities in a one-dimensional toy model with simplified noise. Finally, we study the security implications of incomplete knowledge of the source's probability distribution <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">${\BBP }$</tex></formula>. We derive a bound on the min-entropy of the extracted key under the worst-case assumption, where the attacker knows <formula formulatype="inline"> <tex Notation="TeX">${\BBP }$</tex></formula> exactly. </para>

A NOVEL APPROACH TO GENERATE A SECURED CRYPTOGRAPHIC KEY FROM MULTIMODAL BIOMETRICS: FEATURE LEVEL FUSION OF FINGERPRINT AND IRIS

Human users have a tough time remembering long cryptographic keys. Therefore, researchers, for a long, period of time have been exploratory ways to utilize biometric features of the user instead of a memorable password or passphrase, in an effort to create strong and repeatable cryptographic keys. Our aim is to incorporate the volatility of the user’s biometric features into the generated key, so as to make the key unguessable to an attacker lacking significant knowledge of the user’s biometrics. We go one step further trying to incorporate multiple biometric modalities into cryptographic ke yg eneration so as to provide better security. In this article, we propose an efficient approach based on multimodal biometrics (Iris and fingerprint) for generation of secure cryptographic key. The proposed approach is composed of three modules namely, (i) Feature extraction, (ii) Multimodal biometric template generation and (iii) Cryptographic ke yg eneration. Initially, the features, minutiae points and texture properties are extracted from the fingerprint and iris images respectively. Subsequently, the extracted features are fused together at the feature level to construct the multi-biometric template. Finally, a 256-bit secure cryptographic key is generated from the multi-biometric template. For experimentation, we have employed the fingerprint images obtained from publicly available sources and the iris images from CASIA Iris Database. The experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Forgery Quality and Its Implications for Behavioral Biometric Security

Biometric security is a topic of rapidly growing importance in the areas of user authentication and cryptographic key generation. In this paper, we describe our steps toward developing evaluation methodologies for behavioral biometrics that take into account threat models that have been largely ignored. We argue that the pervasive assumption that forgers are minimally motivated (or, even worse, naive) is too optimistic and even dangerous. Taking handwriting as a case in point, we show through a series of experiments that some users are significantly better forgers than others, that such forgers can be trained in a relatively straightforward fashion to pose an even greater threat, that certain users are easy targets for forgers, and that most humans are a relatively poor judge of handwriting authenticity, and hence, their unaided instincts cannot be trusted. Additionally, to overcome current labor-intensive hurdles in performing more accurate assessments of system security, we present a generative attack model based on concatenative synthesis that can provide a rapid indication of the security afforded by the system. We show that our generative attacks match or exceed the effectiveness of forgeries rendered by the skilled humans we have encountered.

Personalised cryptographic key generation based on FaceHashing

Among the various computer security techniques practice today, cryptography has been identified as one of the most important solutions in the integrated digital security system. Cryptographic techniques such as encryption can provide very long passwords that are not required to be remembered but are in turn protected by simple password, hence defecting their purpose. In this paper, we proposed a novel two-stage technique to generate personalized cryptographic keys from the face biometric, which offers the inextricably link to its owner. At the first stage, integral transform of biometric input is to discretise to produce a set of bit representation with a set of tokenised pseudo random number, coined as FaceHash. In the second stage, FaceHash is then securely reduced to a single cryptographic key via Shamir secret-sharing. Tokenised FaceHashing is rigorously protective of the face data, with security comparable to cryptographic hashing of token and knowledge key-factor. The key is constructed to resist cryptanalysis even against an adversary who captures the user device or the feature descriptor.

BOOK REVIEW: The Advanced Encryption Standard

The privacy of patients is jeopardised when medical records and data are spread or shared beyond the protected cloud of institutions. This is because breaches force them to the brink that they start abstaining from full disclosure of their condition. This type of condition has a negative effect on scientific research, patients and all stakeholders. A blockchain-based data sharing system is proposed to tackle this issue, which employs immutability and autonomy properties of the blockchain to sufficiently resolve challenges associated with access control and handle sensitive data. Our proposed system is supported by a Discrete Wavelet Transform to enhance the overall security, and a Genetic Algorithm technique to optimise the queuing optimization technique as well. Introducing this cryptographic key generator enhances the immunity and system access control, which allows verifying users securely in a fast way. This design allows further accountability since all users involved are already known and the blockchain records a log of their actions. Only when the users’ cryptographic keys and identities are confirmed, the system allows requesting data from the shared queuing requests. The achieved execution time per node, confirmation time per node and robust index for block number of 0.19 s, 0.17 s and 20 respectively that based on system evaluation illustrates that our system is robust, efficient, immune and scalable.

A new dynamic key generation scheme for access control in a hierarchy

In this paper, we propose a new dynamic cryptographic key generation scheme for access control in a hierarchy. Our method can achieve the following three goals. First, the storage space needed to s...

A dynamic cryptographic key generation and information broadcasting scheme in information systems

In this paper, dynamic cryptographic key assignment and information broadcasting schemes based on the RSA public key strategy are proposed. With the cryptographic key generation in a hierarchy, all users are classified into disjoint sets of security classes which employ the relation of partial ordering. In comparison with the existing assignment schemes, whenever a new security class is appended into the user hierarchy system, the corresponding keys can be determined without changing any existing keys. On the other hand, with information broadcasting, the sender broadcasts an encrypted message onto the networking system so that only the legitimate recipients can decrypt it. Compared with the existing broadcasting schemes, our scheme always requires fewer broadcast messages. Furthermore, when a new user is inserted into the distributed system, the corresponding secret and public keys can be determined without changing any existing keys. Therefore, our scheme is suitable for practical implementation.

Cryptographic master-key-generation scheme and its application to public key distribution

We present a cryptographic master-key- generation scheme based on a recently developed cryptographic multi-level key generation scheme. That multilevel key generation scheme is a logical complement to the well known Akl-Taylor- MacKinnon-Meijer scheme, and is particularly efficient for hierarchical structures of limited depth, which is the case for the master-key appli- cation at hand. The master-key problem is defined in this paper and our solution is presented, and illuminated, by way of comparison with a solution presented recently by Chick and Tavares, based on a variation on the Akl-Taylor-MacKinnon- Meijer scheme. Once this master key scheme is obtained and understood, it becomes a natural step to apply it to solve the public-key-distribu- tion problem. This is achieved in a manner, which, unlike the earlier Diffe/Hellman solution, is extendible to groups of more than two users.

A cryptographic key generation scheme for multilevel data security

In 1982, Akl and Taylor proposed an elegant solution to the partially ordered multilevel key distribution problem, using a cryptographic approach. Since then, continuing research has been conducted to try to realize and simplify their scheme. Generally speaking, there are two problems associated with their scheme. First, a large value associated with each security class needs to be made public. Secondly, new security classes are not permitted to be added into the system once all the security keys have been issued. Our paper presents a very similar approach. But, instead of using the top-down design approach as in their scheme, our scheme is using a bottom-up key generating procedure. The result is that the published values for most security classes can be much smaller than in their scheme. This property becomes more obvious for a broad and shallow hierarchical graph. In addition, our scheme can accommodate the changes of adding new security classes into the system.

Exponentiation cryptosystems on the IBM PC

Several cryptosystems based on exponentiation have been proposed in recent years. Some of these are of the public key variety and offer notable advantages in cryptographic key management, both for secret communication and for message authentication. The need for extensive arithmetic calculations with very large integers (hundreds of digits long) is a drawback of these systems. This paper describes a set of experimental programs that were developed to demonstrate that exponentiation cryptosystems can be efficiently implemented on the IBM Personal Computer (PC). The programs are organized into four layers, comprising procedures for: multiple precision integer arithmetic, modular exponentiation, prime number generation and testing, and cryptographic key generation. The major emphasis of the paper is on methods and techniques for improving execution speed. The items discussed include: the use of a specialized squaring procedure; a recursive splitting method to speed up squaring and multiplication; the computation of residues by using multiplication instead of division; the efficient encoding of residue information; and the use of thresholds to select the most effective primality testing algorithm for a given size number. Timing results are presented and discussed. Finally, the paper discusses the advantages of a mixed system that combines the superior key management capabilities inherent in public key cryptosystems with the much higher bulk-encryption speed obtainable with the Data Encryption Algorithm.

Generation, distribution, and installation of cryptographic keys

A key controlled cryptographic system requires a mechanism for the safe and secure generation, distribution, and installation of its cryptographic keys. This paper discusses possible key generation, distribution, and installation procedures for the key management scheme presented in the preceding paper.