Desynchronization Attacks Research Articles

Desynchronization Attacks Resistant Watermarking for Remote Sensing Images Based on DWT‐SVD and Normalized Feature Domain

ABSTRACTMost existing remote sensing image watermarking algorithms concentrate on excavation of particular embedding templates, image features, or geometric invariant domains, which present challenges in terms of resistance to desynchronization attacks, embedding domain repetition, and insufficient algorithm versatility. To address these issues, this study proposes a watermarking algorithm that is robust to desynchronization attacks and can adapt to different types of remote sensing images using the geometric invariant domain and hybrid frequency domain. The algorithm uses the multi‐scale SIFT to identify feature points in remote sensing images, then creates a Delaunay triangulation network (DTN) based on these feature points, extracts the tangent circles of triangles, and normalizes these tangent circles using image moment and affine transformation, and the feature domains with geometric invariance are constructed. On this basis, the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) transforms the feature domain to the frequency decomposition state, and the singular value decomposition (SVD) further mines the watermark embedding domain, ensuring the stability of the watermark transforming back and forth in the embedding domain and improving the overall invisibility of the watermarking algorithm. The experimental results indicate that, compared to related algorithms, the proposed watermarking algorithm not only adapts better to remote sensing images with different bands and bit depths but also provides superior invisibility and demonstrates strong robustness against various desynchronization attacks such as splicing, panning, rotating, as well as image processing like noise addition, filtering, and compression.

DTR-SHIELD: Mutual Synchronization for Protecting against DoS Attacks on the SHIELD Protocol with AES-CTR Mode.

To enhance security in the semiconductor industry's globalized production, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proposed an authentication protocol under the Supply Chain Hardware Integrity for Electronics Defense (SHIELD) program. This protocol integrates a secure hardware root-of-trust, known as a dielet, into integrated circuits (ICs). The SHIELD protocol, combined with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in counter mode, named CTR-SHIELD, targets try-and-check attacks. However, CTR-SHIELD is vulnerable to desynchronization attacks on its counter blocks. To counteract this, we introduce the DTR-SHIELD protocol, where DTR stands for double counters. DTR-SHIELD addresses the desynchronization issue by altering the counter incrementation process, which previously solely relied on truncated serial IDs. Our protocol adds a new AES encryption step and requires the dielet to transmit an additional 100 bits, ensuring more robust security through active server involvement and message verification.

Provably secure and lightweight three-factor authentication scheme for industrial medical CPS

Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is a multidimensional complex system that integrates computing, network, and physical environment, which is widely used to promote the upgrading of industrial production and technology. Recently, the application of industrial CPS in the medical field has attracted the attention of scholars and medical experts. Medical CPS can establish a perfect medical network to help doctors monitor patients’ conditions in real-time and make treatments. However, how to design a provably secure and lightweight authentication protocol for industrial medical CPS is a challenge. Very recently, Qi et al. proposed an authentication protocol for industrial medical CPS based on the chaotic map, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) biometric technique is used in the protocol to resist password guessing attack and smart card lost attack. However, we find that their protocol is still vulnerable to identity guessing attack, user impersonation attack, trace attack, desynchronization attack, and has no perfect forward secrecy. Therefore, we propose a security-enhanced and lightweight authentication protocol for industrial medical CPS. In the protocol, a dynamic temporary identity strategy is designed to protect anonymity and privacy, which enables the updating of temporary identities while resisting desynchronization attacks. The protocol is proved secure through formal security proof in random oracle model. Meanwhile, compared with the related protocols, our protocol is superior in security and cost to meet the lightweight requirements in medical scenarios.

Lightweight Authentication Scheme for Healthcare With Robustness to Desynchronization Attacks

Remote healthcare monitoring systems are gaining a lot of interest as they enable doctors to use public channels to get real-time data from the sensors placed in/on the patient’s body. This necessitates the implementation of a robust authentication scheme to ensure secure communication between trusted healthcare providers and sensors which are usually low in resources. To address these issues, in 2021, Masud et al. presented a lightweight anonymous user authentication scheme for securely obtaining patient’s real-time data. Their protocol is considered practical for deployment on sensor nodes as it only utilizes hash functions and does not require any public key cryptography. In this work, we demonstrate how their protocol loses synchronization when a message is blocked/jammed and how in some scenarios, the protocol is exposed to the risk of session key disclosure and cannot ensure forward secrecy. To overcome these threats, we propose, a Lightweight mutual Authentication Protocol that provides Robustness to Desynchronization attacks. The proposed scheme uses a one-way hash chain technique to ensure forward secrecy and enable resynchronization between the protocol entities in the event of a desynchronization attack. also achieves user and sensor node anonymity, thus ensuring privacy of the communicating entities. With the demonstration of both formal and informal analysis, the proposed protocol is ensured to withstand the identified attacks in Masud et al.’s scheme. The comparative analysis in terms of security and performance with relevant protocols indicates that the proposed protocol ensures higher security with considerably low computation and communication overheads, making it suitable for practical implementation in a lightweight healthcare environment.

Frequency Spectrum Modification Process-Based Anti-Collusion Mechanism for Audio Signals.

The collusion attack combines multiple multimedia files into one new file to erase the user identity information. The traditional anti-collusion methods (which aim to trace the traitors) can defend the collusion attack, but they cannot well defend some hybrid collusion attacks (e.g., a collusion attack combined with desynchronization attacks). To address this issue, we propose a frequency spectrum modification process (FSMP) to defend the collusion attack by significantly downgrading the perceptual quality of the colluded file. The severe perceptual quality degradation can demotivate the attackers from launching the collusion attack. Because FSMP is orthogonal to the existing traitor-trace-based methods, it can be combined with the existing methods to provide a double-layer protection against different attacks. In FSMP, after several signal processing procedures (e.g., uneven framing and smoothing), multiple signals (called FSMP signals) can be generated from the host signal. Launching collusion attack using the generated FSMP signals would lead to the energy disturbance and attenuation effect (EDAE) over the colluded signals. Due to the EDAE, FSMP can significantly degrade the perceptual quality of the colluded audio file, thereby thwarting the collusion attack. In addition, FSMP can well defend different hybrid collusion attacks. Theoretical analysis and experimental results confirm the validity of the proposed method.

Cloud-Assisted Secure and Cost-Effective Authenticated Solution for Remote Wearable Health Monitoring System

Security and privacy are the leading solicitude in cloud computing since users have restricted privilege on the data maintained by distinct service providers at remote locations. The situation becomes more strenuous when a huge amount of data is sensed and produced by wearable devices as it is usually considered more sensitive and heterogeneous. The majority of existing authenticated solutions for such a challenging environment either suffer due to high computation and communication costs or due to the fact that they are susceptible to known cyber threats making them impractical for utilization. Therefore we introduced a cost-effective and secure authenticated scheme for the cloud-assisted remote wearable health monitoring system. Informal security proof is discussed to showcase the security strength of the proposed scheme against known security threats. After that a detailed performance analysis of the proposed scheme with related protocols reveals the fact that it can reduce the computation and communication costs by more than 37% and 40%, respectively. Moreover, our scheme offers some added security features like physical and desynchronization attacks prevention.

Adaptive multiple zero-watermarking based on local fast quaternion radial harmonic Fourier moments for color medical images

The copyright protection of medical images is receiving increasing attention. Zero-watermarking schemes are a critical technology for copyright protection of medical images and show better imperceptibility performance than embedded watermarking schemes. However, existing zero-watermarking schemes still have some limitations that prevent them from fully exploiting their potential, including failure against complex desynchronization attacks and high computational complexity. To this end, we propose a novel zero-watermarking scheme based on fast quaternion radial harmonic Fourier moments (FQRHFMs) that is resistant to desynchronization attacks. Specifically, this article formulates multiple local feature regions (LFRs) based on a speeded-up robust feature (SURF) operator and provides a fast computation method for QRHFMs by using fast Fourier transform (FFT). The magnitudes of FQRHFMs are computed in each incomplete overlapping LFR for generating multiple zero-watermarks to resist desynchronization attacks. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves state-of-the-art robustness against various desynchronization attacks (e.g., translation, cropping, and length-width ratio changing), and outperforms existing local zero-watermarking frameworks with regard to accuracy and efficiency.

An Anonymous Authentication Scheme Based on Chinese Residue Theorem in Wireless Body Area Networks

Considering the resource limitations of low-cost wireless sensors, there is a growing inclination to utilize cryptographic primitives that are optimized for efficiency, such as symmetric key encryption/decryption and hash functions, when designing authentication schemes. However, designing a lightweight authentication scheme that can meet various security requirements poses a significant challenge. In recent years, numerous lightweight authentication schemes have been proposed in order to address these security needs. Nevertheless, recent research has revealed that many of these schemes exhibit security vulnerabilities and design deficiencies, including challenges related to asynchronization and impractical gateway-node search operations. Due to the inadequate security of existing schemes, this study introduces a novel privacy-preserving authentication scheme that aims to provide adaptive resilience against desynchronization attacks in wireless body area networks (WBANs). The proposed scheme utilizes lightweight cryptographic modules to optimize efficiency. To ensure user anonymity, the Chinese Remainder Theorem technique is employed, whereas forward secrecy and resistance to desynchronization attacks are achieved through the use of one-way hash chains and serial numbers, respectively. Through extensive analysis and comparisons, the proposed scheme is demonstrated to strike a fine balance between security and efficiency.

An efficient and reliable ultralightweight RFID authentication scheme for healthcare systems

In the era of the Internet of Communication Technologies (ICT), the Internet is becoming more popular and widely used across the world. Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) has become a prominent technology in healthcare systems for identifying tagged objects. The RFID tags are attached to the billions of different healthcare devices or things in several associated applications. However, RFID tags’ security and privacy are regarded as the two biggest concerns. An adversary might eavesdrop, tamper, or even intercept the transmitted messages in RFID systems. Also, the privacy of the users (patients, doctors, and nurses) may breach. In past years, numerous ultralightweight RFID authentication schemes have been proposed in the healthcare sector. However, all these schemes were pointed out as insecure under several known security attacks namely, replay, impersonation, full-disclosure, and de-synchronization attacks. Keeping in view such security flaws, we present an efficient and reliable ultralightweight RFID authentication scheme (ER2AS) for healthcare systems to enhance patients’ medication safety. The scheme employs bitwise XOR, circular left–right rotations, and our proposed ultralighweight reformation operation to achieve higher-level security. The security and privacy evaluations demonstrate that ER2AS scheme resists several known security attacks. The performance analysis also demonstrates that it incurs lower computation and storage overhead on the RFID tags, thus making it practical to be implemented in real-time healthcare environments.

Provably Secure Dynamic Anonymous Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks in Internet of Things

Wireless sensor networks are a promising application of the Internet of Things in the sustainable development of smart cities, and have been afforded significant attention since first being proposed. Authentication protocols aim to protect the security and confidentiality of legitimate users when accessing and transmitting data. However, existing protocols may suffer from one or more security flaws. Recently, Butt et al. proposed an energy-efficient three-factor authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks. However, their protocol is vulnerable to several attacks, and lacks certain security properties. In this paper, the causes of these design flaws are analyzed. Furthermore, we propose a novel three-factor authentication protocol (password, smart card, and biometric information) for wireless sensor networks in Internet of Things contexts. A dynamic anonymous strategy is designed to prevent privacy disclosure and to resist sensor node capture attacks, tracking attacks, and desynchronization attacks. The Find–Guess model and random oracle model are combined to prove the security of the proposed protocol. A comparative analysis with related schemes shows that the proposed protocol has higher security and is able to maintain a low computational overhead.

DNN-based speech watermarking resistant to desynchronization attacks

Desynchronization attacks proved to be the greatest challenge to audio watermarking systems as they introduce misalignment between the signal carrier and the watermark. This paper proposes a DNN-based speech watermarking system with two adversarial networks jointly trained on a set of desynchronization attacks to embed a randomly generated watermark. The detector neural network is expanded with spatial pyramid pooling layers to be able to handle signals affected by these attacks. A detailed training procedure of the aforementioned DNN system with gradual attack introduction is proposed in order to achieve robustness. Experiments performed on a speech dataset show that the system achieves satisfactory results according to all the benchmarks it was tested against. The system preserves signal quality after watermark embedding. Most importantly, the system achieved resistance to all considered desynchronization attacks. The majority of the attacks cause less than [Formula: see text]% of incorrectly detected watermarked bits on average, which outperforms comparative techniques in this regard.

ECCPWS: An ECC-based protocol for WBAN systems

The development of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) and Wearable Health Monitoring Systems (WHMS) play a key role in healthcare monitoring. WBAN includes medical sensors that monitor vital signs of patients, collect data and usually transmit them to medical servers via wireless channels. Therefore, the patient’s sensitive information sent over the channel can be vulnerable to various attacks. Hence, designing lightweight authentication security protocols for these systems with the lowest computational and communication costs has become a major challenge. Recently, Sowjanya et al. (2020) presented a lightweight authentication scheme for WHMS based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), which provides optimal security features and low storage, communication and computational costs. In this paper, the security of their scheme is evaluated and passive insider secret disclosure and replay attacks against their scheme are presented. It is obvious that other attacks such as desynchronization attack and impersonation attack can be applied to this protocol by obtaining the secret value of network manager. The complexity of our proposed attacks is just one run of the protocol and their success probability equals to one. Finally, by remedying the Sowjanya et al. (2020) ’s protocol, a lightweight ECC-based authentication scheme called ECCPWS is proposed. Moreover, the proposed protocol’s security proof is performed via informal methods and also formally through Real-Or-Random (ROR) model, BAN logic, Scyther and AVISPA tools. The security verification results of ECCPWS show that the ECCPWS has complete security against various security vulnerabilities and attacks.

SSVS-SSVD Based Desynchronization Attacks Resilient Watermarking Method for Stereo Signals

Most of the audio signals in real-world applications are stereo signals. However, the previous desynchronization attacks resilient watermarking methods cannot preserve perceptual quality or achieve robustness when constrained by high embedding rates and stereo host. In this paper, based on two novel features segmental singular values summation (SSVS) and segmental singular values difference (SSVD) that are generated using discrete cosine transform (DCT) and singular value decomposition (SVD), we present a robust watermarking method for stereo signals that not only is robust to desynchronization attacks and common signal processing attacks but also has a larger embedding rate compared with the previous methods. In the proposed method, we first apply DCT and SVD on each segment of the host signal to extract the SSVS feature and the SSVD feature. Then we generate the adaptive embedding parameters and embed watermark bits via optimized embedding strategies based on these features. Due to the use of the adaptive embedding parameters and the optimized embedding strategies, the proposed method significantly increases the embedding rate without compromising the robustness and perceptual quality. Analysis results show our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, where the perceptual quality improvement is over 14%, and the robustness against desynchronization attacks is improved by more than 49% when the embedding rate is 70 bps.

M-Sequences and Sliding Window Based Audio Watermarking Robust Against Large-Scale Cropping Attacks

Large-scale cropping (LSC) is one of the mostly-used operations in desynchronization attacks and can easily destroy the watermark information by deleting continuous audio slices from the watermarked audio. In this work, we propose a spread spectrum (SS) based audio watermarking scheme to resist against LSC attacks more robustly from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Specifically, we first perform discrete wavelet transform (DWT), graph-based transform (GBT), and singular value decomposition (SVD) on the host audio signal to produce transform coefficients. Next, we embed the chaotic encrypted watermark into DWT-GBT-SVD coefficients by the SS technique. Then, we combine m-sequences with the encrypted watermark to generate the watermarking key, which can theoretically guarantee the self-restoration of the cropped watermark based on the periodicity of m-sequences. Additionally, we develop an effective sliding window (SW) strategy to extract the fragmentary watermark slices from DWT-GBT-SVD coefficients and restore the integral watermark by the watermarking key. Finally, the proposed audio watermarking scheme, named m-SW-LSC, is compared with the state-of-the-art audio watermarking methods on audio signals with different genres and lengths under various attacks with different ratios. Experimental results demonstrate that our m-SW-LSC has a superior performance in restoring the complete watermark and exhibits significantly high robustness against LSC attacks.

MDS Code Based Ultralightweight Authentication Protocol for RFID System

Privacy and security are central issues in the deployment of an RFID system. It is vulnerable to several attacks, such as replay attacks, location tracking, man-in-middle attack, de-synchronization attack, etc., due to the inherent weaknesses of underlying wireless communications. In order to tackle these privacy and security concerns, this paper presents an ultralightweight authentication protocol based on group homomorphism and maximum distance separable (MDS) code. We use group homomorphism properties to make a server lookup table that reduces searching complexity and overcomes scalability issues. We develop an ultralightweight protocol using MDS code properties that employs only bit-wise operators. Formal and informal security analysis of the proposed protocol shows that our proposed protocol resists various attacks. In addition, we use automated security protocol verification tools, AVISPA and Scyther, to validate the security features of the proposed protocol. We demonstrate the correctness proof of the proposed protocol using BAN logic. To measure the level of privacy of the proposed protocol, we use two benchmark metrics to simulate the proposed protocol. The performance analysis indicates that the proposed protocol is efficient for a low-cost environment.

Cryptanalysis of Two Recent Ultra-Lightweight Authentication Protocols

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is a critical part of many Internet of Things (IoT) systems, including Medical IoT (MIoT) for instance. On the other hand, the IoT devices’ numerous limitations (such as memory space, computing capability, and battery capacity) make it difficult to implement cost- and energy-efficient security solutions. As a result, several researchers attempted to address this problem, and several RFID-based security mechanisms for the MIoT and other constrained environments were proposed. In this vein, Wang et al. and Shariq et al. recently proposed CRUSAP and ESRAS ultra-lightweight authentication schemes. They demonstrated, both formally and informally, that their schemes meet the required security properties for RFID systems. In their proposed protocols, they have used a very lightweight operation called Cro(·) and Rank(·), respectively. However, in this paper, we show that those functions are not secure enough to provide the desired security. We show that Cro(·) is linear and reversible, and it is easy to obtain the secret values used in its calculation. Then, by exploiting the vulnerability of the Cro(·) function, we demonstrated that CRUSAP is vulnerable to secret disclosure attacks. The proposed attack has a success probability of "1" and is as simple as a CRUSAP protocol run. Other security attacks are obviously possible by obtaining the secret values of the tag and reader. In addition, we present a de-synchronization attack on the CRUSAP protocol. Furthermore, we provide a thorough examination of ESRAS and its Rank(·) function. We first present a de-synchronization attack that works for any desired Rank(·) function, including Shariq et al.’s proposed Rank(·) function. We also show that Rank(·) does not provide the desired confusion and diffusion that is claimed by the designers. Finally, we conduct a secret disclosure attack against ESRAS.

Simple Yet Secure Encoder Architecture and Ultralightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol for RFID Tags in IoT

Internet of things (IoT) has evolved as the internet of everything, and it has grabbed the interest of all the researchers in recent days. Almost all the objects, including nonelectronics devices, can also be connected with the internet through radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The security of the perception layer is crucial to secure the entire IoT network. RFID-enabled IoT perception layer has secured reader-to-server channel and unsecured tag to reader channel. Hence, securing the unsecured communication channel between the reader and the tag is the need of the hour. This work proposes a simple yet secure permutation approximate adder (SYSPXA)-based RFID mutual authentication protocol to address the need. The proposed protocol dramatically reduces the tag’s storage and computational overhead. It needs 40% less storage and 66.7% less permutation operation in comparison with the existing protocols. Nondisclosure of the key and freshness of key, IDS and random numbers at every mutual authentication process gives resistance to the protocol against de-synchronization attack, disclosure attack, tag tracking, replay attack. The SYSPXA protocol is validated for its security features using Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic formal verification. The performance and security of the proposed protocol are contrasted with various futuristic permutation-based protocols, and its superiority over other protocols is highlighted. We have simulated the SYSPXA protocol with ModelSim tool for verifying its functionality. The protocol encoder architecture is implemented in the Intel cyclone IV Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) EP4CE115F29C7 device.

SF-LAP: Secure M2M Communication in IIoT with a Single-Factor Lightweight Authentication Protocol

Machine-to-machine communication allows smart devices like sensors, actuators, networks, gateways, and other controllers to communicate with one another. The industrial Internet of things (IIoT) has become a vital component. Many industrial devices are connected to perform a task automatically in machine-to-machine communication, but they are not properly secured, allowing an adversary to compromise them against a variety of attacks due to communication system vulnerabilities. Recently, a secure lightweight authentication protocol (SLAP) was proposed by Panda et al. They asserted that every known attack that could happen in the IIoT is deterred by their suggested protocol. In this study, we prove that the SLAP protocol is vulnerable to desynchronization, impersonation, replay, and eavesdropping attacks. To prevent these attacks and enhance that protocol, we need to implement a secure authentication mechanism that ensures the security of communication. This paper proposed a secure M2M Communication in IIoT with a single-factor lightweight authentication protocol (SF-LAP). Single-factor authentication is a simple and secure way to communicate. It uses less power and communication overhead while providing a secure mechanism for conversation. In the machine-to-machine (M2M) scenario, the proposed protocol uses an exclusive-OR operation and a hashing function to ensure secure communication between the sensor and the controller. The proposed mechanism uses a secure preshared key and timestamp technique to protect and safeguard this connection against desynchronization attacks and eavesdropping attacks. We used Burrows Abadi Needham (BAN) Gong, Needham, and Yahalom (GNY) logic, and the automated validation of Internet security protocols applications (AVISPA) tool for formal verification and perform a security analysis as an informal verification to make sure the suggested protocol is secure. Analysis that shows the SF-LAP consumes the least computing and communication overhead and is more secure because it prevents desynchronization and eavesdropping attacks to all of the known attacks that are modification attacks, tracing attacks, impersonation, man-in-the-middle, and replay attacks.

Provable Secure Authentication Protocol in Fog-Enabled Smart Home Environment

People can access and obtain services from smart home devices conveniently through fog-enabled smart home environments. The security and privacy-preserving authentication protocol play an important role. However, many proposed protocols have one or more security flaws. In particular, almost all the existing protocols for the smart home cannot resist gateway compromised attacks. The adversary can not only know the user’s identity but also launch impersonation attacks. Designing a provable secure authentication protocol that avoids all known attacks on smart homes is challenging. Recently Guo et al. proposed an authentication scheme based on symmetric polynomials in the fog-enabled smart home environment. However, we found that their scheme suffers from gateway compromised attack, desynchronization attack, mobile device loss/stolen and attack, and has no untraceability and perfect forward secrecy. Therefore, we adopt a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) to resist gateway compromised attack, adopt Elliptic Curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH) key exchange protocol to achieve perfect forward secrecy, and propose a secure and privacy-preserving authentication protocol, which is provably secure under the random oracle model. According to the comparisons with some related protocols, the proposed protocol has better security and transmission efficiency with the same computation cost level.

A PLS-HECC-based device authentication and key agreement scheme for smart home networks

IoT devices permeate our society, collect personal data, and support critical infrastructures such as the healthcare. Therefore, there is a critical need for authentication and authorization schemes for IoT devices to meet privacy requirements, such as mutual authentication and user anonymity, as well as robustness against security attacks. In this paper, we propose a device authentication and key agreement scheme for IoT networks. Our proposal takes as a model the scheme proposed by Rezai et al., and combines it with a physical layer security technique and a hyper-elliptic curve cryptosystem . Our results show that not only our authentication scheme provides anonymity, mutual authentication, and efficiency, but it also provides resilience to various attacks, including man-in-the-middle, replay, and de-synchronization attacks. Our comparison shows that our scheme performs better than the state-of-the-art in terms of security properties, while adding a small overhead of ≈ 10 ( ms ) .