Heuristic Security Research Articles

AHA-BV: Access and handover authentication protocol with batch verification for satellite–terrestrial integrated networks

At present, the rapid development of satellite capabilities has prompted the proposal of satellite–terrestrial integrated networks (STIN), which solves the problem of limited signal coverage of terrestrial cellular networks, further promotes the globalization process, and realizes global data sharing and on-demand use. However, due to the high openness of satellite-to-ground links in STIN, users are vulnerable to attacks such as eavesdropping, replay, tampering, and impersonation when requesting access to satellite nodes and obtaining subscription services. To ensure the security and reliability, many authentication protocols have been proposed, but there are still some shortcomings, such as high authentication overhead, vulnerability to certain attacks. In addition, for inter-satellite handovers caused by the highly dynamic topology of satellites, the computational overhead of existing handover authentication mechanisms is too high to be applied to frequent inter-satellite handover scenarios in STIN. To address the above issues, in this paper, we propose a new access and handover authentication protocol with batch verification for STIN, namely the AHA-BV protocol. The AHA-BV protocol not only realizes mutual authentication and key negotiation between users and satellite access points without the participation of the network control center, but also ensures the conditional anonymity of users during the access authentication phase. Furthermore, the lightweight batch verification mechanism reduces the risk of computing bottlenecks when resource-constrained satellites receive a large number of access authentication requests. Not only that, the AHA-BV protocol can also achieve sustained trust in subscription services from STIN with low computational overhead during the inter-satellite handover authentication phase. Formal and heuristic security analysis show that the AHA-BV protocol can meet the security requirements of STIN. Performance analysis indicates that the AHA-BV protocol has low authentication overhead while ensuring security, and is more suitable for users under satellite dynamic topology to access and obtain subscription services from STIN.

AISCM-FH: AI-Enabled Secure Communication Mechanism in Fog Computing-Based Healthcare

Fog computing-based Internet of Things (IoT) architecture is useful for various types of delay efficient network communications and services, like digital healthcare. However, there are privacy and security issues with the fog computing-based healthcare systems, which can further increase the risk of leakage of sensitive healthcare data. Therefore, a security mechanism, such as access control for fog computing-based healthcare systems, is needed to protect its data against various potential attacks. Moreover, the blockchain technology can be used to solve the digital healthcare’s data integrity related problems. The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) further makes the system more effective in case of prediction of health related diseases. In this paper, an AI-enabled secure communication mechanism in fog computing-based healthcare system (in short, AISCM-FH) has been proposed. The security analysis of the proposed AISCM-FH is provided using the standard random oracle model and also with the heuristic (non-mathematical) security analysis. A pragmatic study determines the impact of the proposed AISCM-FH on key performance indicators. Moreover, we include a detailed performance comparison of AISCM-FH with other relevant existing schemes to show that it has low communication and computation costs, and provides superior security and extra functionality attributes as compared to those for other competing existing approaches.

A blockchain-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme for edge computing services

Edge computing is a new paradigm, especially suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, which require low latency, location awareness and mass connections. It surely makes up for some shortcomings in cloud computing in terms of energy consumption and real-time analysis areas. However, it is still a great challenge to guarantee data security and privacy protection in edge computing environment. In this paper, we focus on the topic of authentication in edge computing and propose a conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme based on blockchain, which guarantees user anonymity, conditional traceability as well as multi-factor security. The scheme uses elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and does not use bilinear pairing operations. The key materials are stored on the blockchain and managed by the smart contracts. Formal security proof and heuristic security analysis show that the protocol satisfies desired security requirements and resists against most kinds of conventional attacks. Moreover, the performance comparison shows that the proposed scheme is more efficient in computation and communication than previous related schemes.

A Redesigned Identity-Based Anonymous Authentication Scheme for Mobile-Edge Computing

Ensuring the security and privacy of users and data in a mobile-edge computing (MEC) deployment, without affecting performance, latency and user quality of experience remain challenging. For example, in this article, we revisit an identity-based anonymous authentication scheme designed for MEC deployment. Then, we reveal that the scheme is vulnerable to impersonation, replay, and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, contrary to their claims. It also does not achieve user untraceability, and the registration center must be online during authentication. We also observe that it is unclear from their scheme description, what encryption algorithm should be used in the authentication process. Therefore, we redesign the scheme in order to mitigate the weaknesses pointed out. Our redesigned protocol uses password and biometrics for authentication, which broadens the scope for real-world implementation. We also provide both formal security proof and heuristic security analysis to demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves the desired security goals. A performance comparison shows that our scheme outperforms four other competing schemes in terms of computation and communication costs.

Secure authenticated key exchange for WSNs in IoT applications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are the key technological building block of Internet of Things (IoT), by which remote users can access the real-time data from the sensor nodes. Due to the openness and mobility of such network, it is essential to establish secure links for end-to-end communication with proper authentication. Although amount of research works in this area have been made, so far designing a secure and efficient authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol for this setting is still an open topic. So, the authors in this paper design a two-factor AKE protocol using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for WSNs in the context of IoT, allowing the end users and sensor nodes to exchange information directly after a secure link is established with the help of the corresponding gateway node. The heuristic security analysis has shown that the new protocol can provide various expected security attributes and resist various known attacks. Moreover, the performance study states that the new protocol is efficient enough and has certain efficiency advantages in the aspects of computation and communication costs compared with the same type of ECC-based AKE protocols for IoT applications.

LAPCHS: A lightweight authentication protocol for cloud-based health-care systems

The development of technology has accelerated things and solved many problems. Among various technologies, the integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) into human social life brings the promise of an easier and better life. The integration of IoT into the medical field, as well as the environments and patients associated with it, has provided a new context called the Telecare Medical Information Systems. It should be noted that the smart medicine, in addition to its significant benefits, carries many security threats, so privacy and especially anonymity is the largest concern in implementing a telecare medical information system.Due to the importance of privacy preservation and security in smart health-care systems, Fan et al. have recently proposed a lightweight authentication protocol (IEEE Netw. 33 (2) (2019)) using quadratic residue and pseudo random number generators, to be used in this platform. They believed that their scheme has enough security, privacy preservation, and also good resistance to various attacks including tag traceability attacks, replay attacks and also de-synchronization (DoS) attacks. The aim of the present study is to examine the security of the mentioned protocol. In fact, a heuristic attack was presented, in which an adversary could retrieve tag’s and reader’s current and previous identifier that contradicts anonymity and forward untraceability properties of this protocol. Reader and tag impersonation attacks were also applied against the protocol. Besides, a lightweight authentication protocol was proposed for cloud-based health-care systems called LAPCHS. Security analysis of our new protocol, through heuristic security analysis and also formal evaluations using Real-or-Random Model and simulations done on the AVISPA and the Scyther tools, confirms its security against different attacks.

A Lightweight User Authentication Scheme Based on Fuzzy Extraction Technology for Wireless Sensor Networks

In order to improve the balanced relationships among security, privacy and design overhead for existing wireless sensor networks (WSNs) user authentication scheme, a lightweight user authentication scheme based on fuzzy extraction technology for WSNs. The present scheme combined with biometric fuzzy extraction technology and hash function to generate biometric key, which eliminates the user password factor in the existing authentication schemes. In addition, the proposed scheme can complete mutual authentication and session key agreement between legitimate users and sensor nodes only by using xor, hash and other operations with the lower computation overhead. And the heuristic security analysis, BAN logic model and random oracle model are used for security verification and performance analysis of the current scheme. The results of analysis and verification show that our scheme achieves more security and functional features, and keeps computational efficiency. Compared with other related works, our scheme is more suitable for practical application.

MoneyMorph: Censorship Resistant Rendezvous using Permissionless Cryptocurrencies

Abstract Cryptocurrencies play a major role in the global financial ecosystem. Their presence across different geopolitical corridors, including in repressive regimes, has been one of their striking features. In this work, we leverage this feature for bootstrapping Censorship Resistant communication. We conceptualize the notion of stego-bootstrapping scheme and its security in terms of rareness and security against chosencovertext attacks. We present MoneyMorph, a provably secure stego-bootstrapping scheme using cryptocurrencies. MoneyMorph allows a censored user to interact with a decoder entity outside the censored region, through blockchain transactions as rendezvous, to obtain bootstrapping information such as a censorshipresistant proxy and its public key. Unlike the usual bootstrapping approaches (e.g., emailing) with heuristic security, if any, MoneyMorph employs public-key steganography over blockchain transactions to ensure provable cryptographic security. We design rendezvous over Bitcoin, Zcash, Monero, and Ethereum, and analyze their effectiveness in terms of available bandwidth and transaction cost. With its highly cryptographic structure, we show that Zcash provides 1148 byte bandwidth per transaction costing less than 0.01 USD as fee.

Two-Pass Privacy Preserving Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Smart Grid

The design of an authenticated key agreement protocol for securing the smart meter communications in smart grid networks has attracted growing attention recently. Typically, realizing mutual authentication and key agreement without active involvement of a trusted third party is expected in this field. Thus, to achieve this aim, several authenticated key agreement schemes for smart grid have been presented; while as investigated in the following section of this work, most of these schemes remain vulnerable to various attacks. Therefore, to design a truly secure authenticated key agreement protocol for smart grid and make some contributions to this field, this work presents our new authenticated key agreement scheme for smart grid using Elliptic Curve Qu-Vanstone (ECQV) implicit certificate as the building block. Our scheme is pairing-free and just uses two passes to realize mutual authentication and key agreement as well as strong credential privacy, making it with high efficiency in both computation and communication overheads. Moreover, its security is formally proved under the widely accepted Canetti and Krawczyk (CK) security model, and is further confirmed by a heuristic security analysis.

Post quantum proxy signature scheme based on the multivariate public key cryptographic signature

Proxy signature is a very useful technique which allows the original signer to delegate the signing capability to a proxy signer to perform the signing operation. It finds wide applications especially in the distributed environment where the entities such as the wireless sensors are short of computational power and needed to be convinced to the authenticity of the server. Due to less proxy signature schemes in the post-quantum cryptography aspect, in this article, we investigate the proxy signature in the post-quantum setting so that it can resist against the potential attacks from the quantum adversaries. A general multivariate public key cryptographic proxy scheme based on a multivariate public key cryptographic signature scheme is proposed, and a heuristic security proof is given for our general construction. We show that the construction can reach Existential Unforgeability under an Adaptive Chosen Message Attack with Proxy Key Exposure assuming that the underlying signature is Existential Unforgeability under an Adaptive Chosen Message Attack. We then use our general scheme to construct practical proxy signature schemes for three well-known and promising multivariate public key cryptographic signature schemes. We implement our schemes and compare with several previous constructions to show our efficiency advantage, which further indicates the potential application prospect in the distributed network environment.

Table Recomputation-Based Higher-Order Masking Against Horizontal Attacks

Masking is a class of well-known countermeasure against side-channel analysis by employing the idea of secret sharing. The theoretical security proof model of higher-order masking was initiated by Ishai, Sahai, and Wagner, and Barthe et al. pushed forward it by proposing a more refine security definition named as ${t}$ -SNI security. In CHES 2016, a new attack called horizontal side-channel attacks (HSCAs) came forward and successfully broke the Rivain–Prouff countermeasure, which has been proved to satisfy the ${t}$ -SNI security. It presents a dilemma: instead of more secure, masking with higher-order may be more vulnerable due to the HSCA. Although there already exists an effective countermeasure for the Rivain–Prouff scheme, it is quite difficult to apply this method in the table recomputation-based higher-order masking schemes, such as the scheme introduced by Coron in EUROCRYPT 2014. To fill this gap, we propose a new table recomputation-based higher-order masking scheme, named as table compression masking (TCM) scheme. While meeting the ${t}$ -SNI security, our new countermeasure is also secure against the HSCA. We give the formal security proof under the ${t}$ -SNI security definition, as well as a heuristic security analysis considering the HSCA. Our analysis shows that, by dividing the full lookup table into many distinct parts and shifting them by refreshed shares, the same share will never be manipulated for more than twice in TCM scheme. This feature gives a heuristic security against HSCA. To our best knowledge, our countermeasure is the first solution for table recomputation-based higher-order masking to resist HSCA.

Cryptanalysis and improvement of 2 mutual authentication schemes for Session Initiation Protocol

SummaryRecently, Chaudhry et al and Kumari et al proposed an advanced mutual authentication protocol for Session Initiation Protocol on the basis of the protocol of Lu et al. The authors claimed that their schemes can be resistant to various attacks. Unfortunately, we observe some important flaws in their respective schemes. We point out that their schemes are prone to off‐line password guessing and privileged insider attacks. To remedy their protocols's drawbacks, in this paper, we present a new improved authentication scheme keeping apart the threats encountered in the design of the schemes of Chaudhry et al and Kumari et al. Furthermore, the security analysis illustrates that our proposed scheme not only removes these drawbacks in their schemes but also can resist all known attacks and provide session key security. We give a heuristic security analysis and also provide the security analysis of the proposed scheme with the help of widespread Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham Logic. Finally, our scheme is compared with the previously proposed schemes on security and performance.

Security analysis and improvement of bio-hashing based three-factor authentication scheme for telecare medical information systems

The deployment of telecare medical information system (TMIS) over public networks gives rise to the threat of exposing sensitive medical information to illegal entities. Although a number of three-factor authentication (3FA) schemes have been developed to address this challenge, most of them are found to be flawed. Understanding security and privacy failures of authentication protocols is a prerequisite to both fixing existing protocols and designing future ones. In this paper, we investigate the 3FA protocol of Lu et al. for TMIS (J Med Syst 39:32, 2015) and reveal that it cannot achieve the claimed security and privacy goals. (1) It fails to provide anonymity and untraceability, and is susceptible to the following attacks targeting user privacy: identity revelation attack, identity guessing attack and tracking attack. (2) It is susceptible to offline password guessing attack, user impersonation attack, and server impersonation attack. Then we present an improved 3FA scheme and show that the new scheme fulfills session key secrecy and mutual authentication using the formal verification tool ProVerif. Moreover, detailed heuristic security analysis is also presented to demonstrate that our new scheme is capable of withstanding various attacks, and provides desired security features. Additionally, performance analysis shows that our proposed protocol is a practical solution for TMIS.

Lightweight three-factor authentication and key agreement protocol for internet-integrated wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will be integrated into the future Internet as one of the components of the Internet of Things, and will become globally addressable by any entity connected to the Internet. Despite the great potential of this integration, it also brings new threats, such as the exposure of sensor nodes to attacks originating from the Internet. In this context, lightweight authentication and key agreement protocols must be in place to enable end-to-end secure communication. Recently, Amin et al. proposed a three-factor mutual authentication protocol for WSNs. However, we identified several flaws in their protocol. We found that their protocol suffers from smart card loss attack where the user identity and password can be guessed using offline brute force techniques. Moreover, the protocol suffers from known session-specific temporary information attack, which leads to the disclosure of session keys in other sessions. Furthermore, the protocol is vulnerable to tracking attack and fails to fulfill user untraceability. To address these deficiencies, we present a lightweight and secure user authentication protocol based on the Rabin cryptosystem, which has the characteristic of computational asymmetry. We conduct a formal verification of our proposed protocol using ProVerif in order to demonstrate that our scheme fulfills the required security properties. We also present a comprehensive heuristic security analysis to show that our protocol is secure against all the possible attacks and provides the desired security features. The results we obtained show that our new protocol is a secure and lightweight solution for authentication and key agreement for Internet-integrated WSNs.

A Provably Password Authenticated Key Exchange Scheme Based on Chaotic Maps in Different Realm

Until now, the overwhelming majority of password- authenticated key agreement protocols using chaotic maps are based on three architectures (client/server, two clients/server and multi-server) and four security models (heuristic security, random oracle, ideal cipher and standard model). However, with rapid changes in the modern communication environment such as wireless mesh net- works and cloud storing, it is necessary to put forward a kind more flexible and general architecture to adapt it. So, in our paper, we firstly propose a provable secure two-party in two-realm key agreement protocol using chaotic maps in the standard model. Our proposed protocol is more general and it is easy to expand to many other forms, such as three-party or N-party in different realms. The new protocol resists dictionary attacks mounted by either passive or active network intruders, allowing, in principle, even weak password phrases to be used safely. It also offers perfect forward secrecy, which protects past sessions and passwords against future compromises. Finally, we give the security proof in the standard model and the efficiency analysis of our proposed scheme.

New Cryptosystem Using Multiple Cryptographic Assumptions

Problem statement: A cryptosystem is a way for a sender and a receiver to communicate digitally by which the sender can send receiver any confidential or private message by first encrypting it using the receiver’s public key. Upon receiving the encrypted message, the receiver can confirm the originality of the message’s contents using his own secret key. Up to now, most of the existing cryptosystems were developed based on a single cryptographic assumption like factoring, discrete logarithms, quadratic residue or elliptic curve discrete logarithm. Although these schemes remain secure today, one day in a near future they may be broken if one finds a polynomial algorithm that can efficiently solve the underlying cryptographic assumption. Approach: By this motivation, we designed a new cryptosystem based on two cryptographic assumptions; quadratic residue and discrete logarithms. We integrated these two assumptions in our encrypting and decrypting equations so that the former depends on one public key whereas the latter depends on one corresponding secret key and two secret numbers. Each of public and secret keys in our scheme determines the assumptions we use. Results: The newly developed cryptosystem is shown secure against the three common considering algebraic attacks using a heuristic security technique. The efficiency performance of our scheme requires 2Texp+2Tmul +Thash time complexity for encryption and Texp+2Tmul +Tsrt time complexity for decryption and this magnitude of complexity is considered minimal for multiple cryptographic assumptions-like cryptosystems. Conclusion: The new cryptosystem based on multiple cryptographic assumptions offers a greater security level than that schemes based on a single cryptographic assumption. The adversary has to solve the two assumptions simultaneously to recover the original message from the received corresponding encrypted message but this is very unlikely to happen.

Improved convertible authenticated encryption scheme with provable security

Convertible authenticated encryption (CAE) schemes allow a signer to produce an authenticated ciphertext such that only a designated recipient can decrypt it and verify the recovered signature. The conversion property further enables the designated recipient to reveal an ordinary signature for dealing with a later dispute over repudiation. Based on the ElGamal cryptosystem, in 2009, Lee et al. proposed a CAE scheme with only heuristic security analyses. In this paper, we will demonstrate that their scheme is vulnerable to the chosen-plaintext attack and then further propose an improved variant. Additionally, in the random oracle model, we prove that the improved scheme achieves confidentiality against indistinguishability under adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks (IND-CCA2) and unforgeability against existential forgery under adaptive chosen-message attacks (EF-CMA).

An Integrative Framework to Protocol Analysis and Repair: Bellare–Rogaway Model + Planning + Model Checker

A modified version of the Bellare and Rogaway (1993) adversarial model is encoded using Asynchronous Product Automata (APA). A model checker tool, Simple Homomorphism Verification Tool (SHVT), is then used to perform state-space analysis on the Automata in the setting of planning problem. The three-party identity-based secret public key protocol (3P-ID-SPK) protocol of Lim and Paterson (2006), which claims to provide explicit key authentication, is used as a case study. We then refute its heuristic security argument by revealing a previously unpublished flaw in the protocol using SHVT. We then show how our approach can automatically repair the protocol. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first work that integrates an adversarial model from the computational complexity paradigm with an automated tool from the computer security paradigm to analyse protocols in an artificial intelligence problem setting - planning problem - and, more importantly, to repair protocols. The views and opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not reflect those of the Australian Government and Australian Institute of Criminology. Research was performed while the author was with the Intelligent Systems Laboratory / University of Western Sydney.

Pro-active approach to malware for healthcare information and imaging systems

Evolution of malware has created dynamic and unique security challenges for operators of healthcare information systems. Ability to integrate heuristic security agents with diagnostic and clinical applications results in greater reliability, increased patient safety and system high availability.

Verifiable signature sharing for DSA with heuristic security

The author points out that verifiable signature sharing (VΣS) for the DSA proposed by Franklin et al. at Eurocrypt'95 does not possess heuristic security, and he proposes an improved scheme which does possess heuristic security.