Identity Impersonation Research Articles

A deep learning-driven fingerprint verification model for enhancing exam integrity in Moroccan higher education

ABSTRACT In Moroccan higher education, the integrity of examinations is paramount, yet it faces the persistent challenge of identity impersonation. This form of academic dishonesty not only undermines the credibility of educational institutions but also contributes to the graduation of incompetent students. In an era where artificial intelligence is revolutionizing various sectors, its application to upholding academic integrity is both timely and essential. This paper proposes an advanced deep learning-driven fingerprint verification model specifically designed to combat impersonation in university examinations. Unlike traditional methods, our model leverages the power of Siamese neural networks (SNN), renowned for their effectiveness in learning distinct features and similarities. The model, trained, validated, and tested using the SOCOFing dataset, demonstrated high accuracy and effectiveness in fingerprint identification, crucial for verifying identities in educational exam settings. It achieved an accuracy of 99.29%, and an F1 score of 99.27%, surpassing other systems and significantly contributing to examination integrity in Moroccan higher education.

Unraveling the complexity of cyberbullying: Development and validation of a comprehensive questionnaire

This study aims to examine the construct validity and discriminant validity of a cyberbullying questionnaire, as well as explore the practical implications of the findings. The study utilizes exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to validate the measurement model of the cyberbullying questionnaire. Data analysis is conducted using established statistical techniques. The results reveal the presence of six distinct dimensions of cyberbullying: Online Privacy Violation, Online Harassment and Discomfort, Online Exclusion and Privacy Violation, Disturbance and Intimidation, Identity Impersonation, and Spread of Secrets. The questionnaire demonstrates good construct validity and discriminant validity, providing a reliable tool to measure cyberbullying experiences. This study is limited to a specific population and cultural context. Further research is needed to validate the questionnaire in diverse populations and explore the relationship between cyberbullying dimensions and associated outcomes. This study contributes to the understanding of cyberbullying by providing a comprehensive framework and validated measurement tool.

LAAKA: Lightweight Anonymous Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for Secure Fog-Driven IoT Systems

Fog computing is a new computing model with limited resources located near the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to provide low transmission delay, mobility, and location awareness services. However, fog technology not only extends the cloud resources but also inherits its properties and security problems, such as device capture, man-in-the-middle, secret key compromise, identity impersonation, and message replay attacks. These vulnerabilities pose significant risks to the integrity of IoT-fog communications. Nevertheless, the existing mutual authentication approaches either suffer from high computational overheads or fail to provide secure mutual authentication. To address this gap, this paper introduces LAAKA, a Lightweight Anonymous Authentication and Key Agreement scheme. Considering the constrained resources of IoT and fog devices, LAAKA utilizes lightweight operations such as hash function and bitwise XOR. Its main objective is to facilitate mutual authentication and establish secure session keys between IoT devices and fog servers, making it useful for various IoT applications. We validate the robustness of LAAKA against various security threats by conducting comprehensive formal security analysis, including Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and Random Oracle Model (ROM), as well as informal analysis. The efficacy of our scheme is further demonstrated through evaluation with the Scyther tool. Compared to other proposed authentication approaches, the results illustrate the superior performance and efficiency of our approach in enhancing the security features, minimizing the computational cost, and optimizing storage utilization.

SM2-DualRing: Efficient SM2-based ring signature schemes with logarithmic size

As an equivalent of a handwritten signature, digital signature can resist against information tampering and identity impersonation during digital communication, but it fails to meet the specific anonymity requirement in circumstances like voting, credit reporting, and whistle-blowing. Ring signature was introduced as a special digital signature to further achieve anonymity, and classical schemes constructed from single ring were faced with linearly increasing size. In CRYPTO 2021, Yuen et al. proposed a novel construction paradigm (namely, DualRing) for reaping logarithmic-sized ring signature. Existing DualRing-based ring signature schemes are based on its supported Type-T standard signature algorithms (Three-move type, e.g. Schnorr signature). In this paper, we are motivated to seek a SM2-based ring signature scheme upon the DualRing technology, among which the SM2 digital signature is widely adopted as an international standard but not with a Type-T architecture. Therefore, we first transform the SM2 digital signature into Type-T and integrate DualRing with the variant of the SM2 digital signature. After that, we prove the unforgeability and anonymity of our schemes, together with proposing optimized and linkable schemes. Finally, we put our schemes into practice to display their performance in communication and computation costs.

Lightweight and Privacy-Preserving Charging Reservation Authentication Protocol for 5G-V2G

To compensate for the lack of charging equipment, the charging reservation mechanism has been employed in the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) system, which is vulnerable to some potential risks, such as privacy disclosure, identity impersonation, hardware modification, and so on. In this paper, we first introduce a 5G-V2G system that integrates the 5G network and the power grid to enable the remote transmission of reservation information. On this basis, we propose a scalable reservation authentication and key agreement protocol that can support access of flexible number and guarantee the confidentiality and privacy of critical reservation data. The proposed protocol uses lightweight algorithms like reverse fuzzy extraction to offload the computation overhead on the EVs and embeds physical unclonable function (PUF) in the outfield equipment to resist physical attacks. We evaluate the security properties of the proposed protocol by the formal analysis tool AVISPA and compare it with the existing schemes in terms of computing overhead, transmission overhead, signaling overhead, and security. The comprehensive results indicate that our protocol performs better in all aspects and has higher reliability and scalability. In practice, our protocol can assist the 5G charging reservation mechanism to complete efficient, lightweight, and privacy-preserving reservation information collection and authentication.

Quantum secure direct communication scheme with identity authentication

Aiming at the problem that traditional quantum secure direct communication schemes need to assume the legitimacy of both parties in advance, a GHZ state (a quantum state involving at least three subsystems or particles entanglement) based quantum secure direct communication scheme with identity authentication is proposed. The scheme first encodes GHZ state particles into eight types, divides the particles into three parts, and sends them three times. Each time, eavesdropping is added to detect whether the particle detection channel is secure, and identity authentication is added when sending particles for the second time to verify the identity of the receiver. Specifically, according to the value of the ID key IDA, the specified particles (such as <inline-formula><tex-math id="Z-20230114055019-1">\begin{document}$ |0\rangle $\end{document}</tex-math><alternatives><graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="2-20221684_Z-20230114055019-1.jpg"/><graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="2-20221684_Z-20230114055019-1.png"/></alternatives></inline-formula> particles or <inline-formula><tex-math id="Z-20230114055019-2">\begin{document}$ |+ \rangle $\end{document}</tex-math><alternatives><graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="2-20221684_Z-20230114055019-2.jpg"/><graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="2-20221684_Z-20230114055019-2.png"/></alternatives></inline-formula> particles) are found in the two particles. Then their positions are marked as <i>L</i> and they traverse down until all the identity keys are traversed, obtaining a position sequence <i>L</i>. After sending the two particles to Bob for eavesdropping detection, Bob measures the <i>L</i> position of the two particles on the corresponding basis according to the value of the identity key, the measurement results are coded, and compared with the identity key IDA to complete the identity authentication. After sending the particles for the third time. the receiver extracts all the detected particles, and then the GHZ state particles are jointly measured, and the original information is recovered through the previously given coding rules, so as to realize quantum safe direct communication. The design of this scheme is simple and efficient, and the communication can be realized without complex unitary transformation. The correctness analysis proves that the scheme is correct in theory. The security analyses of interception/measurement retransmission attack, Trojan horse attack, denial of service attack, auxiliary particle attack, identity impersonation attack, and other attacks prove that the scheme can resist common internal attacks and external attacks, and solve the problem of information leakage. The transmission efficiency of the scheme is 1, the quantum bit utilization is 1, and the coding capacity is a quantum state carrying 3 bits of information. Compared with some previous schemes, this scheme has obvious advantages in these three aspects. The biggest advantage is that the sender does not need to assume the legitimacy of the receiver when sending information, so it has high practical application value.

Quantum secure direct communication scheme based on the mixture of single photon and Bell state with two way authentication

In response to the demand for identity authentication in quantum secure direct communication, this paper proposes a quantum secure direct communication scheme based on a mixture of single photon and Bell state, by combining the bidirectional identity authentication. Before communication begins, both parties share a series of secret information to prepare a series of single photon and Bell state particles. Encoding four single photons and four Bell states yields eight types of encoded information, followed by identity authentication. The first step in identity authentication is to use a single photon to verify the legitimacy of the receiver. If the error exceeds the given threshold, it indicates the presence of eavesdropping. Otherwise, the channel is safe. Then, Bell state particles are used to verify the legitimacy of the sender, and the threshold is also used to determine whether there is eavesdropping. The present method is the same as previous one. If the error rate is higher than the given threshold, it indicates the existence of third-party eavesdropping. Otherwise, it indicates that the channel is secure. As for the specific verification method, it will be explained in detail in the article. Afterwards, Bell state particles are mixed with a single photon as a transmission carrier, and eavesdropping detection particles are added whenever the quantum state is sent. However, once the eavesdropper intercepts the transmitted particles, owing to incomplete information obtained, the eavesdropper is unable to recover the original information, and the eavesdropping behavior will be immediately detected, thus terminating communication. In this scheme, single photon and Bell states are fully utilized, and hybrid communication can effectively improve transmission efficiency, encoding capability, and quantum bit utilization. Security analysis shows that this scheme can resist common external and internal attacks such as interception/measurement replay attacks, auxiliary particle attacks, and identity impersonation attacks. The analysis of efficiency and encoding capacity shows that the transmission efficiency of this scheme is 1, the encoding capacity is 3 bits per state, and the quantum bit utilization rate is 1. Compared with other schemes, this scheme has significant advantages because it uses different particles for bidirectional authentication, making it more difficult for attackers to crack, and thus it has higher security than traditional schemes.

LbSP: Load-Balanced Secure and Private Autonomous Electric Vehicle Charging Framework With Online Price Optimization

Nowadays, autonomous electric vehicles (AEVs) are increasingly popular due to low resource consumption, low pollutant emission, and high efficiency. In practice, Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) networks supply energy power to EVs to ensure the usage of EVs. However, there are still certain security and privacy concerns in V2G connections, such as identity impersonation and message manipulation. Additionally, the widespread usage of EVs brings significant pressure on the power grid, leading to undesirable effects like voltage deviations if EVs’ charging is not well coordinated. In this article, to tackle these issues, we design a novel load-balanced secure and private EV charging framework named load-balanced secure and private framework (LbSP) for secure, private, and efficient EV charging with a minimal negative effect on the existing power grid. It assures reliable and efficient charging services by a lightweighted encryption technique. Also, it balances the energy consumption of power grids via an online pricing strategy that minimizes load variance by optimizing energy prices in real time. Moreover, it preserves users’ privacy while not affecting online pricing using an advanced differential privacy technique. Furthermore, LbSP deploys on an edge-cloud structure for fast response and more precise pricing, where clouds balance overall load consumption by online price optimization while edges gather data for clouds and respond to charging requests from EVs. The evaluation results show that the proposed framework ensures secure and private EV charging, balances energy load consumption, and preserves users’ privacy.

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.

A Dense Neural Network Approach for Detecting Clone ID Attacks on the RPL Protocol of the IoT.

At present, new data sharing technologies, such as those used in the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, are being extensively adopted. For this reason, intelligent security controls have become imperative. According to good practices and security information standards, particularly those regarding security in depth, several defensive layers are required to protect information assets. Within the context of IoT cyber-attacks, it is fundamental to continuously adapt new detection mechanisms for growing IoT threats, specifically for those becoming more sophisticated within mesh networks, such as identity theft and cloning. Therefore, current applications, such as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS), and Security Information and Event Management Systems (SIEM), are becoming inadequate for accurately handling novel security incidents, due to their signature-based detection procedures using the matching and flagging of anomalous patterns. This project focuses on a seldom-investigated identity attack—the Clone ID attack—directed at the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL), the underlying technology for most IoT devices. Hence, a robust Artificial Intelligence-based protection framework is proposed, in order to tackle major identity impersonation attacks, which classical applications are prone to misidentifying. On this basis, unsupervised pre-training techniques are employed to select key characteristics from RPL network samples. Then, a Dense Neural Network (DNN) is trained to maximize deep feature engineering, with the aim of improving classification results to protect against malicious counterfeiting attempts.

Threshold identity authentication signature: Impersonation prevention in social network services

SummaryWhile the social network services (SNS) have dominate the ways that people communicate with each other on the Internet, identity impersonation remains to be a serious issue that needs to be solved due to the anonymity in the cyber network. Currently, the potential solution to the problem relies heavily on the administration from the central server, which requires intensive workload of the identity management. In this article, we propose a threshold identity authentication signature scheme to solve the impersonation problem from the protocol layer rather than software design in the traditional upper level. In our scheme, with the help of some authenticated accounts, trusted relationship can be shared in a group to other unauthenticated accounts, which largely decrease the workload of authenticating all the accounts. Users are given the ability to verify other accounts' identity information by their signatures. Then, we establish three security goals to prevent the malicious adversary to launch the impersonation attack on a group. We claim that our scheme is suitable for the SNS scenario since the procedure of generating a signature to prove the identity requires little computation cost, it is user‐friendly especially on the lightweight devices such as mobile devices and so on.

Secure i-Voting Scheme with Blockchain Technology and Blind Signature

In the last four years, blockchain technology affected largely all aspects of our lives. Blockchain started to launch a new technological revolution of storing digital transactions over the Internet, verifying the authenticity, licensing and providing the highest degree of security and encryption. Blockchain usage started with digital currency then its implementation extended to many industries such as voting, health records, copywriters, real estates and so on. However, it is time to upgrade the election scenario from practicing paper-based elections to use modern technologies in order to facilitate our lives. The fact that the blockchain technology has demonstrated almost infinite immutability and high resistance against hacking, lends credit to employ it in securing election data from fraud by saving every single piece of data, record or transaction with unchangeable history. In this paper, we propose and test implement a robust online voting system based on blockchain in order to prevent election forgery and ease the voting process for citizens. The essence of our research lies in abandoning alterable traditional databases and replacing them with two private blockchains that use the peer-to-peer network. Along with the blockchains, we utilized blind signature to maintain vote/voter privacy in order to safeguard voter eligibility validation against manipulation and forgery. Lastly, we discuss a threat model, and suggest solutions overcome it; we also suggest a solution to identity impersonation and vote-selling problems.

Multilevel Authentication for Social Network

Nowadays, social network plays a vital role in communication. Normally user used social networks in daily activities. However, this left all online users susceptible to misuse and abuse. Recently, there has been a remarkable growth in number of hacking as well. Once the computer is online, anyone can have access to the network. Therefore, we proposed a secure social network site called SocialBook where users can post status, photos and connect with friends. This system is developed using PHP programming language and Iterative and Incremental Development methodology. The purpose of developing this system is to solve unsecured login accounts and lack of user authentication problem. This system applies the secret question procedure when the user wants to change their account password. Moreover, SocialBook use idle session timeout mechanism for additional security. When the user is idle for ten minutes, they will be logged out automatically. So, the user will be less worry about their account from being hacked and the identity impersonation by unauthorized user.

Multilevel Authentication for Social Network

Nowadays, social network plays a vital role in communication. Normally user used social networks in daily activities. However, this left all online users susceptible to misuse and abuse. Recently, there has been a remarkable growth in number of hacking as well. Once the computer is online, anyone can have access to the network. Therefore, we proposed a secure social network site called SocialBook where users can post status, photos and connect with friends. This system is developed using PHP programming language and Iterative and Incremental Development methodology. The purpose of developing this system is to solve unsecured login accounts and lack of user authentication problem. This system applies the secret question procedure when the user wants to change their account password. Moreover, SocialBook use idle session timeout mechanism for additional security. When the user is idle for ten minutes, they will be logged out automatically. So, the user will be less worry about their account from being hacked and the identity impersonation by unauthorized user.

Authenticated key exchange with synchronized state

ABSTRACTWe study the problem on how to either prevent identity impersonation (IDI) attacks or limit its consequences by on‐line detecting previously unidentified IDI attacks, where IDI attacks are normally caused by the leakage of identity related long‐term key. Such problem has, up until now, lacked a provably good solution. We deal with this problem through the scenario on authenticated key exchange with synchronized state (AKESS). This work provides a security model for AKESS, in which we particularly formalize the security of synchronized state based on indistinguishability. We propose a two party execution state synchronization framework for symmetric case, based on which we propose a generic compiler for AKESS protocols. Our goal is to transform any existing passively secure KE protocols to AKESS protocols using synchronized state, without any modification on those KE protocols. The new generic compiler is probably secure in the standard model under standard assumptions. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Performance Analysis of Malicious Node Aware Routing for MANET using TwoHop Authentication

The inherent features of the MANET [1] make it vulnerable to a wide range of attacks. There is no guarantee that a communication path is free from malicious and compromised nodes which deliberately wish to disrupt the network communication. In this paper, we present a security mechanism that provides message integrity, mutual authentication and twohop authentication mechanism without the assistance of online certification authority. Our mechanism not only prevents identity impersonation, replay attacks, but also enables node to regulate the behavior of its neighbors to foil active attacks. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is analyzed to DSR and OLSR routing using simulator NS2.34