Lightweight Primitives Research Articles

Fault-tolerant security-efficiency combined authentication scheme for manned-unmanned teaming

Manned-unmanned teaming (MUM-T) is an emerging network system which interconnects manned aerial vehicles (MAVs) with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to enhance mission effectiveness and reduce workloads. Like other wireless systems, MUM-T is prone to attacks from the open communication channel. Therefore, an authentication scheme is required to establish secure and trusted communication between the MAV and the UAV. However, existing schemes fail to provide adequate security features and necessary efficiency, mostly due to their incomprehensive threat modeling and improper use of authentication techniques. Moreover, traditional centralized architecture of the authentication server leads to the single point of failure (SPOF) problem, which jeopardizes the robustness and scalability of MUM-T. In this paper, we propose a fault-tolerant authentication scheme for MUM-T that will solve these problems. To enhance its security, we construct a new threat model consisting of adversary's capabilities, security features, and security challenges to ensure the security of a scheme under combination attacks. To preserve the highest possible efficiency, we propose the design principle of using lightweight primitives for authentication and applying public key operations in key establishment. To address the SPOF problem, we employ a distributed fault-tolerant mechanism to share registration information within authentication servers and defend against faulty nodes. As is demonstrated by the security proof and performance comparison, our scheme succeeds in improving security and reducing overall costs, which provides a better solution than existing schemes.

Survey on Lightweight Primitives and Protocols for RFID in Wireless Sensor Networks

The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies is becoming widespread in all kind of wireless network-based applications. As expected, applications based on sensor networks, ad-hoc or mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can be highly benefited from the adoption of RFID solutions. There is a strong need to employ lightweight cryptographic primitives for many security applications because of the tight cost and constrained resource requirement of sensor based networks. This paper mainly focuses on the security analysis of lightweight protocols and algorithms proposed for the security of RFID systems. A large number of research solutions have been proposed to implement lightweight cryptographic primitives and protocols in sensor and RFID integration based resource constraint networks. In this work, an overview of the currently discussed lightweight primitives and their attributes has been done. These primitives and protocols have been compared based on gate equivalents (GEs), power, technology, strengths, weaknesses and attacks. Further, an integration of primitives and protocols is compared with the possibilities of their applications in practical scenarios.

Interactive Visual Analysis Engine for High-Performance CAE Simulations

<p indent="0mm">Large-scale simulation data poses new challenges to CAE design and analysis. The coherent interaction between pre-processing and post-processing is weak, and the visual interaction of large-scale data is low. Therefore, an interactive visual analysis engine for high-performance CAE simulations is proposed. Firstly, a hybrid data model that efficiently couples geometric models and computational meshes is constructed. Secondly, a parallel visualization pipeline is developed for the coherent interaction of pre-processing and post-processing. Finally, a GPU photorealistic rendering based on lightweight primitives extracted from the external surface of volume meshes is implemented to support real-time high quality CAE design and analysis. The engine has been integrated into aeroengine CAE simulation Apps of China. The results show that it can smoothly support the interactive design and analysis of large-scale simulation applications. Based on this engine, the interactive performance of one-click import and rendering of the Trent-1000 engine model, including tens of millions of unstructured grids, is more than 8 times higher than that of ANSYS software.

Robust Authentication Protocol for Dynamic Charging System of Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles have emerged as the future of transport worldwide with the rising need for greener and energy-efficient transportation solutions. This remarkable shift delegated a wide variety of protocols for reliable, scalable and secure communications in the electric vehicle transportation system. With this vision in mind, security researchers have proposed diverse authentication protocols vital for the electric vehicle charging system to protect the information exchanged between the various principals involved. Several existing authentication techniques, on the other hand, are either vulnerable to significant security threats or are limited to static charging. This article proposes a robust authentication mechanism for charging electric vehicles while driving, a scenario that is rapidly approaching in the future. The proposed protocol makes use of secure and lightweight primitives such as elliptic curves and hash functions. The proposed protocol's security is being analyzed to demonstrate that it is capable of withstanding relevant attacks. Additionally, the protocol achieves its objectives at a cost that is practically conceivable in terms of transmission and computing.

FPGA Implementation of Some Second Round NIST Lightweight Cryptography Candidates

For almost one decade, the academic community has been working in the design and analysis of new lightweight primitives. This cryptography development aims to provide solutions tailored for resource-constrained devices. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) started an open process to create a Lightweight Cryptography Standardization portfolio. As a part of the process, the candidates must demonstrate their suitability for hardware implementation. Cost and performance are two of the criteria to be evaluated. In this work, we present the analysis of costs and performance in hardware implementations over five NIST LWC Round 2 candidates, COMET, ESTATE-AES/Gift, LOCUS, LOTUS, and Oribatida. Each candidate’s implementation was adapted to the Hardware API for Lightweight Cryptography for fair benchmarking of hardware cores. The results were generated for Xilinx Artix-7 xc7a12tcsg325-3. The results indicate that it is feasible to achieve the reduction of each solution below 2000 LUTs and 2000 slices where some of them (the variants of ESTATE-AES/Gift) are below 850 LUTs and 600 FF when they are included in the LWC CryptoCore.

Safe is the New Smart: PUF-Based Authentication for Load Modification-Resistant Smart Meters

In the energy sector, IoT manifests in the form of next-generation power grids that provide enhanced electrical stability, efficient power distribution, and utilization. The primary feature of a Smart Grid is the presence of an advanced bi-directional communication network between the Smart meters at the consumer end and the servers at the Utility Operators. Smart meters are broadly vulnerable to attacks on communication and physical systems. We propose a secure and operationally asymmetric mutual authentication and key-exchange protocol for secure communication. Our protocol balances security and efficiency, delegates complex cryptographic operations to the resource-equipped servers, and carefully manages the workload on the resource-constrained Smart meter nodes using unconventional lightweight primitives such as Physically Unclonable Functions. We prove the security of the protocol using well-established cryptographic assumptions. We implement the proposed scheme end-to-end in a Smart meter prototype using commercial-off-the-shelf products, a Utility server, and a credential generator as the trusted third party. Additionally, we demonstrate a physics-based attack named load modification attack on the Smart meter to demonstrate that merely securing the communication channel using authentication does not secure the meter, but requires further protections to ensure the correctness of the reported consumption. Hence, we propose a countermeasure to such an attack that goes side-by-side with our protocol implementation.

Securing IoT-Based RFID Systems: A Robust Authentication Protocol Using Symmetric Cryptography.

Despite the many conveniences of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems, the underlying open architecture for communication between the RFID devices may lead to various security threats. Recently, many solutions were proposed to secure RFID systems and many such systems are based on only lightweight primitives, including symmetric encryption, hash functions, and exclusive OR operation. Many solutions based on only lightweight primitives were proved insecure, whereas, due to resource-constrained nature of RFID devices, the public key-based cryptographic solutions are unenviable for RFID systems. Very recently, Gope and Hwang proposed an authentication protocol for RFID systems based on only lightweight primitives and claimed their protocol can withstand all known attacks. However, as per the analysis in this article, their protocol is infeasible and is vulnerable to collision, denial-of-service (DoS), and stolen verifier attacks. This article then presents an improved realistic and lightweight authentication protocol to ensure protection against known attacks. The security of the proposed protocol is formally analyzed using Burrows Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and under the attack model of automated security verification tool ProVerif. Moreover, the security features are also well analyzed, although informally. The proposed protocol outperforms the competing protocols in terms of security.

A novel lightweight key management scheme for RFID-sensor integrated hierarchical MANET based on internet of things

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a group of low power computing mobile and wireless devices which cooperatively form an infrastructure-less and decentralised network. Scarcity of resources in MANET devices requires secure, efficient and lightweight mechanisms for network construction, its management and administration. Teo and Tan (2005) proposed efficient key management approach for hierarchical MANET. In this work, Teo and Tan's circular hierarchical model is extended for dynamic group construction. In proposed mechanism lightweight primitives and protocols are integrated for security and results show that it provides strong authentication, confidentiality, forward and backward secrecies. The comparative analysis shows that the proposed mechanism is having lesser cost in terms of number of messages exchange and there is an improvement of 6.6% for gate equivalents (GEs) as compared to Teo and Tan's protocol. Further, the proposed mechanism provides higher throughput and minimum delay compared to Teo and Tan's protocol.

Self‐similarity cryptanalysis of the block cipher ITUbee

Recent developments in the resource constrained devices have led to a renewed interest in designing light-weight primitives with inventive and unconventional structures. Using round-dependent constants instead of a strong key schedule is one of the most widely used trick against the self-similarity cryptanalysis in recent cipher proposals. So far there has been little discussion about the effect of the round constants on the security of the ciphers. In this study, the authors identify several weaknesses in round-reduced versions of the block cipher ITUbee, which was presented recently at LightSec 2013. These weaknesses allow to build relations between the round constants. The author's technique leads to several cryptanalysis in the weak-key, related-key and single-key models and shows that the resistance of ITUbee against self-similarity cryptanalysis is not independent of the values of round constants. They show that the round-reduced cipher under a fraction of the keys is distinguishable from an ideal random permutation. Then they utilise a similar technique to show there exists a deterministic related-key differential distinguisher for up to eight rounds of the cipher. This observation leads to the decrease of the security of 8-round ITUbee in the single-key model by one bit.

Survey on Lightweight Primitives and Protocols for RFID in Wireless Sensor Networks

The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies is becoming widespread in all kind of wireless network-based applications. As expected, applications based on sensor networks, ad-hoc or mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can be highly benefited from the adoption of RFID solutions. There is a strong need to employ lightweight cryptographic primitives for many security applications because of the tight cost and constrained resource requirement of sensor based networks. This paper mainly focuses on the security analysis of lightweight protocols and algorithms proposed for the security of RFID systems . A large number of research solutions have been proposed to implement lightweight cryptographic primitives and protocols in sensor and RFID integration based resource constraint networks. In this work, an overview of the currently discussed lightweight primitives and their attributes has been done. These primitives and protocols have been compared based on gate equivalents (GEs), power, technology, strengths, weaknesses and attacks. Further, an integration of primitives and protocols is compared with the possibilities of their applications in practical scenarios.

An AES Based 256-bit Hash Function for Lightweight Applications: Lesamnta-LW

This paper proposes a new lightweight 256-bit hash function Lesamnta-LW. The security of Lesamnta-LW is reduced to that of the underlying AES-based block cipher and it is theoretically analyzed for an important application, namely the key-prefix mode. While most of recently proposed lightweight primitives are hardware-oriented with very small footprints, our main target with Lesamnta-LW is to achieve compact and fast hashing for lightweight application on a wider variety of environments ranging from inexpensive devices to high-end severs at the 2120 security level. As for performance, our primary target CPUs are 8-bit and it is shown that, for short message hashing, Lesamnta-LW offers better tradeoffs between speed and cost on an 8-bit CPU than SHA-256.