Low Cost Smart Cards Research Articles

An IoT-Oriented Privacy-Preserving Fingerprint Authentication System

Identity authentication has become an essential component for access control in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment. To overcome the inherent weakness of password-based authentication, many present IoT devices (e.g., commercial banking smart cards) are equipped with the fingerprint authentication mechanism. However, due to the resource constraints of IoT devices, oversimplified authentication schemes are deployed, which compromise system performance significantly. Moreover, fingerprint templates in these existing schemes are unprotected. To address these issues, we propose an IoT-oriented privacy-preserving fingerprint authentication system. The proposed system is composed of four main components: 1) minutiae extraction; 2) the minutia cylinder-code (MCC)-based cancelable binary template, generated by the proposed normalized random projection; 3) the lightweight, privacy-preserving template, built by novel pairwise Boolean operations; and 4) fingerprint matching. Our system can effectively mitigate preimage and hill-climbing attacks. A prototype of the proposed system is developed using a popular open-source platform (i.e., Open Virtual Platforms). Comprehensive experimental results on eight benchmark data sets validate the effectiveness of the proposed IoT-oriented fingerprint authentication system. Our system also achieves equivalent authentication accuracy to that of the unprotected fingerprint authentication systems deployed in the resource-rich, non-IoT environment. More importantly, our system prototype is deployable to commercially available low-cost smart cards, such as Atmel AT24C256C Memory Smart Card 256K Bits. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed system is the first privacy-preserving, cancelable fingerprint authentication system developed in such a resource-constrained IoT setting.

ISO/IEC standards for on-card biometric comparison

On-card biometric comparison is getting more attention from government and the IT industry because of the higher level of security and its ability to prevent the enrolment template from leakage that can cause privacy concern. To address the interoperability needs, the ISO/IEC SC17 WG11 published a standard entitled ISO/IEC 24787 - 'On-card biometric comparison'. This paper will give an introduction to this new standard and analyse the limitation of implementing minutiae matching algorithm using this standard on low-cost smartcard. We will present a novel algorithm to perform off-card template alignment using the work-sharing mechanism. The final matching process is executed on-card to ensure that the security is not compromised. The average verification time of our proposed algorithm is about 2.5 seconds with an 8-bit Java card with an average EER <= 4.3% using FVC2000 and FVC2002 databases. Hence, the performance is comparable to those minutiae matching algorithms running on PC.

Deformation Characteristics of an Organic Thin Film Transistor

An organic thin film transistor (OTFT) on a flexible substrate with electroplated electrodes has many advantages in the fabrication of low cost sensors, e-paper, smart cards, and flexible displays. In this study, we simulated the mechanical characteristics of an OTFT with various compressive stress conditions using COMSOL. An analysis model, which was limited to channel, source, and drain, was used to investigate deformation and internal stress concentrations. The channel length is 40 microm and the OTFT structure is a top-contact structure. The OTFT was fabricated using pentacene as a semiconducting layer and electroplated Ni as a gate electrode. The deformation characteristics of the fabricated OTFT were predicted in terms of strain and internal stress.

NUMERICAL ANALYSIS ON THE MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF ORGANIC THIN FILM TRANSISTOR

The organic thin film transistor (OTFT) on flexible substrate electroplated electrodes has many advantages as in the fabrication of low cost sensors, e-paper, smart cards, and flexible displays. In this study, we simulated the mechanical and electrical characteristics of the OTFT with various voltage conditions by using COMSOL. The model consisting of a channel, source and drain was employed to investigate the temperature distribution and thermal stress concentration. The channel length is 40 µm and the voltage ranged between -20V and -40V. The OTFT was fabricated using pentacene as a semiconducting layer and electroplated Ni as a gate electrode. Mechanical properties of the fabricated OTFT were characterized by thermal stress which was predicted with the result of stress distribution.

Robust one-time password authentication scheme using smart card for home network environment

Due to the exponential growth of the Internet users and wireless devices, interests on home networks have been enormously increased in recent days. In digital home networks, home services including remote access and control to home appliances as well as services offered by service providers are alluring. However, the remote control services cause digital home networks to have various security threats. Hence, for digital home networks, robust security services, especially remote user authentication, should be considered. This paper presents a robust and efficient authentication scheme based on strong-password approach to provide secure remote access in digital home network environments. The proposed scheme uses lightweight computation modules including hashed one-time password and hash-chaining technique along with low-cost smart card technology. It aims to satisfy several security requirements including stolen smart card attack and forward secrecy with lost smart card as well as functional requirements including no verification table and no time synchronization. Comparing with the existing representative schemes, it can be validated that the proposed scheme is more robust authentication mechanism having better security properties. We have conducted formal verification of the proposed scheme.

A new perturbation algorithm and enhancing security of SFLASH signature scheme

This paper introduces the concept of noise factor and noise operation, and constructs a noise group. We present a new perturbation algorithm for enhancing security of multivariate public key cryptosystems (MPKCs). European Consortium SFLASH which derives from Matsumoto-Imai scheme is a fast signature scheme intended for low cost smart cards. It was broken with the differential cryptanalysis by Dubois et al. in 2007. Taking Matsumoto-Imai system as an example, security analysis shows that the new algorithm can powerfully demolish its potential mathematical properties of the public key, and effectively avoid differential cryptanalysis without lowering the efficiency of the original algorithm.

On the Fly Authentication and Signature Schemes Based on Groups of Unknown Order

In response to the current need for fast, secure and cheap public-key cryptography, we propose an interactive zero-knowledge identification scheme and a derived signature scheme that combine provable security based on the problem of computing discrete logarithms in any group, short keys, very short transmission and minimal on-line computation. This leads to both efficient and secure applications well suited to implementation on low cost smart cards. We introduce GPS, a Schnorr-like scheme that does not require knowledge of the order of the group nor of the group element. As a consequence, it can be used with most cryptographic group structures, including those of unknown order. Furthermore, the computation of the prover's response is done over the integers, hence can be done with very limited computational capabilities. This paper provides complete security proofs of the identification scheme. From a practical point of view, the possible range of parameters is discussed and a report on the performances of an actual implementation on a cheap smart card is included: a complete and secure authentication can be performed in less than 20 milliseconds with low cost equipment.

Cryptanalysis of the new TTS scheme in CHES 2004

We combine the method of searching for an invariant subspace of the unbalanced Oil and Vinegar signature scheme and the Minrank method to defeat the new TTS signature scheme, which was suggested for low-cost smart card applications at CHES 2004. We show that the attack complexity is less than 250.

A Fingerprint Matching Using Minutia Ridge Shape for Low Cost Match-on-Card Systems

In recent years, there is an increasing trend of using biometric identifiers for personal authentication. Encouraged by advances in smart card technologies, the fingerprint matching gets increasingly embedded into smart cards for an effective personal authentication method. However, current generation of low cost smart cards are usually equipped with limited hardware resources such as an 8-bit or 16-bit microcontroller. The fingerprint matching typically is a time consuming, computationally intensive and costly process. Therefore, it is still a challenge to integrate the fingerprint matching into a smart card. In this paper, we present a fast memory-efficient fingerprint matching using minutia ridge shape feature. This feature offers advantages of smaller template size, smaller memory requirement, faster matching time and robust matching against image distortion over conventional minutiae-based feature. The implementation result shows that the proposed method can be embedded in smart cards for a real-time Match-on-Card system.

New hierarchical assignment without Public Key cryptography

The access privileges in many distributed systems can be effectively organized as a hierarchical tree. Distributing distinct cryptographic keys to distinct entities, according to their privileges, provides a good solution to the hierarchical access control problem. Many existing key assignment schemes use public key cryptography, which requires lots of costly public key operations and thus leads to a limited degree of deployment. In this paper, we shall propose a new key assignment protocol that employs only a low cost smart card with little memory to perform simple arithmetic operations. Our approach greatly reduces the computational load and the implementation cost. Compared with Lin’s scheme, which is a very efficient scheme without using any public key cryptography, our new scheme further reduces the computational cost by as much as 66% and the quantity of public data by 50%.

A New \mathcal{NP} -Complete Problem and Public-Key Identification

The appearance of the theory of zero-knowledge, presented by Goldwasser, Micali and Rackoff in 1985, opened a way to secure identification schemes. The first application was the famous Fiat-Shamir scheme based on the problem of modular square roots extraction. In the following years, many other schemes have been proposed, some Fiat-Shamir extensions but also new discrete logarithm based schemes. Therefore, all of them were based on problems from number theory. Their main common drawback is high computational load because of arithmetical operations modulo large integers. Implementation on low-cost smart cards was made difficult and inefficient. With the Permuted Kernels Problem (PKP), Shamir proposed the first efficient scheme allowing for an implementation on such low-cost smart cards, but very few others have afterwards been suggested. In this paper, we present an efficient identification scheme based on a combinatorial \mathcal{NP}-complete problem: the Permuted Perceptrons Problem (PPP). This problem seems hard enough to be unsolvable even with very small parameters, and some recent cryptanalysis studies confirm that position. Furthermore, it admits efficient zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge and so it is well-suited for cryptographic purposes. An actual implementation completes the optimistic opinion about efficiency and practicability on low-cost smart cards, and namely with less than 2KB of EEPROM and just 100 Bytes of RAM and 6.4 KB of communication.

SCALPS: Smart card for limited payment systems

Secure money-transfer cards continue to find acceptance in commerce. Currently, three main types of these cards coexist: magnetic stripe, mass memory, and smart. We describe another approach: merging the processor and coprocessor on a small chip dedicated to public-key cryptography. We added parts needed to obtain a low-cost smart card compatible with the ISO 7816-3 standard. By developing the processor for specific applications, we drastically reduced the complexity without affecting the chip's usefulness. To prove the feasibility of such a chip, we built one for use in a payment application with prepaid tokens.