Privileged Insider Research Articles

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.

Provable analysis and improvement of smart card–based anonymous authentication protocols

SummaryNowadays, authentication protocols are essential for secure communications specially for roaming networks, distributed computer networks, and remote wireless communication. The numerous users in these networks rise vulnerabilities. Thus, privacy‐preserving methods have to be run to provide more reliable services and sustain privacy. Anonymous authentication is a method to remotely authenticate users with no revelation about their identity. In this paper, we analyze 2 smart card–based protocols that the user's identity is anonymous. However, we represent that they are vulnerable to privileged insider attack. It means that the servers can compromise the users' identity for breaking their privacy. Also, we highlight that the Wen et al protocol has flaws in both stolen smart card and stolen server attacks and the Odelu et al protocol is traceable. Then, we propose 2 modified anonymous authentication protocols. Finally, we analyze our improved protocols with both heuristic and formal methods.

Provably secure anonymous three-factor authentication scheme for multi-server environments

Significant developments in wireless communication technologies have resulted in the increased popularity of mobile devices and mobile services. However, excessive service requests reduce the efficiency of traditional single-server architectures, which consist of one server and many users. To overcome this limitation, a multi-server architecture was proposed. Additionally, password-based or smart-card-based authentication schemes cannot support some important security properties in multi-server environments. Consequently, biometrics are widely used as a third factor, in addition to passwords and smart cards, to make authentication schemes more secure. Reddy et al. recently designed a three-factor (i.e., password, smart card and biometrics) authentication scheme for multi-server environments. However, we found that their scheme lacks untraceability and is vulnerable to privileged insider attacks. To address these deficiencies, we propose a security-enhanced three-factor authentication scheme for multi-server environments based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). We prove that the proposed scheme is secure using the random oracle model. Moreover, an informal security analysis shows that the proposed scheme fulfills all the security requirements of the multi-server architecture. Finally, the results from performance analyses indicate that our proposed scheme achieves a significant improvement in security with minimal impact on performance.

2PAKEP: Provably Secure and Efficient Two-Party Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol for Mobile Environment

With the increasing use of mobile devices, a secure communication and key exchange become the significant security issues in mobile environments. However, because of open network environments, mobile user can be vulnerable to various attacks. Therefore, the numerous authentication and key exchange schemes have been proposed to provide the secure communication and key exchange. Recently, Qi and Chen proposed an efficient two-party authentication key exchange protocol for mobile environments in order to overcome the security weaknesses of the previous authentication and key exchange schemes. However, we demonstrate that Qi and Chen’s scheme is vulnerable to various attacks such as impersonation, offline password guessing, password change, and privileged insider attacks. We also show that Qi and Chen’s scheme does not provide anonymity, efficient password change mechanism, and secure mutual authentication. In this paper, to overcome the outlined abovementioned security vulnerabilities, we propose a secure and efficient two-party authentication key exchange protocol, called 2PAKEP, that hides user’s real identity from an adversary using a secret parameter. 2PAKEP also withstands various attacks, guarantees anonymity, and provides efficient password change mechanism and secure mutual authentication. In addition, we prove that 2PAKEP provides the secure mutual authentication using the broadly accepted Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic and the session key security using the formal security analysis under the widely accepted real-or-random model. Moreover, the formal security verification using the popular simulated software tool, Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications, on 2PAKEP shows that the replay and man-in-the-middle attacks are protected. In addition, we also analyze the performance and security and functionality properties of 2PAKEP and compare these with the related existing schemes. Overall, 2PAKEP provides better security and functionality features, and also the communication and computational overheads are comparable with the related schemes. Therefore, 2PAKEP is applicable to mobile environment efficiently.

A Family Affair: Caring in Teaching and Implications for Teacher and Researcher Preparation

The purpose of this study was to explore how perceptions of remembered instances ofteacher caring in K-College impacted the motivation of a college student. Implicationsfor teacher preparation programs and educational research were then drawn from theseperceptions. The first part of the title “A Family Affair” stems from the fact that theauthors are members of the same family – Father, Mother, and Son. Both the father andmother had prior knowledge of some (not all) of the instances of caring and non-caringdescribed by their son and thus shared a privileged insider position that offered uniqueinsights while cooperative peer checking was used both during and after the interview tohelp promote the trustworthiness of findings. It was found that the degree of caringshown by teachers had a profound influence on the participant’s willingness to put fortheffort especially in those courses that were not his favorite subjects which suggests that astrong connection exists between caring and student motivation. An importantimplication of this study is that teachers and those responsible for teacher preparationprograms would benefit by being aware of the impact of caring on students’ engagementand attitude toward learning. If the ultimate purpose of educational research is tocontribute to effective teaching, then the “soft variable” of caring should be consideredan important component of researcher preparation. It is hoped that readers will find thisstudy to be transferable to the degree that it resonates with their own experience asteachers, students, and parents, and which we refer to as “experiential validity”.

An Improved SIP Authentication Scheme Based on Server-Oriented Biometric Verification

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) provides a way to control the wired and wireless Voice over Internet Protocol-based communication over an insecure channel. The SIP protocol is not secure due to relying on an intrinsically open text-based communication, which further stresses the strengthening of SIP authentication protocols. Many solutions have been put forward in the last few years to design the secure and efficient SIP authentication protocols for multimedia. Recently, Zhang et al. proposed a SIP authentication protocol with an enhanced feature that enables the server authenticate the users on the basis of biometric verification. However, after a careful observation, one can witness few limitations regarding privileged insider attack, session specific temporary attack, De-synchronization attack; denial-of-service attack, inefficient password modification and lack forward secrecy compromise. We have proposed a secure scheme countering the identified flaws of Zhang et al. and other contemporary schemes. We also demonstrate the security strength of proposed scheme by employing the formal security analysis under BAN logic.

An improved lightweight multiserver authentication scheme

SummaryMultiserver authentication complies with the up‐to‐date requirements of Internet services and latest applications. The multiserver architecture enables the expedient authentication of subscribers on an insecure channel for the delivery of services. The users rely on a single registration of a trusted third party for the procurement of services from various servers. Recently, Chen and Lee, Moon et al, and Wang et al presented multiserver key agreement schemes that are found to be vulnerable to many attacks according to our analysis. The Chen and Lee scheme was found susceptible to impersonation attack, trace attack, stolen smart card attack exposing session key, key‐compromise impersonation attack, and inefficient password modification. The Moon et al is susceptible to stolen card attack leading to further attacks, ie, identity guessing, key‐compromise impersonation attack, user impersonation attack, and session keys disclosure, while Wang et al is also found to be prone to trace attack, session‐specific temporary information attack, key‐compromise information attack, and privileged insider attack leading to session key disclosure and user impersonation attacks. We propose an improved protocol countering the indicated weaknesses of these schemes in an equivalent cost. Our scheme demonstrates automated and security analysis on the basis of Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham logic and also presents the performance evaluation for related schemes.

Cryptanalysis and improvement of a biometric‐based remote user authentication protocol usable in a multiserver environment

AbstractRecently, Amin and Biswas have discussed a bilinear pairing–based three‐factor remote user authentication protocol, claiming it to be secured against various attacks. We scrutinize this protocol and find that it is vulnerable to identity guessing attack, password guessing attack, user untraceability attack, user‐server impersonation attack, new smart card issue attack, and privileged insider attack. In this paper, we propose an elliptic curve cryptography and biometric‐based remote user authentication protocol for a multiserver environment by overcoming these drawbacks. We conduct its informal and formal security analysis to show that it resists all known security attacks. The Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham (BAN) logic verifies that our protocol facilitates mutual authentication and session key agreement securely. We simulate it using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool to certify that it can be protected from passive and active threats, including replay and man‐in‐the‐middle attacks. Furthermore, the proposed protocol provides more security attributes and better complexity in terms of smart card storage cost, computation cost, estimated time, and communication cost, as compared with the related existing protocols.

A password based authentication scheme for wireless multimedia systems

In this digital era, where Internet of Things (IoT) is increasing day by day, use of resource constrained devices is also increasing. Indeed, the features such as low cost, less maintenance, more adaptive to hostile environment, etc. make the wireless multimedia devices to be the best choice as the resource constrained devices. For the security, the end user device requires to establish the session key with the server before transferring the data. Mobile is one of the device having more and more usage as wireless multimedia device in recent years. In 2013, Li et al. proposed an efficient scheme for the wireless mobile communications and claimed it to be secure against various attacks. Recently, Shen et al. claimed that the scheme of Li et al. is still vulnerable to the privileged insider attack, the stolen verifier attack and finally proposed a scheme to withstand the mentioned and other attacks. However, in this paper we claim that the scheme of Shen et al. is still susceptible to the user anonymity, the session specific temporary information attack and the replay attack. In addition, Shen et al.’s scheme requires more time due to many operations. Further, we propose an efficient scheme that is secure against various known attacks and due to reduced time complexity our scheme is a preferred choice for the wireless mobile networks and hence for wireless multimedia systems.

5G-VRSec: Secure Video Reporting Service in 5G Enabled Vehicular Networks

Despite an imminent arrival of the 5G communication technology, there are only a few research works done using such technology in the field of vehicular networks. One of the pioneers in proposing a service for 5G enabled vehicular networks is the Eiza-Ni-Shi Scheme. In such scheme, the authors present an innovative system model for 5G vehicular networks that enables a secure real-time video reporting service with privacy awareness. Even though the proposed service is very important since it aims to improve the road safety, it cannot be considered secure enough. This work found that the scheme has serious security flaws and functionality limitations. First, it is vulnerable to Department of Motor Vehicles and Law Enforcement Agency impersonation attacks, it allows forged video upload, there is no separation of responsibilities between Law Enforcement Agency and trusted authority, and it is susceptible to privileged insider attack. In addition, it does not contemplate the management of multiple geographic/administrative regions (multiple trusted authorities) which is important in real implementations. In this situation, the present work proposes an extended scheme that eliminates the identified security flaws and implements new features that make the implementation across several geographic/administrative regions possible.

A Secure and Efficient Multi-Factor Mutual Certificateless Authentication with Key Agreement Protocol for Mobile Client-Server Environment on ECC without the third-party

Authentication with key agreement (AKA) protocols are implemented to provide identity authentication and session keys for communication entities. In order to reduce the heavy trust reliance on key generator center (KGC) in identity based AKA protocols, a certificateless based AKA (CLAKA) protocol for client-server environment without the third-party (i.e., KGC) is introduced in this paper. The proposed protocol is constructed based on elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) and multi-factor protections (such as password, biometrics, and smart card). Moreover, security proof based on BAN-logic is carried out and shows that our protocol can provide mutual authentication, user anonymity, dynamic identity and perfect forward security, and resist to user impersonation attack, server spoofing attack and privileged insider attack. Meanwhile, security and efficiency analysis shows that our proposed protocol outperforms the previous related ones.

Design of a Secure Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme Preserving User Privacy Usable in Telecare Medicine Information Systems

Authentication and key agreement schemes play a very important role in enhancing the level of security of telecare medicine information systems (TMISs). Recently, Amin and Biswas demonstrated that the authentication scheme proposed by Giri et al. is vulnerable to off-line password guessing attacks and privileged insider attacks and also does not provide user anonymity. They also proposed an improved authentication scheme, claiming that it resists various security attacks. However, this paper demonstrates that Amin and Biswas's scheme is defenseless against off-line password guessing attacks and replay attacks and also does not provide perfect forward secrecy. This paper also shows that Giri et al.'s scheme not only suffers from the weaknesses pointed out by Amin and Biswas, but it also is vulnerable to replay attacks and does not provide perfect forward secrecy. Moreover, this paper proposes a novel authentication and key agreement scheme to overcome the mentioned weaknesses. Security and performance analyses show that the proposed scheme not only overcomes the mentioned security weaknesses, but also is more efficient than the previous schemes.

Provably secure biometric‐based user authentication and key agreement scheme in cloud computing

AbstractCloud computing, the conjoin of many types of computing, has made a great impact on the life of everyone. People from anywhere can access the different cloud‐based services by using the Internet. A user, who wants to access some cloud‐based service, needs to register himself/herself to an authority (service provider), and after that, he/she can use the service. To access the service, each user needs to authenticate to that particular cloud server. Several user authentication schemes for cloud computing have been presented but mostly have limitations/drawbacks as they are prone to various known attacks, such as privileged insider, user and server impersonation, and strong reply attacks, and they also have lack of functionality features. Moreover, these schemes do not provide efficient password change phase. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we propose a new provably secure biometric‐based user authentication and key agreement scheme for cloud computing. The proposed scheme overcomes the weaknesses of the existing schemes and supports extra functionality features including user anonymity and efficient password and biometric update phase for multi‐server environment. The careful formal security analysis under standard model and informal security analysis and the simulation results for formal security verification using the most acceptable AVISPA tool show that the proposed scheme is secure against various known possible attacks. The analysis of computation and communication overheads of our scheme depicts its efficiency over other related existing schemes, and thus, the proposed scheme is suitable for the cloud computing environment. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Secure anonymity-preserving password-based user authentication and session key agreement scheme for telecare medicine information systems

Background and objectivesInformation and communication and technology (ICT) has changed the entire paradigm of society. ICT facilitates people to use medical services over the Internet, thereby reducing the travel cost, hospitalization cost and time to a greater extent. Recent advancements in Telecare Medicine Information System (TMIS) facilitate users/patients to access medical services over the Internet by gaining health monitoring facilities at home. MethodsAmin and Biswas recently proposed a RSA-based user authentication and session key agreement protocol usable for TMIS, which is an improvement over Giri et al.'s RSA-based user authentication scheme for TMIS. In this paper, we show that though Amin–Biswas's scheme considerably improves the security drawbacks of Giri et al.'s scheme, their scheme has security weaknesses as it suffers from attacks such as privileged insider attack, user impersonation attack, replay attack and also offline password guessing attack. A new RSA-based user authentication scheme for TMIS is proposed, which overcomes the security pitfalls of Amin–Biswas's scheme and also preserves user anonymity property. ResultsThe careful formal security analysis using the two widely accepted Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic and the random oracle models is done. Moreover, the informal security analysis of the scheme is also done. These security analyses show the robustness of our new scheme against the various known attacks as well as attacks found in Amin–Biswas's scheme. The simulation of the proposed scheme using the widely accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool is also done. ConclusionsWe present a new user authentication and session key agreement scheme for TMIS, which fixes the mentioned security pitfalls found in Amin–Biswas's scheme, and we also show that the proposed scheme provides better security than other existing schemes through the rigorous security analysis and verification tool. Furthermore, we present the formal security verification of our scheme using the widely accepted AVISPA tool. High security and extra functionality features allow our proposed scheme to be applicable for telecare medicine information systems which is used for e-health care medical applications.

Cryptanalysis of an Efficient Passwortd Authentication Scheme.

Password authentication schemes are one of the most commonly used solution to protect resources in network environment from unauthorized access. Since, their first introduction in [9], many password authentications schemes have been proposed and analysed by crypto com- munity. Contribution of the present paper is two-folded. At first it presents the cryptanalysis results of Ramasamy et al.'s RSA based password authentication scheme [11] and shows that it is vulnerable to privileged insider at- tack, password guessing attack and Impersonation attack. Secondly, modifications to the scheme were suggested to overcome the vulnerabilities. Formal security analysis of the proposed scheme was presented using BAN logic. In addition to being secure the modified scheme facilitate password update and mutual authentication. Efficiency comparison of the modified scheme is presented.

Preserving privacy for free: Efficient and provably secure two-factor authentication scheme with user anonymity

Due to its simplicity, portability and robustness, two-factor authentication has received much interest in the past two decades. While security-related issues have been well studied, how to preserve user privacy in this type of protocols still remains an open problem. In ICISC 2012, Kim–Kim presented an efficient two-factor authentication scheme that attempts to provide user anonymity and to guard against various known attacks, offering many merits over existing works.However, in this paper we shall show that user privacy of Kim–Kim’s scheme is achieved at the price of severe usability downgrade – a de-synchronization attack on user’s pseudonym identities may render the scheme completely unusable unless the user re-registers. Besides this defect, it is also prone to known key attack and privileged insider attack. It is noted that our de-synchronization attack can also be applied to several latest schemes that strive to preserve user anonymity. As our main contribution, an enhanced scheme with provable security is suggested, and what we believe is most interesting is that superior security and privacy can be achieved at nearly no additional communication or computation cost. As far as we know, this work is the first one that defines a formal model to capture the feature of user un-traceability and that highlights the damaging threat of de-synchronization attack on privacy-preserving two-factor authentication schemes.

A secure and robust password-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards for the integrated EPR information system.

An integrated EPR (Electronic Patient Record) information system of all the patients provides the medical institutions and the academia with most of the patients' information in details for them to make corrective decisions and clinical decisions in order to maintain and analyze patients' health. In such system, the illegal access must be restricted and the information from theft during transmission over the insecure Internet must be prevented. Lee et al. proposed an efficient password-based remote user authentication scheme using smart card for the integrated EPR information system. Their scheme is very efficient due to usage of one-way hash function and bitwise exclusive-or (XOR) operations. However, in this paper, we show that though their scheme is very efficient, their scheme has three security weaknesses such as (1) it has design flaws in password change phase, (2) it fails to protect privileged insider attack and (3) it lacks the formal security verification. We also find that another recently proposed Wen's scheme has the same security drawbacks as in Lee at al.'s scheme. In order to remedy these security weaknesses found in Lee et al.'s scheme and Wen's scheme, we propose a secure and efficient password-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards for the integrated EPR information system. We show that our scheme is also efficient as compared to Lee et al.'s scheme and Wen's scheme as our scheme only uses one-way hash function and bitwise exclusive-or (XOR) operations. Through the security analysis, we show that our scheme is secure against possible known attacks. Furthermore, we simulate our scheme for the formal security verification using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool and show that our scheme is secure against passive and active attacks.

A secure and robust temporal credential-based three-factor user authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks

User authentication is one of the most important security services required for the resource-constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In user authentication, for critical applications of WSNs, a legitimate user is allowed to query and collect the real-time data at any time from a sensor node of the network as and when he/she demands for it. In order to get the real-time information from the nodes, the user needs to be first authenticated by the nodes as well as the gateway node (GWN) of WSN so that illegal access to nodes do not happen in the network. Recently, Jiang et al. proposed an efficient two-factor user authentication scheme with unlinkability property in WSNs Jiang (2014). In this paper, we analyze Jiang et al.’s scheme. Unfortunately, we point out that Jiang et al.’s scheme has still several drawbacks such as (1) it fails to protect privileged insider attack, (2) inefficient registration phase for the sensor nodes, (3) it fails to provide proper authentication in login and authentication phase, (4) it fails to update properly the new changed password of a user in the password update phase, (5) it lacks of supporting dynamic sensor node addition after initial deployment of nodes in the network, and (6) it lacks the formal security verification. In order to withstand these pitfalls found in Jiang et al.’s scheme, we aim to propose a three-factor user authentication scheme for WSNs. Our scheme preserves the original merits of Jiang et al.’s scheme. Our scheme is efficient as compared to Jiang et al.’s scheme and other schemes. Furthermore, our scheme provides better security features and higher security level than other schemes. In addition, we simulate our scheme for the formal security analysis using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool. The simulation results clearly demonstrate that our scheme is also secure.

A security enhanced mutual authentication scheme based on nonce and smart cards

There are many mutual authentication schemes proposed in the literature for preventing unauthorized parties from accessing resources in an insecure environment. However, most of them based on smart cards have assumed a tamper resistant condition for the smart card. To solve the problem, Huang, Liu, and Chen (2013) proposed a mutual authentication scheme based on nonce and smart cards and claimed that the adversary was not able to attack and access the system even if he could extract the data stored in the smart card. Unfortunately, in this paper, we will demonstrate that Huang et al.’s scheme is vulnerable to the offline password guessing attack and the privileged insider attack. We also propose an improved scheme to overcome the weaknesses.

Understanding security failures of two-factor authentication schemes for real-time applications in hierarchical wireless sensor networks

Understanding security failures of cryptographic protocols is the key to both patching existing protocols and designing future schemes. In this work, we investigate two recent proposals in the area of smart-card-based password authentication for security-critical real-time data access applications in hierarchical wireless sensor networks (HWSN). Firstly, we analyze an efficient and DoS-resistant user authentication scheme introduced by Fan et al. in 2011. This protocol is the first attempt to address the problems of user authentication in HWSN and only involves lightweight cryptographic primitives, such as one-way hash function and XOR operations, and thus it is claimed to be suitable for the resource-constrained HWSN environments. However, it actually has several security loopholes being overlooked, and we show it is vulnerable to user anonymity violation attack, smart card security breach attack, sensor node capture attack and privileged insider attack, as well as its other practical pitfalls. Then, A.K. Das et al.’s protocol is scrutinized, and we point out that it cannot achieve the claimed security goals: (1) It is prone to smart card security breach attack; (2) it fails to withstand privileged insider attack; and (3) it suffers from the defect of server master key disclosure. Our cryptanalysis results discourage any practical use of these two schemes and reveal some subtleties and challenges in designing this type of schemes. Furthermore, using the above two foremost schemes as case studies, we take a first step towards investigating the underlying rationale of the identified security failures, putting forward three basic principles which we believe will be valuable to protocol designers for advancing more robust two-factor authentication schemes for HWSN in the future.