Digital Certificates Research Articles

AutoCert: Automated TOCTOU-secure digital certification for IoT with combined authentication and assurance

The Internet of Things (IoT) network is comprised of heterogeneous devices which are part of critical infrastructures throughout the world. To enable end-to-end security, the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is undergoing advancements to incorporate IoT devices globally which primarily provides device authentication. In addition to this, integrity of the software-state is vital, where Remote Attestation (RA) and Integrity Certificates play an important role. Though, Integrity Certificate verifies the software-state integrity of the device at the time of execution of the remote attestation process, it does not provide mechanisms to validate that the current software-state corresponds to the attested state. This issue is referred to as the Time-Of-Check to Time-Of-Use (TOCTOU) problem and remains unsolved in the context of Integrity Certificates.In this paper, we propose AutoCert, the first TOCTOU-secure mechanism to combine software-state integrity with PKI for IoT which resolves the TOCTOU problem in RA and Integrity Certificates. To this end, we utilize the IETF Remote Attestation Procedures architecture and standard X509 IoT profile certificates to ensure both device authentication and software assurance for IoT. We implement and evaluate the performance of the AutoCert proof-of-concept on a real IoT device, the OPTIGA TPM Evaluation Kit, to show its practicality and usability. AutoCert can validate the attested state of an IoT device in approximately 4746 milliseconds, with a minimal network overhead of 350 bytes.

Smart contract assisted blockchain based public key infrastructure system

ABSTRACTPublic key infrastructure (PKI) is a reliable solution for Internet communication. PKI finds applications in secure email, virtual private network (VPN), e‐commerce, e‐governance, and so on. It provides a secure mechanism to authenticate users and communications. The conventional PKI system is centralized, which exposes the infrastructure to many security issues. The digital certificate generation and validation processes in PKI suffer from high latency and inadequate authentication processes. Moreover, it needs enormous time and effort to mitigate the malfeasance of the certificate authority (CA). The complexity of employing the traditional key and certificate management increases by enforcing the centralized, which can compromise the transaction security. To overcome the aforementioned issues of PKI, three different solutions have been reported in the literature: Log based PKI (LBPKI), Web of Trust (WoT), and blockchain based PKI. The blockchain based PKI achieves more attention as it is the combination of LBPKI and WoT, which serves distributed trust, log of transactions, and constant sized data to verify the identity of users. Motivated by these facts, this article reports a blockchain‐based PKI system which has a lighter smart contract and less storage capacity and is also suitable for lightweight applications. The lighter smart contract in our infrastructure uses a, which validates the limit of one participating node for becoming theof any transaction inside the network. This approach can prevent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. This smart contract also checks the signer node address. The proposed smart contract can prevent seven cyber attacks, such as Denial of Service (DoS), Man in the Middle Attack (MITM), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), 51%, Injection attacks, Routing Attack, and Eclipse attack. The Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus algorithm used in this model reduces the number of validators for each transaction which makes it suitable for lightweight applications. The timing complexity of key/certificate validation and signature/certificate revocation processes do not depend on the number of transactions. The comparisons of various timing parameters with existing solutions show that the proposed PKI is competitively better.

Protection of accounting information in the conditions of cyber security

In the given study, it is substantiated that the unauthorized use of information generated in the accounting system can lead to harmful consequences, risking loss of information, incorrect data entry and misuse of confidential information. Therefore, the issue of protecting information generated in the accounting system is extremely urgent, and ensuring its security is a priority in many companies. The purpose of the study was to generalize existing approaches and outline promising directions for the organization of accounting information protection in the context of cyber security. It has been proven that effective communication and joint strategies between management, accountants and auditors are important to reduce or protect against emerging threats to the accounting information system. To properly assess potential risks, accountants and auditors must be familiar with current and emerging technologies. Groups of risks are given, based on the selection of risks for all components of the accounting process, which are inherent in electronic accounting information systems (risks associated with the collection and input of data into an automated system, risks associated with information processing and its storage on electronic media, risks associated with stage of generalization and transfer of information) and analyzed their features in order to find ways of minimization. Controlling unauthorized access to accounting records is an important component of internal control. Access and password policies, encryption, digital signatures, disk locks, firewalls, and digital certificates are examples of controls that should be identified, documented, communicated, and tested when evaluating control effectiveness. Examples of the impact of cyberattacks on the accounting system and related costs are given. It is well-founded that the protection of accounting information and the avoidance of cyber-attacks is possible only if comprehensive measures and joint actions of management, accounting, auditors and educational institutions are followed in the training of future specialists.

Adaptive segmented webpage text based malicious website detection

Malicious websites pose a great threat to the physical and mental health and property security of netizens, and malicious website detection is a key research topic in network security . Many researchers first extract features from webpage texts, and then detect malicious websites through deep learning methods . However, due to the limited sequence length that the deep learning model can process, researchers generally directly discard the webpage text that exceeds the maximum sequence length (MSL), which will affect the website detection accuracy to a great extent. Therefore, a malicious website detection model based on adaptive segmented webpage text is proposed. By ensuring the integrity of webpage text, the malicious website detection results are significantly improved, which greatly contribute to the accurate handling of malicious websites in cyberspace. Firstly, according to the MSL set by deep learning model and the length of webpage text, the number of text segments of each webpage text is determined, and rich features are extracted from multiple spaces of each segmented text through Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) mechanism. Secondly, in order to solve the problem of missing context continuity caused by segmentation, the hidden vector obtained by Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (BILSTM) in the previous segment is combined with the embedding vector of the latter segment, and then input into the MHSA network . Thirdly, combining the results of multiple segments into multi-channel vector, classification is carried out by multi-channel text convolution (MCTC) network. In order to avoid misclassification of website type caused by webpage text alone, the digital certificate and Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of website are used to assist in detecting malicious websites. Multiple comparison experiment results on the malicious and benign website datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art comparison models, and experiment results on public text classification datasets demonstrate that the proposed model has strong generalization ability .

Security Authentication Framework Design for Electric Internet of Things

The intelligent terminal equipment of the electric internet of things (IoT) is vulnerable to network attacks when installing APPs from the application store. Encryption of the communication process can enhance security protection, but the key needs to be stored in the local equipment. When the equipment is attacked, the key is leaked easily resulting in communication security problems. To solve the above problems, we proposes a terminal APP security authentication mechanism based on TrustZone approach and OP-TEE (Open Source Trust Execution Environment) system to identify the identity information of both sides of the communication. The digital certificate of the application store is checked before the terminal equipment installs the APP. After the check is passed, the session key is generated in the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), and the communication parties use the session key to encrypt the subsequent process. Simulation results validate that the proposed security authentication mechanism can effectively protect the communication process of terminal equipment installation APP and meet the performance requirements.

An Internet of Things (IoT)-Based Optimization to Enhance Security in Healthcare Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network that connects a large number of items. Each thing uses sensors to create and gather data from its surroundings and then sends to other objects or a central database through a channel. Keeping and transforming this created data is one of the most difficult tasks in IoT today, and it is one of the top worries of all enterprises that deploy IoT technology. Sensing equipment together with communication, storing, and display devices get benefit from technological advancements in the healthcare sector. Moreover, medical parameters and postoperative days require close observation. Therefore, the most cutting-edge approach to healthcare communication is adopted, which makes use of the Internet of Things (IoT). We can use the Internet of Things to speed changes in the healthcare environment, such as enhancing patient involvement and outcomes and shifting healthcare from reactive to proactive accessibility. Nonetheless, the growth of IoT exposes healthcare practitioners and their patients to new vulnerabilities, risks, and security concerns. However, there is currently a scarcity of research on how to improve IoT security in healthcare. Existing studies tend to concentrate only on the installation of IoT peripherals in a healthcare setting and to include a secure application solution. Because healthcare data and information are extremely sensitive, it is critical to have a secure health IoT application in place. As the IoT gets more widely used in healthcare, there will inevitably be more instances of sensitive patient information being made public. This paper proposes an optimized hashing algorithm with digital certificates to enhance the security. Initially, the health data are collected and preprocessed using normalization. The data are then stored in the IoT device. Here, the digital certificates are used for authentication purpose. The proposed discrete decision tree hashing algorithm (DDTHA) with ant colony optimization (ACO) hashes the unsigned digital certificates. The blowfish algorithm is used for encryption, and the signed digital certificate is obtained which is used for authentication purpose. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated and compared with conventional methodologies to prove the efficiency of the system.

Digital Health Passport Using Blockchain

Abstract: The recent outbreak of the COVID 19 pandemic has transformed everyone's lives. Dramatically, and society has gone through a new stage with new needs. In this article, A solution to one of these needs to provide a system of digital certificates for secure storage to share medical data related to COVID 19 for the purpose of demonstrating immunity or deficiency is provided. A clear, unbreakable and safe way to infect a virus. The proposed system is based on Blockchain and its unique benefits, decentralized mobile and cross-platform app development for its use.

Determination of Green Building Awareness: A Study in Turkey

The building sector is the world’s most significant energy consumer. In addition to that, water consumption and increased waste are some of the most significant issues. Owing to the need to find a solution to this problem, the concept of green buildings has emerged. Green buildings are building types that consume less energy and are constructed with recyclable materials, in harmony with nature. The adoption of the concept of green building in societies is very important in this regard. This study aimed to understand the awareness level of people about green buildings. Its scope was to determine the level of awareness of people living in buildings with and without an energy identity certificate in Adana. The results were created in Microsoft Excel, and the survey questions were measured using SPSS. Data analysis was performed by the WEKA tool using the association rule mining method. According to the result, most of the participants did not have sufficient information about the subjects. The results show that nowadays, most people do not understand this building type and what it means to the next generation.

Digital Covid Certificates as Immunity Passports: An Analysis of Their Main Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues

Digital COVID certificates are a novel public health policy to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. These immunity certificates aim to incentivize vaccination and to deny international travel or access to essential spaces to those who are unable to prove that they are not infectious. In this article, we start by describing immunity certificates and highlighting their differences from vaccination certificates. Then, we focus on the ethical, legal, and social issues involved in their use, namely autonomy and consent, data protection, equity, and international mobility from a global fairness perspective. The main conclusion of our analysis is that digital COVID certificates are only acceptable if they meet certain conditions: that they should not process personal data beyond what is strictly necessary for the aimed goals, that equal access to them should be guaranteed, and that they should not restrict people’s autonomy to access places where contagion is unlikely. We conclude that, if such conditions are guaranteed, digital COVID certificates could contribute to mitigating some of the most severe socioeconomic consequences of the pandemic.

Certyfikat szczepionkowy jako instrument prawnej regulacji międzynarodowego ruchu osobowego

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic affected almost all the inhabitants of the globe, and mi-grants were among those who felt it particularly hard. Their problems were largely related to numerous limitations in the international movement of persons. As part of the fight against these effects, national governments have initiated a discussion on the idea of launching vaccine certificates, sometimes called “Covid passports”. The concept has been developed and has led to the adoption of specific solutions in various countries, as well as on a wider, regional scale, in particular in the form of the EU digital COVID certificate. In the paper, the authors outline individual concepts and consider whether a vac-cine certificate does indeed bear the features of a travel document and whether it is justified to use this term. They go on to contrast the idea of issuing such certificates with national, EU and regional law. Finally, they reflect on what formal and material conditions must be met by such a document in order to enable the holder to cross borders, and whether such tools can be reused in the event of future pandemics. The research allows several conclusions to be formulated. The EU digital COVID certificate or other certificates cannot be regarded as travel documents, in particular, they cannot be called passports. Vaccine certificates are not meant to be a privilege or a restriction, but only an instrument that allows possible restrictions in the international movement of persons to be waived for the holder of the document (assuming that the restrictions themselves are not illegal). They should be consid-ered a temporary measure, applied in extraordinary circumstances as an instrument in the hands of states or state organizations, not private entities. In such a formula, they can also be used in the event of similar epidemic threats in the future.

Fourth industrial revolution—a review of applications, prospects, and challenges for artificial intelligence, robotics and blockchain in higher education

Much has been written about the fourth industrial revolution’s (4IR) contributions to and its impact on higher education (HE). In addition, review studies have been conducted on the contributions of 4IR technologies to and on their impact on HE. Most of these studies have reviewed single 4IR technologies in isolation as attested to by the review studies cited in the current study. Against this backdrop, the current study reviewed, discussed, and synthesized the applications, prospects, and challenges of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and blockchain at given higher education institutions (HEIs) between 2013 and 2019 as reported by 26 selected journal articles. Employing a slightly modified version of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines for searching and screening, three of the findings of this study are worth mentioning. Firstly, the dominant AI technologies for learning are chatbots, and AI holds the prospect of personalized, scalable, and affordable learning. Secondly, the applications of robotics are exploratory in nature, and have a meta-teaching and a meta-learning orientation. Thirdly, some of the applications of blockchain relate to digital grading, digital credentialing and digital certification, and to real-time contracting and time stamping of learning. The implications of this review are that the three sets of technologies reviewed, have a lot applications for HE, barring the challenges that have been outlined.

Secured blind digital certificate and Lamport Merkle cloud assisted medical image sharing using blockchain

Secured blind digital certificate and Lamport Merkle cloud assisted medical image sharing using blockchain

Ideas: Art market goes crypto with NFTs

Over recent years, several record-breaking sales have established non-fongible tokens (NFTs) as the new black in the world of art. These secure, authenticated digital certificates allow the acquisition of virtual art, which means new income opportunities for artists and a greater interest in digital art among museums. But are we really witnessing a revolution, or a speculative bubble about to burst?

Lattice‐based batch authentication scheme with dynamic identity revocation in VANET

Aggregate signatures allow someone to aggregate multiple signatures into one signature, which is suitable for resource-constrained and computationally inefficient environments. Identify-based aggregate signature can solve the storage problem of public key certificates while achieving efficient signature verification. However, in most of the identity-based aggregate signature schemes, the user identity revocation process is time-consuming and cannot resist quantum attacks. To solve above problems, this paper proposes a lattice-based aggregate signature scheme with dynamic identity revocation by combining lattice-based cryptography and an aggregate signature scheme. The security of the proposed lattice-based aggregate signature scheme with dynamic identity revocation has been proved in the random oracle model. In addition, the verification efficiency of the aggregate signature has been improved compared with multiple different signatures. Much of the data transfer in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is carried out wirelessly, which makes VANET vulnerable to identity spoofing attacks. Identity authentication technology can prevent attackers from impersonating legitimate users, thus ensuring the security of VANET. Based on the proposed lattice-based aggregate signature scheme with dynamic identity revocation, this paper proposes a lattice-based batch authentication scheme with dynamic identity revocation in VANET. Through the proposed batch authentication scheme, we can effectively resist the impersonation attack of VANET in the quantum computer environment, and the efficiency of authentication is improved.

Use of Cryptography and Signing for Network Security

Abstract: With technological advancements along with tremendous generation and storage of sensitive data, which can be cryptographic keys, passwords or other data that can be crucial for operation of an organization, thereis a need to secure this sensitive data startingfrom its creation, its transfer from one place to another and its final place of storage. Thiscan be done with the help of cryptography and cryptographic algorithms that can help secure this entire process. With cryptography, it is possible to securely transfer sensitive data to ensure that it cannot be read or tampered by a third party. Cryptography and its related algorithms can also be used to secure the network for safe transfer and storage of sensitive data. In this paper, starting with a brief introduction to cryptography concepts and some networkingprotocols, we shall discuss and compare usage of an algorithm such as AES, hashing and importance of Digital Certificates and Signing operation along with encryption for better security.

Highly private blockchain-based management system for digital COVID-19 certificates

As a result of the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, several proposals of blockchain-based solutions for digital COVID-19 certificates have been presented. Considering that health data have high privacy requirements, a health data management system must fulfil several strict privacy and security requirements. On the one hand, confidentiality of the medical data must be assured, being the data owner (the patient) the actor that maintain control over the privacy of their certificates. On the other hand, the entities involved in the generation and validation of certificates must be supervised by a regulatory authority. This set of requirements are generally not achieved together in previous proposals. Moreover, it is required that a digital COVID-19 certificate management protocol provides an easy verification process and also strongly avoid the risk of forgery. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a protocol to manage digital COVID-19 certificates where individual users decide how to share their private data in a hierarchical system. In order to achieve this, we put together two different technologies: the use of a proxy re-encryption (PRE) service in conjunction with a blockchain-based protocol. Additionally, our protocol introduces an authority to control and regulate the centers that can generate digital COVID-19 certificates and offers two kinds of validation of certificates for registered and non-registered verification entities. Therefore, the paper achieves all the requirements, that is, data sovereignty, high privacy, forgery avoidance, regulation of entities, security and easy verification.

Digitalization of Calibration Data Management in Pharmaceutical Industry Using a Multitenant Platform

The global quality infrastructure (QI) has been established and is maintained to ensure the safety of products and services for their users. One of the cornerstones of the QI is metrology, i.e., the science of measurement, as the quality management systems commonly rely on measurements for evaluating quality. For this reason, the calibration procedures and the management of the data related to them are of the utmost importance for the quality management in the process industry and given a high priority by the regulatory authorities. To overcome the relatively low level of digitalization in metrology, machine-interpretable data formats such as digital calibration certificates (DCC) are being developed. In this paper, we analyze the current calibration processes in the pharmaceutical industry, and the requirements defined for them in the relevant standards and regulations. For digitalizing the calibration-related data exchange, a multitenant cloud platform-based method is presented. To test and validate the approach, a proof of concept (POC) implementation of the platform is developed with a focus on ease and cost-efficiency of deployment and use while ensuring the preservation of traceability and data integrity. The POC is based on two industrial use cases involving organizations with different roles in the metrology infrastructure. In the testing, the presented approach proves to be an efficient method for organizing the calibration data exchange in industrial use.

SARS-CoV-2 transmission risk screening for safer social events: a non-randomised controlled study

There is an ongoing debate on the implementation of the COVID-19 passport throughout Europe. We sought to build and test a feasible prevention strategy to ensure low SARS-CoV transmission risk in public events. We conducted a non-randomised controlled study. The intervention group obtained a confidential digital certificate of very low capacity for transmitting SARS-CoV-2 and attended socio-cultural events in Girona (Spain) between 1 April and 21 May 2021. The primary care services and a network of pharmacies cooperated in providing the certification. A group of non-attendees was randomly selected from pseudonymised health records as controls. We estimated the incidences of SARS-CoV-2 infection and recorded the challenges in the process. Follow-up was complete for 1351 participants, who were matched with 4050 controls. Mean age of the study population was 31.1 years, and 53% of participants were women. Incidence rates of SARS-CoV infection at 14 days in the group of attendees and non-attendees were 15.9 and 17.7 per 100,000 person-days, respectively; the difference between incidences was − 1.8 (95% CI − 22.8, 19.3). Implementation problems were minor, and 89.2% of respondents to a survey were satisfied with the process. The incidence rate of SARS-CoV-2 infection was not different in the intervention and control groups. These results are in favour of establishing a COVID-19 certificate to attend public events, and connote feasibility of implementation at a population level.

Implications of digitalization during the COVID-19 pandemics

The article provides with analysis of the proposal of Regulation on European Digital Identity with regards to processing of personal data, particularly those that concerns health. It presents cross-examination with the Mobile Tracing Application and Digital Green Certificate which were established in order to combat the COVID-19. Lastly, it mentions the main challenges and critical positions, as well as proposals on how to tackle some of them.

The Safety-Hygiene Air Corridor between UK and Spain Will Coexist with COVID-19

Background: The main goal of this case study is to analyze the air traffic, air cargo, and the safety-hygiene air corridor between UK and Spain, in airports managed by MAG Group (UK) and AENA Group (Spain). Methods: To review the specific paradigm of research which discusses, investigates, and analyses the air traffic, air cargo, and the safety-hygiene air corridor between UK and Spain at airports managed by MAG (UK) and AENA (Spain). Results: The air traffic that airlines project onto the UK-Spain corridor has decreased due to the pandemic, but the result of this research shows that in the medium term, to implement the new Safety-Hygiene Air Corridor (SHAC) will return to economically nurture airlines, airports and destination thanks to vaccines, the digital COVID-19 certificate that will give more confidence to passengers to travel, and with new COVID-19 safety regulations at airports and airlines. Furthermore, the results of the research show the need to create Safety-Hygiene Air Corridor Elements (SHACE) to improve the air activity of these countries. Conclusions: The study contributes towards providing solutions such as those we propose in this study, the UK-Spain SHAC and SHACE will guarantee the value of corridors between countries, reduce the uncertainty of airlines, organizations, and passengers, to restore the tourism and aviation industries.