Signature-based Scheme Research Articles

An authentication and signature scheme for UAV-assisted vehicular ad hoc network providing anonymity

Cybersecurity is a hot issue in our times. People try to keep digital attacks away from cyberspace, to finish the task of cybersecurity. A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) with drone assistance is an important part of cyberspace, which can be used in disastrous or rural areas. The data produced on the vehicle side should go through different channels to the central server for processing. However, various attacks may occur in communication, and the tasks of data security in VANETs attract researchers to solve them. Although, researchers have come up with various solutions to overcome the flaws, the various security loopholes are still needed to be addressed. In this paper, we present a new and secure signature-based scheme for UAV-assisted VANETs, which can ensure that the produced data on the vehicles are transmitted securely. Also, the identities of vehicles can be tracked, if they should be monitored by the police. We present the formal and informal security analysis of the proposed scheme to prove its security against well-known security attacks. The formal security analysis is presented based on the widely used random oracle model. The informal analysis is presented using the assumptions of the threat model. Also, Proverif is used to illustrate the security of our scheme under Dolev-Yao model. Furthermore, we present a detailed performance analysis of the proposed protocol along with a simulation to show that the proposed scheme is practical.

Analysis and Correlation of Visual Evidence in Campaigns of Malicious Office Documents

Many malware campaigns use Microsoft (MS) Office documents as droppers to download and execute their malicious payload. Such campaigns often use these documents because MS Office is installed on billions of devices and that these files allow the execution of arbitrary VBA code. Recent versions of MS Office prevent the automatic execution of VBA macros, so malware authors try to convince users into enabling the content via images that, e.g., forge system or technical errors. In this article, we propose a mechanism to extract and analyse the different components of the files, including these visual elements, and construct lightweight signatures based on them. These visual elements are used as input for a text extraction pipeline which, in combination with the signatures, is able to capture the intent of MS Office files and the campaign they belong to. We test and validate our approach using an extensive database of malware samples, obtaining an accuracy above 99% in the task of distinguishing between benign and malicious files. Furthermore, our signature-based scheme allowed us to identify correlations between different campaigns, illustrating that some campaigns are either using the same tools or collaborating between them.

A Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for VANETs with Exculpability

Message authentication and conditional privacy preservation are two critical security issues in VANETs (vehicular ad hoc networks). To achieve the corresponding security goals, many security technologies have been proposed so far. Identity-based pseudonyms and group signature-based schemes are two of the main technologies in recently published literature. However, the key escrow is difficult to achieve and pseudonym identities may reveal the physical location of the vehicle in the identity-based scheme. The global manager TA of VANETs knows the full keys given to the vehicles and can forge signatures under the vehicle’s key. Therefore, the exculpability cannot be satisfied in the group signature scheme. To address these security issues, a privacy-preserving authentication scheme for VANETs with exculpability is proposed in this paper, which applies double key approach to realize the trusted communication between vehicle and road side units and TA by combining the advantage of group-based methods and identity-based methods. Security analysis shows that the security of our scheme can resist stronger attacks than previous schemes.

A Traitor Tracking Method Towards Deep Learning Models in Cloud Environments

Cloud computing can speed up the training process of deep learning models. In this process, training data and model parameters stored in the cloud are prone to threats of being stolen. In model protection, model watermarking is a commonly used method. Using the adversarial example as model watermarking can make watermarked images have better concealment. Oriented from the signature mechanism in cryptography, a signature-based scheme is proposed to guarantee the performance of deep learning algorithms via identifying these adversarial examples. In the adversarial example generation stage, the corresponding signature information and classification information will be embedded in the noise space, so that the generated adversarial example will have implicit identity information, which can be verified by the secret key. The experiment using the ImageNet dataset shows that the adversarial examples generated by the authors’ scheme must be correctly recognized by the classifier with the secret key.

Cryptanalysis of an Efficient and Secure Certificateless Aggregate Signature-Based Authentication Scheme for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) apply the Internet of Things technology to provide secure communication among the vehicles, thereby improving the safe driving of vehicles, the utilization of traffic resources, and the efficiency of information services. Due to the openness and vulnerability of wireless networks in VANETs, messages in sharing and transmission are easily attacked and destroyed. Therefore, a large number of schemes for VANETs were proposed to protect the privacy of vehicles and ensure the authentication, integrity, and nonrepudiation of messages. However, most of these schemes have serious security flaws or poor performance issues. Recently, Thumbur et al. presented an efficient certificateless aggregate signature-based authentication scheme for VANETs and then gave the detailed security proof (IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 1908–1920, 2021). In this article, we analyze the security of Thumbur et al.’s scheme and demonstrate that it has significant security problems. Specifically, their scheme cannot resist public key replacement attacks from external adversaries, and it is not secure against coalition attacks from malicious vehicles. Then, we improve Thumbur et al.’s scheme to address the security weaknesses. According to the security and performance analysis, the improved scheme enhances the security while maintaining the performance of the original scheme.

Anonymous Blockchain-based System for Consortium

Blockchain records transactions with various protection techniques against tampering. To meet the requirements on cooperation and anonymity of companies and organizations, researchers have developed a few solutions. Ring signature-based schemes allow multiple participants cooperatively to manage while preserving their individuals’ privacy. However, the solutions cannot work properly due to the increased computing complexity along with the expanded group size. In this article, we propose a Multi-center Anonymous Blockchain-based (MAB) system, with joint management for the consortium and privacy protection for the participants. To achieve that, we formalize the syntax used by the MAB system and present a general construction based on a modular design. By applying cryptographic primitives to each module, we instantiate our scheme with anonymity and decentralization. Furthermore, we carry out a comprehensive formal analysis of our exemplified scheme. A proof of concept simulation is provided to show the feasibility. The results demonstrate security and efficiency from both theoretical perspectives and practical perspectives.

SCBS: A Short Certificate-Based Signature Scheme With Efficient Aggregation for Industrial-Internet-of-Things Environment

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has escalated the sharing of information among various smart devices many fold, irrespective of their geographical location. Recently, applications, such as e-healthcare, farm monitoring, border security, smart transportation, etc. have attracted wide attention from the research community. However, as devices in the Industrial-IoT (IIoT) environment share their information using the Internet, security issues, such as authentication, integrity, and confidentiality of data pose various challenges to the research community for the successful implementation of any solution. To handle these issues, several digital signature-based schemes have been designed in the past. However, because of the usage of the identity-based public-key cryptography (IDPKC) or certificate-less-based public-key cryptography (CLPKC), these schemes suffer from key escrow or secret key distribution problems. To eliminate these flaws, this article presents a short digital signature scheme without pairing in certificate-based setting with aggregation in IIoT environment. Besides, in IIoT environment, communication and computational costs are also considered as imperative challenges. In this regard, the pairing free construction, short length signature and aggregation make it a communication and computational efficient signature scheme. The performance comparison of the proposed scheme shows that our scheme causes less computational overhead and takes significantly less execution time as compared to the existing schemes, which is imperative for the resource limited IIoT devices. We also demonstrate that signature aggregation and verification cost is 6.67(n+2) ms which is much less in comparison to the verification cost ( 20.01n ms) of n short signatures.

A Lightweight Provably Secure Digital Short-Signature Technique Using Extended Chaotic Maps for Human-Centered IoT Systems

Internet of Things (IoT) consists of numerous smart devices for sharing sensed data through the availability of online services. Direct communication by smart devices with people to identify parameters of healthcare and send them to a central repository is crucial. There is a need to secure messages among the sender and recipient during data exchange in order to tackle the malicious attacks by human. To provide secure communication, various signature-based schemes are presented in the literature. However, smart devices require lightweight tasks by guaranteeing essential security strengths. The main difficulty in signature-based methods is more computational cost incurred for signature and verification stages involving large numbers. This article introduces a lightweight provably secure short digital signature technique for safe communication amongst smart devices in human-centered IoT (HCIoT), the security of which is closely related to an extended chaotic maps assumption in a random oracle model (ROM). Moreover, we used less comprehensive operations to accomplish processes of verification and signing, similar to human signing on legitimate documents and then check as per witness. The proposed technique provides a stronger guarantee of protection than existing signature techniques. The key advantage of the presented technique over the DSA techniques is that it takes less computation in the verification stage and signing length; it retains the degree of protection. The presented short signature takes less bandwidth for communication, storage, and computing resources.

A Provably Secure Lightweight Subtree-Based Short Signature Scheme With Fuzzy User Data Sharing for Human-Centered IoT

Internet of Things (IoT) is made up of various smart devices for the exchange of sensed data through online services. Direct contact with people through smart devices to define parameters for healthcare and send them to a centralized repository. At the time of data exchange, messages need to be secure between a source (sender) and target (receiver) in order to confront human malicious attacks. Various signature-based schemes are presented in the literature to provide secure communication. Smart apps, however, require lightweight activities by maintaining critical security strengths. The key challenge in signature-based methods is more incurred computational expense for signing and checking process involving large numbers. In this article, a new lightweight provably secure partial discrete logarithm (DL) based subtree-based short signature with fuzzy user data sharing for human-centered IoT systems is introduced and it's security analysis is demonstrated on random oracle (RO) model. The presented scheme provides assurance of better security than other standing short-signature schemes. For low-storage, low-computation environments and low-bandwidth communication, the presented new provably secure and lightweight subtree-based short-signature scheme is needed. The results demonstrate the strength of proposed scheme, as opposed to existing works.

A bandwidth efficient HMAC-based authentication scheme for network coding

Pollution attacks in network coding result in the waste of bandwidth and computational resources. Several homomorphic message authentication code (HMAC) and signature-based schemes have been proposed to mitigate such attacks. In these schemes, authentication is achieved by appending several HMAC tags with or without a signature to the packet payload. This approach negatively affects the throughput as well as the communication overhead incurred by such schemes. A phenomenon determined by a property we dubbed as the admissible payload rate (APR). In this paper we propose an HMAC and signature-based authentication scheme that addresses the afore mentioned problems. It achieves this by reducing the number of symbols needed to represent a packet. We evaluated the performance of our scheme and compared our findings to the performance of similar, state of the art authentication schemes. Our comparisons revealed that the proposed scheme incurred a negligible percentage gain in computational complexity. However, with no extra key storage overhead, and without sacrificing security, our scheme achieved a significant percentage reduction in communication overhead. The above mentioned favorable characteristics make our scheme an ideal and practical authentication solution for networks where bandwidth is a constraint or an optimal throughput is a requirement.

Hardware Constructions for Lightweight Cryptographic Block Cipher QARMA With Error Detection Mechanisms

The cryptographic algorithm QARMA is a family of lightweight tweakable block ciphers targeted at applications such as memory encryption and construction of keyed hash functions. Utilizing lightweight security in hardware has the advantage of adopting the mechanisms to battery-constrained usage models including implantable and wearable medical devices. This lightweight block cipher utilizes a substitution permutation network (SPN) which is inspired by block ciphers such as PRINCE, MANTIS, and MIDORI. Moreover, it uses a three-round Even-Mansour scheme instead of the FX-construction, with its central permutation being non-involutory and keyed. In this article, we introduce error detection schemes on variations of QARMA, namely QARMA-64 and QARMA-128, which to the best of authors’ knowledge, have not been presented to date. We present our derivations for the logic-gate-based implementation, following which, we present the derivations for signature-based and interleaved signature-based schemes for the LUT-based approach. The presented, new signature-based error detection schemes, including cyclic redundancy check (CRC), are provided for the compact, involutory, and optimized S-box. Besides, recomputations through encoding the operands allow for the architectures to counter both transient and permanent faults. Also, the schemes are benchmarked on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware platform, where performance and implementation metrics show acceptable overheads and degradations. The proposed schemes are aimed to make the implementations of this lightweight tweakable block cipher more reliable.

Fractional chaotic maps based short signature scheme under human-centered IoT environments

IntroductionThe Internet of Things (IoT) comprises of various smart devices for the sharing of sensed data through online services. People will be directly contacted to check their health parameters and the reports will be collected centrally through smart devices. The requirement is protection of messages during the exchange of data between sender and receiver in order to tackle human malicious attacks. Various signature-based schemes are discussed in the literature to provide secure communication. Smart devices however require lightweight tasks by ensuring critical safety strengths. An important problem in the signature based method is that it incurs more computational expenses for signing and verification process in large numbers. ObjectivesIn this study, we introduced an efficient Short Signature Scheme (SSS) that uses Fractional Chaotic Map (FCM) for secure communication in IoT based smart devices, the security of which is closely related to a random oracle based on FCM assumption. MethodsIn this study, we have designed new short signature scheme using FCM. The presented scheme consist of four sub-algorithm as follows: setup, key generation, signing and verification. We have used less rigorous operations based on the FCM to carry out signing and verification procedures, similar to human signing on valid documents and then verifying them as per witness. ResultsThe proposed SSS offers a better security assurance than currently established signature schemes. The key advantage of the SSS over the DSA schemes is that at the verification stage and signing period it takes less computation; it retains the degree of protection. The presented SSS takes less bandwidth for storage, communication, and computing resources; particularly applicable to wireless devices and smart cards. ConclusionWe concluded that the uses of fractional chaotic maps is more effective for secure communication in human-centered IoT to present a provably secure short signature technique.

LimonDroid: a system coupling three signature-based schemes for profiling Android malware

Android remains an interesting target to attackers due to its openness. A contribution in the literature consists of providing similarity measurement such as fuzzy hashing to fight against code obfuscation techniques. Research works in this approach suffer from limited signature database. This work combines fuzzy hashing with YARA rules and VirusTotal signature-based schemes, to improve and consistency of the signature database. It is proposed LimonDroid, an Android system, which mimics Limon, a Desktop security tool that includes such schemes. LimonDroid has been tested with 341 malicious and 300 benign applications on a database of 12925 fuzzy-hashed malware signatures, 62 YARA malware families’ patterns and VirusTotal engine. Our approach gives a true-positive rate of 97.36%, a true negative rate of 98.33% and an accuracy of 97.82%. A comparison with similarity-based solutions reveals that LimonDroid is more efficient for users. The objective is not to propose a detection approach better than those in the literature. Instead, we aim at establishing a robust signature database able to identify malicious trends in Android apps.

Detecting forged management frames with spoofed addresses in IEEE 802.11 networks using received signal strength indicator

IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN networks are vulnerable to MAC address spoofing attacks and to sending forged management frames to disconnect or disturb existing connections. The main reason behind this vulnerability is that the management frames are sent as a plain text with no built-in authentication or encryption mechanism. In this paper, intention is to address problem of detecting forged management frames with spoofed source addresses. Using a distributed architecture and Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI), the paper proposes a signature-based detection scheme. Employing a set of monitoring points, RSSI is used as a non-counterfeiting feature to extract a signature for each node. The proposed approach uses majority voting as an ensemble method to aggregate the local judgments of the monitoring points. The simulation results show that when the attacker is far enough from the victim, this approach can detect spoofing attacks with a high detection rate.

Revocation Protocol for Group Signatures in VANETs: A Secure Construction

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) enable wireless communication between vehicles and roadside infrastructure to provide a safer and more efficient driving environment. However, due to VANETs wireless nature, vehicles are exposed to several security attacks when they join the network. In order to protect VANETs against misbehaviours, one of the vital security requirements is to revoke the misbehaved vehicles from the network. Some existing revocation protocols have been proposed to enhance security in VANETs. However, most of the protocols do not efficiently address revocation issues associated with group signature-based schemes. In this paper, we address the problem by constructing a revocation protocol particularly for group signatures in VANETs. We show that this protocol can be securely and efficiently solve the issue of revocation in group signature schemes. The theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate our work is secure against adversaries and achieves performance efficiency and scalability.

A Secure and Efficient Data Integrity Verification Scheme for Cloud-IoT Based on Short Signature

The Internet of Things (IoT) is also known as the Internet of everything. As an important part of the new generation of intelligent information technology, the IoT has attracted the attention both of researchers and engineers all over the world. Considering the limited capacity of smart products, the IoT mainly uses cloud computing to expand computing and storage resources. The massive data collected by the sensor are stored in the cloud storage server, also the cloud vulnerability will directly threaten the security and reliability of the IoT. In order to ensure data integrity and availability in the cloud and IoT storage system, users need to verify the integrity of remote data. However, the existing remote data integrity verification schemes are mostly based on the RSA and BLS signature mechanisms. The RSA-based scheme has too much computational overhead. The BLS signature-based scheme needs to adopt a specific hash function, and the batch signature efficiency in the big data environment is low. Therefore, for the computational overhead and signature efficiency issues of these two signature mechanisms, we propose a scheme of data integrity verification based on a short signature algorithm (ZSS signature), which supports privacy protection and public auditing by introducing a trusted third party (TPA). The computational overhead is effectively reduced by reducing hash function overhead in the signature process. Under the assumption of CDH difficult problem, it can resist adaptive chosen-message attacks. The analysis shows that the scheme has a higher efficiency and safety.

Efficient and Scalable Integrity Verification of Data and Query Results for Graph Databases

Graphs are used for representing and understanding objects and their relationships for numerous applications such as social networks, Semantic Webs, and biological networks. Integrity assurance of data and query results for graph databases is an essential security requirement. In this paper, we propose two efficient integrity verification schemes—HMACs for graphs (gHMAC) for two-party data sharing, and redactable HMACs for graphs (rgHMAC) for third-party data sharing, such as a cloud-based graph database service. We compute one HMAC value for both the schemes and two other verification objects for rgHMAC scheme that are shared with the verifier. We show that the proposed schemes are provably secure with respect to integrity attacks on the structure and/or content of graphs and query results. The proposed schemes have linear complexity in terms of the number of vertices and edges in the graphs, which is shown to be optimal. Our experimental results corroborate that the proposed HMAC-based schemes for graphs are highly efficient as compared to the digital signature-based schemes—computation of HMAC tags is about 10 times faster than the computation of digital signatures.

3VSR: Three Valued Secure Routing for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks using Sensing Logic in Adversarial Environment

Today IoT integrate thousands of inter networks and sensing devices e.g., vehicular networks, which are considered to be challenging due to its high speed and network dynamics. The goal of future vehicular networks is to improve road safety, promote commercial or infotainment products and to reduce the traffic accidents. All these applications are based on the information exchange among nodes, so not only reliable data delivery but also the authenticity and credibility of the data itself are prerequisite. To cope with the aforementioned problem, trust management come up as promising candidate to conduct node’s transaction and interaction management, which requires distributed mobile nodes cooperation for achieving design goals. In this paper, we propose a trust-based routing protocol i.e., 3VSR (Three Valued Secure Routing), which extends the widely used AODV (Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector) routing protocol and employs the idea of Sensing Logic-based trust model to enhance the security solution of VANET (Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network). The existing routing protocol are mostly based on key or signature-based schemes, which off course increases computation overhead. In our proposed 3VSR, trust among entities is updated frequently by means of opinion derived from sensing logic due to vehicles random topologies. In 3VSR the theoretical capabilities are based on Dirichlet distribution by considering prior and posterior uncertainty of the said event. Also by using trust recommendation message exchange, nodes are able to reduce computation and routing overhead. The simulated results shows that the proposed scheme is secure and practical.

Reliable Inversion in GF(28) With Redundant Arithmetic for Secure Error Detection of Cryptographic Architectures

In secure cryptographic primitives, such as block ciphers, the reliability of hardware implementations needs to be closely considered because faults in the hardware implementations can potentially reduce or impact on the underlying security. In this paper, we present approaches to detect errors in hardware implementations of the inversion in GF(28). The proposed approaches are based on both nonredundant and redundant arithmetic, utilizing normal basis (nonredundant) and two redundant Galois field representations, i.e., polynomial ring representation and redundantly represented basis through tower fields. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work focusing on the error detection architectures for redundant arithmetic-based inversion in GF(28). The presented signature-based schemes in this paper are general and can be applied to block ciphers with 8-bit S-boxes, such as Camellia, SMS4, the advanced encryption standard, and CLEFIA. We present the results of error simulations and application-specific integrated circuit implementations to demonstrate the utility of the presented schemes. Based on the specific implementation’s security/reliability objectives and the overhead/degradation tolerance for implementation/performance metrics, one can fine-tune and tailor the proposed work to achieve more reliable inversions in GF(28).

A Lightweight Digital Signature Based Security Scheme for Human-Centered Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) comprises of large number of smart devices that can exchange sensed data by availing online services. Smart devices can directly interact with the human beings for sensing the healthcare parameters and transmitting to a central repository. During the data exchange, it is mandatory to secure the messages between sender and receiver to handle the malicious human based attacks. For providing secure communication, a number of signature-based schemes are explored in literature but smart devices need more lightweight operations by ensuring desired security strengths. The main problem during signature based approaches is the computational overhead due to large real numbers required for signature and verification processes. This paper presents a light weight shortened complex digital signature algorithm for providing secure communication between smart devices in human centered IoT. We have used less extensive operations to achieve signature and verification processes like human beings do signatures on legal documents and verify later as per witness. We have also presented a multi-option parameter selection to use a signature-verification pair of expressions at particular index by adopting the common practice of human beings for using different signatures as per document criticality level. It enhances the security strength to guard against traffic analysis attacks. We have developed an experimental setup where a number of cell phones and smart devices are considered for secure communication using existing and proposed digital signature schemes. Results demonstrate the supremacy of our scheme as compared to preliminaries.