Simultaneous Authentication Research Articles

Meeting the challenge of varietal and geographical authentication of hazelnuts through lipid metabolite fingerprinting

Hazelnuts are high-quality products with significant economic importance in many European countries. Their market price depends on their qualitative characteristics, which are driven by cultivar and geographical origin, making hazelnuts susceptible to fraud. This study systematically compared two lipidomic fingerprinting strategies for the simultaneous authentication of hazelnut cultivar and provenance, based on the analysis of the unsaponifiable fraction (UF) and triacylglycerol (TAG) profiles by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry coupled with chemometrics. PLS-DA classification models were developed using a large sample set with high natural variability (n = 309) to discriminate hazelnuts by cultivar and origin. External validation results demonstrated the suitability of the UF fingerprint as a hazelnut authentication tool, both tested models showing a high efficiency (>94 %). The correct classification rate of the TAG fingerprinting method was lower (>80 %), but due to its faster analysis time, it is recommended as a complementary screening tool to UF fingerprinting.

HS-SPME-GC-MS Analysis of the Volatile Composition of Italian Honey for Its Characterization and Authentication Using the Genetic Algorithm

Honey’s chemical and sensory characteristics depend on several factors, including its botanical and geographic origins. The consumers’ increasing interest in monofloral honey and honey with a clear indication of geographic origin make these types of honey susceptible to fraud. The aim was to propose an original chemometric approach for honey’s botanical and geographic authentication purposes. The volatile fraction of almost 100 Italian honey samples (4 out of which are from Greece) from different regions and botanical origins was characterized using HS-SPME-GC-MS; the obtained data were combined for the first time with a genetic algorithm to provide a model for the simultaneous authentication of the botanical and geographic origins of the honey samples. A total of 212 volatile compounds were tentatively identified; strawberry tree honeys were those with the greatest total content (i.e., 4829.2 ng/g). A greater variability in the VOCs’ content was pointed out for botanical than for geographic origin. The genetic algorithm obtained a 100% correct classification for acacia and eucalyptus honeys, while worst results were achieved for honeydew (75%) and wildflower (60%) honeys; concerning geographic authentication, the best results were for Tuscany (92.7%). The original combination of HS-SPME-GC-MS analysis and a genetic algorithm is therefore proposed as a promising tool for honey authentication purposes.

Optical double-image cryptosystem based on a joint transform correlator in a linear canonical domain

In this work, we present a new optical double-image encryption method based on a joint transform correlator (JTC) and the linear canonical domain for the simultaneous authentication of two images. This new extension of the encryption system overcame the vulnerability of the method based on the JTC and the conventional 4f-optical processor in the Fourier domain. Although the simultaneous authentication process is satisfied in the Fourier domain, the data content is partially disclosed in false validation. Therefore, we introduce a quadratic phase encryption system of the linear canonical transform (LCT) domain in this method. The linear canonical transform domain adds more degrees of freedom to the security method due to the six LCT orders. In addition, the double-image encryption scheme became secure against intruder attacks, and it was difficult to recognize confidential information during the negative validation process. A cryptanalysis is performed in terms of a chosen-plaintext attack (CPA) and chosen-ciphertext attack (CCA). Numerical simulations demonstrate the feasibility, security, and effectiveness of the proposed system.

Simultaneous Authentication of Multiple Users Using a Single mmWave Radar

Simultaneous Authentication of Multiple Users Using a Single mmWave Radar

PUF-Based Privacy-Preserving Simultaneous Authentication Among Multiple Vehicles in VANET

PUF-Based Privacy-Preserving Simultaneous Authentication Among Multiple Vehicles in VANET

A novel triplex real-time PCR method for the simultaneous authentication of meats and antlers from sika deer (Cervus nippon) and red deer (Cervus elaphus)

Deer products have been used as a traditional Chinese medical and edible food for over 2000 years. Due to the high price, the meats and antlers are often adulterated with low-value materials. The present study developed a triplex real-time PCR assay to simultaneously identify the DNA from sika deer and red deer in deer products. The triplex real-time PCR approach showed high specificity for 10 animal species, and the method simultaneously amplified an endogenous control to eliminate false-negative results. The absolute limits of detection for raw meat, meat product, and antlers were 0.00005–0.000025 ng, 0.00005–0.000025 ng, and 0.0001–0.000025 ng, respectively, for sika deer and 0.00005–0.000025 ng, 0.0005–0.00025 ng, and 0.0025–0.00025 ng, respectively, for red deer. This approach could determine 0.1% (w/w) adulteration. In conclusion, the established triplex real-time PCR assay displayed high specificity and sensitivity, and applicability and can be used for authentic animal products from sika deer and red deer. Data will be made available on request.

Role Based Access Control Using Biometric the in Educational System

The purpose of a secure e-learning system based on cloud computing is to allow instructors and students to access their accounts at any time and from anywhere. These types of systems work to ensure that their users (instructors and students) are truly enrolled in the school or institute to prevent unauthorized users from accessing the resources and components of the system. Furthermore, the traditional authentication techniques used in the majority of educational systems suffer from several issues, such as cyber security attacks and weak management of resources. So, some students could be eager to take advantage of such a system's flaw in an effort to cheat. User authentication and end-user monitoring are more difficult in this situation. Multifactor adaptive authentication techniques are used to implement a system with simultaneous authentication. The proposed scheme system offers an effective, affordable, and human intervention-adaptive authentication and monitoring solution for e-learning environments. Additionally, our work can resist cyber security and contains some good metrics like mutual authentication, user anomalies, and others. In this paper, the proposed scheme system uses a two-factor authentication system based on Asymmetric Scalar Product Preserving Encryption (APSE) and fingerprint biometrics for managing and generating a user's account in a secure way. Our work also achieves a good balance between performance and security complexity compared to the state-of-the-art. So, we achieve good results for 1.69 ms for computation and 1280 bits for communication.

Pairing-Free Certificateless Aggregate Signcryption Scheme for Vehicular Sensor Networks

Smart vehicle applications play an increasingly significant role in constructing intelligent transportation systems. Vehicles with sensors are able to form temporary vehicular sensor networks dynamically, in which a mass of data are collected, shared, and aggregated to the traffic administration for improving road safety and efficiency. In such networks, vehicles exchange urgent or sensitive information with others in open wireless channels. To ensure secure and privacy-preserving communications, we develop a new pairing-free certificateless aggregate signcryption scheme based on the elliptic curve cryptosystem. The certificateless setting prevents the proposed scheme from both certificate management and key escrow issues. Aggregate signcryption without pairings realizes the aggregation and simultaneous authentication of multisource data by efficient cryptographic computing. The proposed scheme is proved to achieve confidentiality and unforgeability with the random oracle model. The security analysis shows that the proposed scheme provides forward secrecy, immunity to various known attacks, and pseudonym-based conditional privacy for vehicles. The performance analysis demonstrates that it satisfies more security properties with higher computation efficiency and lower communication overhead than state-of-the-art schemes.

WPAxFuzz: Sniffing Out Vulnerabilities in Wi-Fi Implementations

This work attempts to provide a way of scrutinizing the security robustness of Wi-Fi implementations in an automated fashion. To this end, to our knowledge, we contribute the first full-featured and extensible Wi-Fi fuzzer. At the time of writing, the tool, made publicly available as open source, covers the IEEE 802.11 management and control frame types and provides a separate module for the pair of messages of the Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE) authentication and key exchange method. It can be primarily used to detect vulnerabilities potentially existing in wireless Access Points (AP) under the newest Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 (WPA3) certification, but its functionalities can also be exploited against WPA2-compatible APs. Moreover, the fuzzer incorporates: (a) a dual-mode network monitoring module that monitors, in real time, the behavior of the connected AP stations and logs possible service or connection disruptions and (b) an attack tool used to verify any glitches found and automatically craft the corresponding exploit. We present results after testing the fuzzer against an assortment of off-the-shelf APs by different renowned vendors. Adhering to a coordinated disclosure process, we have reported the discovered issues to the affected vendors, already receiving positive feedback from some of them.

A Chosen Random Value Attack on WPA3 SAE Authentication Protocol

Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE) is a password-authenticated key exchange protocol that is designed to replace the WPA2-PSK-based authentication. The SAE authenticated key exchange protocol supports the peer-to-peer authentication and is one of the major authentication mechanisms of the Authentication and Key Management Suite specified within Wi-Fi. The SAE authenticated key exchange protocol has been widely implemented in today’s Wi-Fi devices as part of major security feature upgrades and is regarded as the third generation of Wi-Fi Protected Access. This article presents a way of attacking the weaker randomness generation algorithm within the SAE protocols, which can lead to successful impersonation types of attacks. We also suggest some protocol amendments for protection. It is recommended that SAE implementations should be upgraded to ensure protection against these attacks.

A novel duplex droplet digital PCR assay for simultaneous authentication and quantification of Panax notoginseng and its adulterants

Food adulteration can result in unfair commercial trade and consumer distrust, therefore, a reliable and effective method for food qualitative and quantitative analysis is necessary. In the present work, we developed a highly sensitive and precise approach based on duplex droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) for the identification and quantification of Panax notoginseng (P. notoginseng) powder and its adulterants. The detection targeted single copy nuclear genes, the limits of detection (LODs) for rice and soybean were both 0.1%, and the limits of quantifications (LOQs) were both 0.5%. The relationship between species proportions and DNA copy number was established for rice, soybean and P. notoginseng and the regression equation all exhibited good linearity. To further demonstrate the accuracy of the developed method, samples with known concentrations were tested. In general, the developed duplex ddPCR assays is useful for addressing adulteration issues in health food material powder from P. notoginseng.

RFID Batch Authentication—A Usable Scheme Providing Anonymity

Businesses are slowly replacing Universal Product Code (barcodes used for tracking items) with radio-frequency identification (RFID). Unlike a barcode, RFID tag does not need to be within the line of sight of the reader, and can be interrogated from up to hundreds of meters from the reader in the case of active tag. Some readers are designed to read multiple RFID tags concurrently, which is useful in, e.g., warehouses. We address the problem of efficient methods for simultaneous authentication of multiple RFID tags – batch tag authentication. We provide a general design to build a provable secure batch tag authentication protocol from a single-tag authentication scheme using some aggregation function. Our main goal is to build a computationally-efficient batch tag authentication method that provides a reasonable level of anonymity in a model with an untrusted RFID reader. We provide an efficiency analysis of a protocol where the Bloom filter is used as the aggregation function together with a brief comparison with alternative data structures.

How is your Wi-Fi connection today? DoS attacks on WPA3-SAE

WPA3-Personal renders the Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE) password-authenticated key agreement method mandatory. The scheme achieves forward secrecy and is highly resistant to offline brute-force dictionary attacks. Given that SAE is based on the Dragonfly handshake, essentially a simple password exponential key exchange, it remains susceptible to clogging type of attacks at the Access Point side. To resist such attacks, SAE includes an anti-clogging scheme. To shed light on this contemporary and high-stakes issue, this work offers a full-fledged empirical study on Denial of Service (DoS) against SAE. By utilizing both real-life modern Wi-Fi 6 certified and non-certified equipment and the OpenBSD’s hostapd, we expose a significant number of novel DoS assaults affecting virtually any AP. No less important, more than a dozen of vendor-depended and severe zero-day DoS assaults are manifested, showing that the implementation of the protocol by vendors is not yet mature enough. The fallout of the introduced attacks to the associated stations ranges from a temporary loss of Internet connectivity to outright disconnection. To our knowledge, this work provides the first wholemeal appraisal of SAE’s mechanism endurance against DoS, and it is therefore anticipated to serve as a basis for further research in this timely and intriguing area.

Leptophilic fermion WIMP: Role of future lepton colliders

The leptophilic weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) is realized in a minimal renormalizable model scenario where scalar mediators with lepton number establish the WIMP interaction with the standard model (SM) leptons. We perform a comprehensive analysis for such a WIMP scenario for two distinct cases with an SU(2) doublet or singlet mediator considering all the relevant theoretical, cosmological and experimental constraints at present. We show that the mono-photon search at near-future lepton collider experiments (ILC, FCC-ee, CEPC, etc.) can play a significant role to probe the yet unexplored parameter range allowed by the WIMP relic density constraint. This will complement the search prospect at the near-future hadron collider experiment (HL-LHC). Furthermore, we discuss the combined model scenario including both the doublet and singlet mediator. The combined model is capable of explaining the long-standing muon (g-2) anomaly which is an additional advantage. We demonstrate that the allowed region for anomalous muon (g-2) explanation, which has been updated very recently at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, can also be probed at the future colliders which will thus be a simultaneous authentication of the model scenario.

An Enhanced Secure Authentication Scheme With One More Tag for RFID Systems

Currently, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is one of the key technologies to realize the Internet of Things (IoT), which is widely used in our daily life. However, there are some security threats such as impersonation attack, replay attack in existed RFID systems. In addition, most physical-layer authentication methods for RFID systems are mainly to authenticate tags without authenticating the user. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of Au-Hota, a system that can authenticate the tag and the user simultaneously, and can resist replaying attack and impersonation attack that cannot be solved by most physical-layer methods. Our idea is to assign a unique identifier to the user based on the inductive coupling between two adjacent tags. When the user draws the identity identifier on the tag, different identity identifiers correspond to unique phase features so that simultaneous authentication of the tag and the user can be achieved under the premise of ensuring security. The system is fully compatible with Ultra High Frequency (UHF) RFID systems without any modification. We implement a prototype of the system and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate performance. Our results demonstrate that the system has good authentication performance.

DNA barcode based species-specific marker for Ocimum tenuiflorum and its applicability in quantification of adulteration in herbal formulations using qPCR

Ocimum tenuiflorum L. is a highly traded and extensively used species in Ayurvedic medicine owing to its immense therapeutic potential, which has led to adulteration of both formulations as well as traded raw drugs. To meet the standard international market requirements, quick and efficient techniques for authentication are required which can keep pace with the increasing demand for the herb. In view of this, a robust and accurate DNA marker for the qualitative and quantitative analyses of this species and derived products is reported. The species-specific markers (designated as CIM-PATH-fwd / CIM-PATH-rev) developed in this study was designed based on the differences in the nucleotide sequence of the psbA-trnH intergenic region. A consistent amplicon of 218 bp was generated across all the O. tenuiflorum accessions and was absent in other Ocimum species studied. Further, developed species-specific primers were assessed for simultaneous authentication as well as quantification of O. tenuiflorum in commercially purchased herbal formulations by SYBR green-based quantitative real-time PCR assay. The established qPCR method was determined to be effective for the authentication and relative quantitative assessments of the products. The species-specific marker developed can be successfully employed as a taxonomic marker for O. tenuiflorum.

Image Encryption System Based on a Nonlinear Joint Transform Correlator for the Simultaneous Authentication of Two Users

We propose a new encryption system based on a nonlinear joint transform correlator (JTC) using the information of two biometrics (one digital fingerprint for each user) as security keys of the encryption system. In order to perform the decryption and authentication in a proper way, it is necessary to have the two digital fingerprints from the respective users whose simultaneous authentication is pursued. The proposed security system is developed in the Fourier domain. The nonlinearity of the JTC along with the five security keys given by the three random phase masks and the two digital fingerprints of the two users allow an increase of the system security against brute force and plaintext attacks. The feasibility and validity of this proposal is demonstrated using digital fingerprints as biometrics in numerical experiments.

Feasibility Study of the Use of Handheld NIR Spectrometer for Simultaneous Authentication and Quantification of Quality Parameters in Intact Pineapple Fruits

The potential of predicting maturity using total soluble solids (TSS) and identifying organic from inorganic pineapple fruits based on near-infrared (NIR) spectra fingerprints would be beneficial to farmers and consumers alike. In this study, a portable NIR spectrometer and chemometric techniques were combined to simultaneously identify organically produced pineapple fruits from conventionally produced ones (thus organic and inorganic) and also predict total soluble solids. A total of 90 intact pineapple fruits were scanned with the NIR spectrometer while a digital refractometer was used to measure TSS from extracted pineapple juice. After attempting several preprocessing techniques, multivariate calibration models were built using principal component analysis (PCA), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) to identify the classes (organic and conventional pineapple fruits) while partial least squares regression (PLSR) method was used to determine TSS of the fruits. Among the identification techniques, the MSC-PCA-LDA model accurately identified organic from conventionally produced fruits at 100% identification rate. For quantification of TSS, the MSC-PLSR model gave Rp = 0.851 and RMSEC = 0.950 °Brix, and Rc = 0.854 and RMSEP = 0.842 °Brix at 5 principal components in the calibration set and prediction set, respectively. The results generally indicated that portable NIR spectrometer coupled with the appropriate chemometric tools could be employed for rapid nondestructive examination of pineapple quality and also to detect pineapple fraud due to mislabeling of conventionally produced fruits as organic ones. This would be helpful to farmers, consumers, and quality control officers.

Simultaneous authentication of species identity and geographical origin of shrimps: Untargeted metabolomics to recurrent biomarker ions

Mandatory disclosure of the species identity, production method, and geographical origin are embedded in the regulations and traceability systems, governing international seafood trade. A high-resolution mass spectrometry-based metabolomics approach could simultaneously authenticate the species identity and geographical origin of commercially important shrimps. The highly innovative approach spared the need for multiple testing methods which are in routine use currently. A robust chemometric model, developed using the metabolite fingerprint dataset, could accurately predict the species identity of the shrimp samples. Subsequently, species-specific biomarkers were discovered and a tandem mass spectrometry method for authentication of the species was developed. Two other chemometric models from the metabolomics experiment accurately predicted the geographical origin of king prawns and tiger prawns. The study has shown for the first time that food-metabolomics along with chemometrics can simultaneously check for multiple seafood fraud issues in the global seafood supply-chain.

Specific authentication of Hippocampus based on SNP markers

Seahorses, which are used as traditional Chinese medicine, have large market demands and premium price. Because of overfishing, many seahorse species are endangered and listed in IUCN Red List. The purpose of this study was to develop a simple, rapid and reliable molecular method for specific authentication of seahorse species. Cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) sequences were analyzed for molecular authentication of seahorses in this study. Many single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) sites were detected among COI sequences of nine seahorse species. Based on the SNP sites, four pairs of modified specific primers were designed respectively for authentication of Hippocampus kuda, Hippocampus japonicus, Hippocampus trimaculatus and Hippocampus kelloggi using allele-specific PCR. Moreover, a multiplex allele-specific PCR for simultaneous authentication of H. kuda, H. japonicus and H. trimaculatus was also developed. The study showed that allele-specific PCR required no sequencing and electrophoresis, and the only necessity is to add fluorochrome into PCR products. Hence the whole authentication procedure only takes about 1.5 h. This work provides an effective method for rapid and reliable identification of seahorse species.