Single-factor Authentication Research Articles

Security analysis and provision of authentication protocol, based on peer-to-peer structure in IOT platform

The Internet of Things technology allows you to transfer data to any asset through communication networks such as the Internet or intranet. One of the most important problems is security, which includes confidentiality, authenticity validation, and completeness. Among security problems, the most important ones are ensuring authenticity and protecting privacy. The elliptic curve encryption algorithm is famous protocols for maintaining privacy and verifying authenticity. Despite the capabilities they have and provide good security against network attacks, they face challenges such as response time, delay in the authentication and authentication process, as well as the amount of memory consumed. Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a security process where users provide two different authentication factors to authenticate themselves. It also provides a higher level of security than authentication methods that rely on single-factor authentication (SFA). This article presents two novel methods for 2FA that use encryption techniques, scramble architecture, and chord architecture. These methods allow for the authentication process to be initiated by both parties involved in the communication. Three scenarios and three metrics of reaction time, memory usage, and connection latency were used to assess the efficacy of the suggested approach. The average reaction time is improved and is 0.012 s when the lengths of the finger table in the chord structure are increased to 10, 15, and 20. The findings show that the suggested approach reduces computing complexity, reaction time, and communication latency. It has an average reaction time of 0.016 s, an average memory use of 30,360 kb, and an average connection latency of 0.042 s.

Design and Implementation of USB Key System Based on Dual-Factor Identity Authentication Protocol

With the increasing demand for information security, traditional single-factor authentication technology can no longer meet security requirements. To this end, this paper proposes a Universal Serial Bus (USB) Key hardware and software system based on a two-factor authentication protocol, aiming to improve the security and reliability of authentication. This paper first analyzes the current status and technical principles of USB Key-related research domestically and internationally and designs a two-factor authentication protocol that combines impact/response authentication and static password authentication. The system consists of a host computer and a USB Key device. The host computer interacts with the USB Key through a graphical user interface. The Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) and MySQL database are used to implement the authentication function. Experimental results show that the designed two-factor authentication protocol can effectively prevent replay attacks and information tampering, and improve the security of authentication. If the corresponding USB Key is not inserted, the system will prompt that the device is not found. Once the USB Key is inserted, user identity is confirmed through two-factor verification, which includes impact/response authentication and static password authentication.

A Literature Review on Access Control in Networking Employing Blockchain

Access Control (AC) in networking attempts to make sure that only authorized devices perform actions formed upon privileges defined for them with a view to prevent malicious users' entry and interaction in the communication grid. Blockchain solutions contain an arrangement of related blocks that naturally safeguards the trustworthiness, defending the incontestability, defend masked-identity of its transactions/transfers due to scattered consensus strategies and cryptographic solutions. Our survey comprehensively reviews BC-formed AC in broad scope of networking considering AC techniques while breaking down into 4 propositions and assessing them in terms of blockchain roles, AC technique and approach, network elements, and rest. We stockpiled a primary sample of 79 bibliographic references by weeding out them for screening criteria sought from scientific information reservoirs exploiting a qualitative and extensive strategy. Formed upon this survey, in blockchain-formed AC, blockchain can be exploited as an AC manager to administrate network devices and access information, implement automatic AC by means of smart contracts, secure storage of AC related data to reinforce overall AC security, and for safe data exchanging in the operation of AC. Minute assessment highlights that from blockchain-formed AC, 52.5% provide AC using blockchain itself or using smart contracts, 92.5% exploit sequential blockchain, 35% exploit PBFT consensus, provide 100% fine-grained and host-formed AC, 85% decentralized AC, 87.5% have single-factor authentication, 92.5% provide dynamic AC, and 45% have opted for IoT. Finally, we evaluate the chances and difficulties of the principle of blockchain-formed AC and then giving recommended actions to beat them.

THREE LEVEL SECURITY AUTHENTICATION IN ONLINE BANKING

Authentication, security, and confidentiality are some of the most important topics of cyber security. There have been many solutions presented to users for strengthening the security of login password-based authentication methods. Primarily this has been through the use of two-factor authentication methods. Two-factor authentication is the combination of single factor authentication mechanisms. The growing popularity and acceptance of two-factor methods are driven by the increasing need for privacy and security in this technological age. The success and popularity of adapted security measures are largely dependent on their ease of implementation and convenience to the user. The focus of this research is to address and analyze the implications of using a three-factor authentication model for added security in websites and mobile apps. This paper will present an app we created which could provide a potential method for three-factor authentication that could potentially ensure added authentication assurances without loss of convenience.

Multi-biometric fusion for enhanced human authentication in information security

In the digital age, information security has taken on greater importance, necessitating the development of strong and trustworthy human authentication techniques. Traditional single-factor authentication schemes, such passwords or PINs, are prone to a number of security flaws. Multi-biometric fusion approaches have become a possible remedy to these restrictions. In comparison to other fusion techniques, feature level fusion is a very popular technique. Features are taken from every biometric attribute in this fusion. Then, the retrieved features are concatenated to create a high dimension final feature vector. In this study, we present a novel method for feature-level fusion employing optimal feature level fusion. The essential features are chosen and identified using a Binary chimp optimized adaptive kernel support vector machine (BCO-AKSVM). According to f1-score (99 %), recall (98 %), accuracy (97 %), precision (88 %), and time computation (1000 ms), the experimental results of the suggested method are analyzed. When compared to current methods, it can show that the proposed BCO-AKSVM achieves the highest performance of information security in human biometric authentication. Multi-biometric fusion is anticipated to play a significant role as technology develops in maintaining secure access control and safeguarding sensitive information in numerous sectors.

Citizens’ Data Protection in E-government System

E-government is the use of information and communication technology for public service provision in governance. Nowadays, E-government facilitates transparent, accountable, efficient and all-inclusive governing process for improved service delivery to citizens. However, the emergence of this novel innovation opened up new security vulnerabilities to citizens’ data. Comprehensive security plan for secure linkage of people, process and technology is crucial to ensure that data and network channel is protected from potential security threats. The purpose of this study is to provide a security model for protection of citizens’ data in E-government system. This paper propose information security stack, a data protection model for efficient data protection in E-government system. The information security stack comprised of citizens’ identification, authentication of identities, data confidentiality and data integrity in E-government system. First, this paper classified citizens’ identification into international, national and purposive identification. Second, acceptable form of identification for authentication of identities in E-government system depends on the security restriction imposed on the requested information. Consequently, user authentication is classified into single factor authentication, two-factor authentication and multifactor authentication depending on the use case in the E-government system. Third, data confidentiality implemented by data encryption is an information security goal for preserving the privacy of information in E-government system. The authors categorised data encryption in E-government into symmetric encryption and asymmetric encryption. Finally, ensuring the accuracy and completeness of citizens’ data is crucial for preserving data integrity in E-government system. This can be achieved by digital signature, an electronic version of handwritten signature.

Blockchain-Based Authentication Scheme with an Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication Strategy

Authentication is of paramount significance to cybersecurity. However, most of conventional authentication schemes are implemented in a centralized mode, in which potential problems that could arise include single-point failure, the exposure of personal information, and the risk of identity theft. Additionally, static single-factor authentication schemes are unsuitable for dynamic environments like mobile applications. In order to tackle these difficulties, we propose a blockchain-based authentication scheme with an adaptive multi-factor authentication strategy. Our scheme features a blockchain-based authentication framework that prevents unauthorized information alteration and system corruption. Additionally, we design an adaptive multi-factor authentication strategy model to ensure trustworthy multi-factor authentication in dynamic scenarios. Last, we construct a Raft-based consensus model to select an authoritative leading node for rapid authentication. The security analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in effectively countering various forms of cyberattacks targeted at authentication systems, and experiments demonstrate its superior effectiveness and efficiency compared to existing studies.

Development of Intelligent Door Lock System for Room Management Using Multi Factor Authentication

Keys play an important role in a security system. Most room door security systems still use conventional door locks, especially in room management applications. Room management with conventional keys has several problems, such as long key searches for each loan, and easily lost and duplicated. Therefore, the authors propose a door lock system that is capable of automating room door control and supervision via the internet network. Research that has been done previously uses single factor authentication (SFA). This technology is less secure for the authentication process for parties/users who want to access the room. This research proposes that a system with multi factor authentication (MFA) aims to protect the system from unauthorized users. The MFA concept will be implemented by validating the physical token on the RFID card and the security code or PIN entered by the user. MFA also increases the level of security and allows the implementation of identification, verification and authentication to ensure user authority. The results of this study are system prototypes that can work well, the system can be realized using backend services using expressjs and data stored in cloud services that can be accessed anytime and from anywhere by the client. The system can also be realized using a combination of nodejs, expressjs, PostgreSQL and esp32 client technologies. The validation process at check-in can occur within 207ms. The server is reliable enough to execute 500 requests simultaneously. Overall, the system has worked well for room management.

A Systematic Survey of Multi-Factor Authentication for Cloud Infrastructure

The unauthorized usage of various services and resources in cloud computing is something that must be protected against. Authentication and access control are the most significant concerns in cloud computing. Several researchers in this field suggest numerous approaches to enhance cloud authentication towards robustness. User names and associated passwords have been a common practice for long as Single Factor Authentication. However, advancements in the speed of computing and the usage of simple methods, starting from the Brute Force technique to the implementation of advanced and efficient crytographic algorithms, have posed several threats and vulnerabilities for authentication systems, leading to the degradation of their effectiveness. Multi-factor authentication has emerged as a robust means of securing the cloud using simultaneous and multiple means of authentication factors. This employs multiple levels of cascaded authentication checks. This paper covers an extensive and systematic survey of various factors towards their adoption and suitability for authentication for multi-factor authentication mechanisms. The inference drawn from the survey is in terms of arriving at a unique authentication factor that does not require any additional, specialized hardware or software for multi-factor authentication. Such authentication also uses the distinct biometric characteristics of the concerned user in the process. This arrangement augments the secured and robust user authentication process. The mechanism is also assessed as an effective means against impersonation attacks.

A smart privacy preserving framework for industrial IoT using hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) seeks more attention in attaining enormous opportunities in the field of Industry 4.0. But there exist severe challenges related to data privacy and security when processing the automatic and practical data collection and monitoring over industrial applications in IIoT. Traditional user authentication strategies in IIoT are affected by single factor authentication, which leads to poor adaptability along with the increasing users count and different user categories. For addressing such issue, this paper aims to implement the privacy preservation model in IIoT using the advancements of artificial intelligent techniques. The two major stages of the designed system are the sanitization and restoration of IIoT data. Data sanitization hides the sensitive information in IIoT for preventing it from leakage of information. Moreover, the designed sanitization procedure performs the optimal key generation by a new Grasshopper–Black Hole Optimization (G–BHO) algorithm. A multi-objective function involving the parameters like degree of modification, hiding rate, correlation coefficient between the actual data and restored data, and information preservation rate was derived and utilized for generating optimal key. The simulation result establishes the dominance of the proposed model over other state-of the-art models in terms of various performance metrics. In respect of privacy preservation, the proposed G–BHO algorithm has achieved 1%, 15.2%, 12.6%, and 1% enhanced result than JA, GWO, GOA, and BHO, respectively.

BAuth-ZKP-A Blockchain-Based Multi-Factor Authentication Mechanism for Securing Smart Cities.

The overwhelming popularity of technology-based solutions and innovations to address day-to-day processes has significantly contributed to the emergence of smart cities. where millions of interconnected devices and sensors generate and share huge volumes of data. The easy and high availability of rich personal and public data generated in these digitalized and automated ecosystems renders smart cities vulnerable to intrinsic and extrinsic security breaches. Today, with fast-developing technologies, the classical username and password approaches are no longer adequate to secure valuable data and information from cyberattacks. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) can provide an effective solution to minimize the security challenges associated with legacy single-factor authentication systems (both online and offline). This paper identifies and discusses the role and need of MFA for securing the smart city ecosystem. The paper begins by describing the notion of smart cities and the associated security threats and privacy issues. The paper further provides a detailed description of how MFA can be used for securing various smart city entities and services. A new concept of blockchain-based multi-factor authentication named "BAuth-ZKP" for securing smart city transactions is presented in the paper. The concept focuses on developing smart contracts between the participating entities within the smart city and performing the transactions with zero knowledge proof (ZKP)-based authentication in a secure and privacy-preserved manner. Finally, the future prospects, developments, and scope of using MFA in smart city ecosystem are discussed.

A sustainable Ethereum merge-based Big-Data gathering and dissemination in IIoT System

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has captured the attention of various smart farming industries in recent years by connecting physical objects of smart farms over the internet so that they can be discovered and queried globally using Enterprise Application Software (EAS). This continuous transmission and processing poses a significant challenge in dealing with the massive amount of Big-Data being gathered and disseminated. As more applications use cloud platforms to increase storage capacity by storing Big-Data on an untrusted cloud server, data security precautions should be taken. However, with the rapid increase in the number of IIoT devices and EAS end-users and their diverse categories, the existing device authentication mechanisms in IIoT suffer from single factor authentication and poor adaptability. In light of the security requirements in IIoT Big-Data sharing using untrusted cloud servers, we present in this paper a sustainable Ethereum merge-based Big-Data gathering and dissemination in IIoT system. Extensive theoretical and simulation results validate data gathering with a business incentive mechanism with a proper data propagation threshold is an important parameter for determining equilibrium and analysing dynamic properties of IIoT system, which directly affects data processing speed and its final state. The Ethereum merge mechanism controls data dissemination instances in both the industry and EAS through classification and integrity verification using distributed authentication devices. Proof-of-stake is used for this purpose, which uses randomly selected validators to confirm transactions and add new ledgers to consortium blockchains to transfer data using partial secrets, making it fast, secure, and sustainable. Our proposed scheme outperforms other state-of-the-art schemes in simulation over Hyperledger Fabric with improved security measures.

SF-LAP: Secure M2M Communication in IIoT with a Single-Factor Lightweight Authentication Protocol

Machine-to-machine communication allows smart devices like sensors, actuators, networks, gateways, and other controllers to communicate with one another. The industrial Internet of things (IIoT) has become a vital component. Many industrial devices are connected to perform a task automatically in machine-to-machine communication, but they are not properly secured, allowing an adversary to compromise them against a variety of attacks due to communication system vulnerabilities. Recently, a secure lightweight authentication protocol (SLAP) was proposed by Panda et al. They asserted that every known attack that could happen in the IIoT is deterred by their suggested protocol. In this study, we prove that the SLAP protocol is vulnerable to desynchronization, impersonation, replay, and eavesdropping attacks. To prevent these attacks and enhance that protocol, we need to implement a secure authentication mechanism that ensures the security of communication. This paper proposed a secure M2M Communication in IIoT with a single-factor lightweight authentication protocol (SF-LAP). Single-factor authentication is a simple and secure way to communicate. It uses less power and communication overhead while providing a secure mechanism for conversation. In the machine-to-machine (M2M) scenario, the proposed protocol uses an exclusive-OR operation and a hashing function to ensure secure communication between the sensor and the controller. The proposed mechanism uses a secure preshared key and timestamp technique to protect and safeguard this connection against desynchronization attacks and eavesdropping attacks. We used Burrows Abadi Needham (BAN) Gong, Needham, and Yahalom (GNY) logic, and the automated validation of Internet security protocols applications (AVISPA) tool for formal verification and perform a security analysis as an informal verification to make sure the suggested protocol is secure. Analysis that shows the SF-LAP consumes the least computing and communication overhead and is more secure because it prevents desynchronization and eavesdropping attacks to all of the known attacks that are modification attacks, tracing attacks, impersonation, man-in-the-middle, and replay attacks.

A Study on Three Step Multifactor Authentication System for Modern Security

Abstract: This survey paper reviews all the major factors in validating three-level passwords such as one-factor authentication using passwords and two-factor authentication is not enough to provide better security to the modern digital age with remarkable advances in the field of information technology. Even when single-factor or two-factor authentication was used to secure remote access and the system, hacking tools, were simple computer programs for collecting private keys, as well as private generators have made it difficult to provide security. Security threats based on malware, such as important installed trackers, are always available to improve security risks. This is necessary the use of a safe and easy-to-use object. As a result, Three Level Security is an easy-to-use software. It also proves the use of different techniques used by different authors. Keywords: Three-level authentication, network, security, remote access, two-factor authentication

Age and Gender Impact on Password Hygiene

Password hygiene plays an essential part in securing systems protected with single-factor authentication. A significant fraction of security incidents happen due to weak or reused passwords. The reasons behind differences in security vulnerable behaviour between various user groups remains an active research topic. The paper aims to identify the impact of age and gender on password strength using a large password dataset. We recovered previously hashed passwords of 102,120 users from a leaked customer database of a car-sharing company. Although the measured effect size was small, males significantly had stronger passwords than females for all age groups. Males aged 26–45 were also significantly different from all other groups, and password complexity decreased with age for both genders equally. Overall, very weak password hygiene was observed, 72% of users based their password on a word or used a simple sequence of digits, and passwords of over 39% of users were found in word lists of previous leaks.

Smart Home Multi-Factor Authentication Using Face Recognition and One-Time Password on Smartphone

Recently, the adoption of smart home technology has been on the rise and becoming a trend for home residents. The development of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology drives the smart home authentication system with biometric systems such as facial recognition, fingerprint, and voice control techniques. In the context of homeowners, security is always the primary concern. However, conventional home security and the existing smart home security system have some limitations. These techniques use single-factor authentication, which provides limited protection for home security. Therefore, this project proposed a design for smart home multi-factor authentication using facial recognition and a one-time password sent to smartphones for a home security system. Rapid application development was the methodology for conducting this study. A usability evaluation suggested that the proposed smart home multi-factor authentication is acceptable, but some usability issues can be improved in the future.

An Efficient and Provable Multifactor Mutual Authentication Protocol for Multigateway Wireless Sensor Networks

As the most popular way of communication technology at the moment, wireless sensor networks have been widely concerned by academia and industry and plays an important role in military, agriculture, medicine, and other fields. Identity authentication offers the first line of defence to ensure the security communication of wireless sensor networks. Since the sensor nodes are resource-limited in the wireless networks, how to design an efficient and secure protocol is extremely significant. The current authentication protocols have the problem that the sensor nodes need to execute heavy calculation and communication consumption during the authentication process and cannot resist node capture attack, and the protocols also cannot provide perfect forward and backward security and cannot resist replay attack. Multifactor identity authentication protocols can provide a higher rank of security than single-factor and two-factor identity authentication protocols. The multigateway wireless sensor networks’ structure can provide a larger communication coverage area than the single-gateway network structure, so it has become the focus of recent studies. Therefore, we design a novel multifactor authentication protocol for multigateway wireless sensor networks, which only apply the lightweight hash function and are given biometric information to achieve a higher level of security and efficiency and a larger communication coverage area. We separately apply BAN logic, random oracle model, and AVISPA tool to validate the security of our authentication protocol in Case 1 and Case 2. We put forward sixteen evaluation criteria to comprehensively evaluate our authentication protocol. Compared with the related authentication protocols, our authentication protocol is able to achieve higher security and efficiency.

ICAS: Two-factor identity-concealed authentication scheme for remote-servers

As the number of users in remote server environments is more prevalent (i.e., in e-payment, e-healthcare), a secure authentication scheme becomes increasingly important for this paradigm. In general, single-factor authentication in remote-systems suffers from several security issues, whereas multi-factor authentication can be considered as an alternative solution where additional factors increase the security level. However, in existing multi-factor authentication schemes, leakage of randomness and identity-concealment are not well considered; these can cause privacy issues in some application scenarios. In this paper, we propose a two-factor-based identity-concealed authentication scheme refer to as ICAS. ICAS ensures secure authentication between the user and remote server even if some intermediate randomness (e.g., Diffie-Hellman exponent) has been exposed to an adversary, prevents users’ identity against adversaries, can resist perpetual leakage of confidential information, and provide a strong security guarantee against device lost attacks. We define a proper security model in the random oracle and prove the security of ICAS under the model. We provide a comprehensive performance evaluation, which shows that ICAS is efficient. Specifically, the proposed scheme reduces the total computation cost by at least 24% and reduces the user’s communication cost by at least 4%; thereby, ICAS is feasible to deploy in the practical environment.

Enabling Secure Authentication in Industrial IoT With Transfer Learning Empowered Blockchain

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is ushering in huge development opportunities in the era of Industry 4.0. However, there are significant data security and privacy challenges during automatic and real-time data collection, monitoring for industrial applications in IIoT. Data security and privacy in IIoT applications are closely related to the reliability of users, which is determined by user authentication that have been widely used as an effective approach. However, the existing user authentication mechanisms in IIoT suffer from single factor authentication and poor adaptability with the rapid growth of the number of users and the diversity of user categories. To solve the aforementioned issues, this article proposes a novel Authentication mechanism based on Transfer Learning empowered Blockchain, coined ATLB. In ATLB, blockchains are applied to achieve the privacy preservation for industrial applications. In addition, by introducing the transfer learning based authentication mechanism, trustworthy blockchains are built such that the privacy preservation for industrial applications is further enhanced. Specifically, ATLB first employs a guiding deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm to train the user authentication model of a specific region, which is then transferred locally for foreign user authentication or cross-regionally for another region's user authentication such that the model training time is significantly reduced. Experimental results show that the proposed ATLB not only provides accurate authentications for IIoT applications but also achieves high throughput and low latency.

Practical Threshold Multi-Factor Authentication

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) has been widely used to safeguard high-value assets. Unlike single-factor authentication (e.g., password-only login), $t$ -factor authentication ( $t$ FA) requires a user always to carry and present $t$ specified factors so as to strengthen the security of login. Nevertheless, this may restrict user experience in limiting the flexibility of factor usage, e.g., the user may prefer to choose any factors at hand for login authentication. To bring back usability and flexibility without loss of security, we introduce a new notion of authentication, called $(t,n)$ threshold MFA , that allows a user to actively choose $t$ factors out of $n$ based on preference. We further define the “most-rigorous” multi-factor security model for the new notion, allowing attackers to control public channels, launch active/passive attacks, and compromise/corrupt any subset of parties as well as factors. We state that the model can capture the most practical security needs in the literature. We design a threshold MFA key exchange (T-MFAKE) protocol built on the top of a threshold oblivious pseudorandom function and an authenticated key exchange protocol. Our protocol achieves the “highest-attainable” security against all attacking attempts in the context of parties/factors being compromised/corrupted. As for efficiency, our design only requires $4+t$ exponentiations, 2 multi-exponentiations and $\mathbf {2}$ communication rounds. Compared with existing $t$ FA schemes, even the degenerated $(t,t)$ version of our protocol achieves the strongest security (stronger than most schemes) and higher efficiency on computational and communication. We instantiate our design on real-world platform to highlight its practicability and efficiency.