Digital Certificates Research Articles

An exploration of public key infrastructure applications across diverse domains: a comparative analysis

This article delves into the vital role of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) in securing and authenticating communications across a multitude of fields. PKI has evolved from a mere technical concept into a cornerstone of secure digital communications, playing a central role in various domains such as web security, healthcare, finance, the Internet of Things (IoT), and government services. PKI employs cryptographic techniques and digital certificates to establish trust, ensure data integrity, and enable secure communications, thus acting as the backbone of digital security. In the wake of the digital revolution, the demand for reliable and robust security solutions has skyrocketed. The diversity and scale of modern digital platforms necessitate adaptable security solutions, a challenge which PKI tackles through its flexible implementation. Despite sharing core principles, the implementation of PKI demonstrates divergences influenced by factors such as scale, complexity, resource constraints, regulatory environments, and trust models. This article offers an extensive comparison of PKI's utilization across various domains, highlighting the commonalities and divergences. It explores how PKI is tailored to meet the unique requirements and challenges of each sector and discusses the certificate lifecycle management in varying contexts. Moreover, it provides an analysis of the current state of PKI applications and challenges, offering insights into the evolving landscape of threats and technologies. Not only does the article address the current state of PKI, but it also presents a forward-looking perspective on its potential future developments. As the digital landscape continues to evolve and expand, it is crucial to anticipate the emerging challenges and devise strategies for proactive adaptation. This article thus serves as a comprehensive resource for understanding the role and impact of PKI in the contemporary digital infrastructure. Ultimately, the article seeks to underline the importance of PKI and highlight the need for continued research and development in this area. As our reliance on digital communications and transactions continues to grow, the role of PKI in safeguarding these interactions becomes increasingly significant. This comprehensive review serves as a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in understanding the diverse applications of PKI and its critical role in securing the digital world.

Digital media system design and visual art analysis based on information security

BackgroundWith the growing maturity of Internet technology and 5G transmission technology, digital media systems begin to present more complex scenario applications. Software design security issues are also increasingly evident in digital media systems. This paper analyzes the security issues of digital media system design from the perspective of software protection security. Discussed based on the information security digital media system design and visual art analysis. MethodsThis paper discusses based on the software security protection design and visual art analysis, first proposed the media convergence and information security risk assessment research, including media convergence cognition, information security risk management theory, system information security risk assessment methods and based on the media under the digital certificate. Secondly, the information security algorithm based on digital media technology is studied. From the basic knowledge of digital image, a method of image encryption based on the change of pixel value, the common algorithm of digital image watermarking technology and the encryption technology of digital media are summarized. ResultsExperiments were carried out on three art painting data sets, including Painting91, Oil Painting and Pandora. Compared with the existing label distribution learning methods on the Painting91style dataset, the algorithms SA-IIS and SA-BFGS achieve the classification accuracy of 65.51 % and 66.52 %, respectively. The classification result of the baseline method of VGGNet is 63.89 % on the OilPainting dataset. On the Pandora-style dataset, the classification accuracy of MSCNN1 method is 71.32 %, and the experimental results of CNNF4 method reach 71.76 %. ConclusionThe method proposed in this paper has good application results in different data sets, and the digital media art design system has high reliability and fault tolerance. From the perspective of information security, different index systems have higher security levels.

Nearly zero energy building design and optimization: A residential building transformation in Türkiye

In this study, the energy performance analysis of a representative residential building located in Izmir, Turkey, was carried out, utilizing the DesignBuilder energy simulation program. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems are modeled as detailed in Design Builder in order to consider parameters such as thermal properties of materials, duct layout and airflow dynamics of the system in detail in the analysis. The technical and economic analysis of transforming the building into a nearly zero energy building (NZEB) was performed for eight different retrofit scenarios, including passive and active energy efficiency measures. The most effective scenario, Scenario 8 (S8), reduced the building's annual net primary energy consumption by 96.08% to 7.45 kWh/m²/year. S8's annual CO2 emissions decreased by 100.07% compared with the reference scenario, resulting in −0.042 kg CO2/m²/year. The overall energy performance class of the building was determined using Turkey's national calculation program for the preparation of the energy identity certificate. The energy performance class of the reference building was determined as D, and the class of the building designed according to S8 as A. Investment evaluations were carried out for the retrofit scenarios, revealing that the investment cost for S8, having the lowest net primary energy consumption, amounted to USD 17,565.87. This finding establishes S8 as a more financially viable option in the short term. This study demonstrates the potential of NZEBs in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and achieving sustainable development goals.

IDENTIFICATION OF PHISHING URLS AND WEBSITES USING ML

The internet has become an essential part of our lives. The rise of the internet also opens opportunities to various scams and malicious activities like phishing. Phishing attacks are the practice of sending fraudulent communications that appear to come from a reputable source. Phishers try to deceive their victims by social engineering and creating mockup websites to steal information such as account ID, username, password from individuals and organizations. The identification process encompasses various techniques, including scrutinizing URLs for misspellings, inspecting SSL certificates for secure connections, analyzing website design and content quality, and avoiding unsolicited emails or pop-up windows requesting personal data. Many methods have been proposed to detect phishing websites and URLS yet the phishers have evolved their methodology and have managed to escape from these detection methods. One of the most successful methods for detecting these malicious activities is Machine Learning. This is because most Phishing attacks have some common characteristics which can be identified by machine learning methods. These systems exhibit the capability to adapt to emerging phishing tactics and work efficiently. The proposed approach employs various comparative analyses to select the most efficient algorithm. The anticipated outcome is an effective and adaptable ML-based phishing URL detection system, contributing to the ongoing efforts in safeguarding users from cyber threats. Keywords: Phishing, Cybersquatting, Typosquatting, Gradient boosting algorithm, random forest classifier, CatBoost classifier

Service for Verification of Electronic Document’s Certificates

The legislation of the Republic of Belarus currently establishes the same legal force for identical documents on paper and in electronic form, which have a mandatory requisite - an electronic digital signature. The article considers the system for managing public keys of electronic digital signature in the Republic of Belarus, as well as the concepts and definitions associated with this system. The technical normative legal acts in the field of cryptographic protection of electronic documents are analyzed. The necessity of verification of certificates of public keys of electronic digital signature is substantiated. Possible variants of the procedure for verifying public key certificates are described, their advantages and disadvantages are shown. An online service for checking public key certificates has been developed using open cryptographic libraries and public tools.

Holistic Human-Serving Digitization of Health Care Needs Integrated Automated System-Level Assessment Tools.

Digital health tools, platforms, and artificial intelligence- or machine learning-based clinical decision support systems are increasingly part of health delivery approaches, with an ever-greater degree of system interaction. Critical to the successful deployment of these tools is their functional integration into existing clinical routines and workflows. This depends on system interoperability and on intuitive and safe user interface design. The importance of minimizing emergent workflow stress through human factors research and purposeful design for integration cannot be overstated. Usability of tools in practice is as important as algorithm quality. Regulatory and health technology assessment frameworks recognize the importance of these factors to a certain extent, but their focus remains mainly on the individual product rather than on emergent system and workflow effects. The measurement of performance and user experience has so far been performed in ad hoc, nonstandardized ways by individual actors using their own evaluation approaches. We propose that a standard framework for system-level and holistic evaluation could be built into interacting digital systems to enable systematic and standardized system-wide, multiproduct, postmarket surveillance and technology assessment. Such a system could be made available to developers through regulatory or assessment bodies as an application programming interface and could be a requirement for digital tool certification, just as interoperability is. This would enable health systems and tool developers to collect system-level data directly from real device use cases, enabling the controlled and safe delivery of systematic quality assessment or improvement studies suitable for the complexity and interconnectedness of clinical workflows using developing digital health technologies.

Spoofing Against Spoofing: Toward Caller ID Verification in Heterogeneous Telecommunication Systems

Caller ID spoofing is a global industry problem and often acts as a critical enabler for telephone fraud. To address this problem, the Federal Communications Commission has mandated telecom providers in the U.S. to implement STIR/SHAKEN, an industry-driven solution based on digital signatures. STIR/SHAKEN relies on a public key infrastructure (PKI) to manage digital certificates, but scaling up this PKI for the global telecom industry is extremely difficult, if not impossible. Furthermore, it only works with IP-based systems (e.g., SIP), leaving the traditional non-IP systems (e.g., SS7) unprotected. So far the alternatives to the STIR/SHAKEN have not been sufficiently studied. In this article, we propose a PKI-free solution, called Caller ID Verification (CIV). CIV authenticates the caller ID based on a challenge-response process instead of digital signatures, hence requiring no PKI. It supports both IP and non-IP systems. Perhaps counter-intuitively, we show that number spoofing can be leveraged, in conjunction with Dual-tone Multi-frequency, to efficiently implement the challenge-response process, i.e., using spoofing to fight against spoofing. We implement CIV for Voice over Internet Protocol, cellular, and landline phones across heterogeneous networks (SS7/SIP) by only updating the software on the user’s phone. This is the first caller ID authentication solution with working prototypes for all three types of telephone systems in the current telecom architecture. Finally, we show how the implementation of CIV can be optimized by integrating it into telecom clouds as a service, which users may subscribe to.

Malware Cyber Threat Intelligence System for Internet of Things (IoT) Using Machine Learning

Cyber Intelligence (CI) is a sophisticated security solution that uses machine learning models to protect networks against cyber-attack. Security concerns to IoT devices are exacerbated because of their inherent weaknesses in memory systems, physical and online interfaces, and network services. IoT devices are vulnerable to attacks because of the communication channels. That raises the risk of spoofing and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks on the entire system, which is a severe problem. Since the IoT ecosystem does not have encryption and access restrictions, cloud-based communications and data storage have become increasingly popular. An IoT-based Cyber Threat Intelligence System (IoT-CTIS) is designed in this article to detect malware and security threads using a machine learning algorithm. Because hackers are continuously attempting to get their hands on sensitive information, it is important that IoT devices have strong authentication measures in place. Multifactor authentication, digital certificates, and biometrics are just some of the methods that may be used to verify the identity of an Internet of Things device. All devices use Machine Learning (ML) assisted Logistic Regression (LR) techniques to address memory and Internet interface vulnerabilities. System integrity concerns, such as spoofing and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, must be minimized using the Random Forest (RF) Algorithm. Default passwords are often provided with IoT devices, and many users don’t bother to change them, making it simple for cybercriminals to get access. In other instances, people design insecure passwords that are easy to crack. The results of the experiments show that the method outperforms other similar strategies in terms of identification and wrong alarms. Checking your alarm system’s functionality both locally and in terms of its connection to the monitoring centre is why you do it. Make sure your alarm system is working properly by checking it on a regular basis. It is recommended that you do system tests at least once every three months. The experimental analysis of IoT-CTIS outperforms the method in terms of accuracy (90%), precision (90%), F-measure (88%), Re-call (90%), RMSE (15%), MSE (5%), TPR (89%), TNR (8%), FRP (89%), FNR (8%), Security (93%), MCC (92%).

Problems and Legal Protection of Art Works in Non-Fungible Token (NTF) Practices

This article analyzes the Non-Fungible Token, abbreviated NFT, which is a digital certificate that can be used to verify who owns certain assets in the world of crypto art, where this certificate represents ownership of authentic works of art. Non-Fungible Token (NFT) as a digital asset as well as several legal issues that arise related to NFTs, especially in the field of intellectual property law including copyright protection and legal construction of copyright ownership of NFTs. This study uses a normative legal research method with a statutory approach. This study aims to find out how the legal problems in the practice of intellectual property development commercialization of non-fungible tokens (NFT) and how to protect works of art in the form of Indonesian non-fungible tokens (NFT). The results of this study indicate that although in Indonesia there are no specific regulations that explicitly regulate Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), the rights of creators of works are generally protected by Law Number 28 of 2014 concerning Copyright, but from an intellectual point of view property development, NFT presents the potential for the development and commercialization of works through digital media that has a wide reach and provides more optimal monetization opportunities.

Blockchain and Smart Contract System for Digital Certificate

Abstract: An millions of students Graduates per year. A student generates lots of certificates during their education. For further studies or Apply for job at any company requires these certificates. So sometimes student need these certificate on urgent basis. But according to university guidelines generating certificate process takes time. This problem is solved by Digital Certificate System. While recruiting employees in company, company needs to verify their certificate because issue of fake certificate is very common in India. Anyone can get fake certificate very easily. Many companies spend large amount of money on verifying this certificate. To overcome these problem Blockchain technology is used. Blockchain is decentralized distributed ledger. Blockchain is immutable in which no one can easily modify the data.

XAutn: Blockchain-based cross domain authentication for digital certificates in the education sector

Traditional testimony and electronic endorsements are extremely challenging to uphold and defend, and there is a problem with challenging authentication. The identity of the student is typically not recognized when it comes to requirements for access to a student’s academic credentials that are scattered over numerous sites. This is an issue with cross-domain authentication methods. On the one hand, whenever the volume of cross-domain authentication requests increases dramatically, the response time can become intolerable because of the slow throughput associated with blockchain mechanisms. These systems still do not give enough thought to the cross-domain scenario’s anonymity problem. This research proposes an effective cross-domain authentication mechanism called XAutn that protects anonymity and integrates seamlessly through the present Certificate Transparency (CT) schemes. XAutn protects privacy and develops a fast response correctness evaluation method that is based on the RSA (Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman) cryptographic accumulator, Zero Knowledge Proof Algorithm, and Proof of Continuous work consensus Algorithm (POCW). We also provide a privacy-aware computation authentication approach to strengthen the integrity of the authentication messages more securely and counteract the discriminatory analysis of malevolent requests. This research is primarily used to validate identities in a blockchain network, which makes it possible to guarantee their authenticity and integrity while also increasing security and privacy. The proposed technique greatly outperformed the current methods in terms of authentication time, period required for storage, space for storage, and overall processing cost. The proposed method exhibits a speed gain of authentication of roughly 9% when compared to traditional blockchain systems. The security investigation and results from experiments demonstrate how the proposed approach is more reliable and trustworthy.

Exploratory Analysis of the E-government E-skills of Serbian Citizens and Their Ability to Use E-government Services with Special Emphasis on the Regional Differences

The topic of the e-government e-skills of Serbian citizens has been largely unexplored. Thus, the study aims to explore the citizens' current level of e-government e-skills competencies. The data were collected from 2,894 citizens through a paper survey and analyzed using ANOVA and EFA. The empirical results suggest that there are significant differences between the regions, with the citizens of the Belgrade region being significantly more proficient than citizens in other regions of Serbia in all areas except digital certificate skills. The empirical results also suggest that women are more proficient than men, that the 65+ age group’s digital skills are completely inadequate, and that education level is a key factor.

CERTI-BLOCK A Blockchain Technology Based Certificate Validation System

Abstract: In recent years, blockchain technology has made significant strides, offering promising opportunities to revolutionize the education sector. This innovation can create innovative and cost-effective learning pathways while redefining the relationships between educators and students. One of its most transformative aspects is the creation of immutable digital certificates, which could overcome the limitations of current certificate verification systems by providing speed, reliability, and independence from central authorities. Despite its potential, the application of blockchain in education is still in its infancy, and this paper aims to shed light on this emerging field

Fischer machine learning for mobile cloud computing in eHealth systems using blockchain mechanism

The Electronic Healthcare (eHealth) systems are competent to ensure effective care engineering and intensified healthcare quality which are user-friendly cache and administration, in Electronic Health Records (EHRs). For secure EHRs of Mobile Cloud-based eHealth systems, ensuring high security and data privacy, Interplanetary File System in healthcare has traditionally been concentrated. However, there has been a recent push towards achieving high quality of e-health services because blockchain-based health care applications require QoS guarantees in terms of requirements such as network latency and end-to-end delay. In this work, an Extended Validation Certification-based Fischer Neural Network Optimization (EVC-FNNO) method for secured Mobile Cloud-based E-Health Systems is proposed. With the identity being the digital certificate, the EVC is provided with the identity to the mobile cloud user who will transact in the network. In this way, the mobile cloud user is being ensured to access the ledger for the transaction. Therefore, both data privacy and security is said to be provided. Next, with Fischer Neural Network Optimization (FNNO), every authenticated mobile cloud user via EVC then possess a copy of shared ledger, therefore resolving data acquisition in cloud server and hence solving network latency. The proposed method is verified by some demonstrative examples in addressing QoS. The empirical results show that the EVC-FNNO method provides an efficient solution by validating the mobile cloud user sensitive health information with digital certificate. Security analysis proves that the EVC-FNNO method is secure. We also conduct comprehensive performance evaluations that demonstrate the high efficiency of the EVC-FNNO method in terms of end-to-end delay, network latency and data privacy, compared to the existing data sharing methods.

Blockchain-based privacy and security model for transactional data in large private networks

Cyberphysical systems connect physical devices and large private network environments in modern communication systems. A fundamental worry in the establishment of large private networks is mitigating the danger of transactional data privacy breaches caused by adversaries using a variety of exploitation techniques. This study presents a privacy-preserving architecture for ensuring the privacy and security of transaction data in large private networks. The proposed model employs digital certificates, RSA-based public key infrastructure, and the blockchain to address user transactional data privacy concerns. The model also guarantees that data in transit remains secure and unaltered and that its provenance remains authentic and secure during node-to-node interactions within a large private network. The proposed model has increased the encryption speed by about 17 times, while the decryption process is expedited by 4 times. Therefore, the average overall acceleration obtained was 16.5. Both the findings of the security analysis and the performance analysis demonstrate that the proposed model can safeguard transactional data during communications on large private networks more effectively and securely than the existing solutions.

Lagrangian Recurrent Steganalysis and Hyper Elliptic Certificateless Signcryption for Secure Image Transmission

Present-day evolution in communication and information technology dispenses straightforward and effortless access to data, but the most noteworthy condition is the formation of secure communication. Numerous approaches were designed for safety communication. One of the crucial approaches is image steganography. Moreover, provisioning of information security services is arrived at via cryptosystems where cryptosystems make certain the secure messages transmission between the users in an untrustworthy circumstance. The conventional method of providing encryption and signature is said to be first signing and then encryption, but both the computation and communication costs are found to be high. A certificateless signcryption mechanism is designed to transfer the medical data or images securely. This mechanism will minimize the storage and verification costs of public key certificates. The author of this article proposes a method named Lagrangian recurrent Steganalysis and Hyper Elliptic Certificateless Signcryption for transferring the medical data or images securely. In two sections the LRS-HECS method is split. They are medical image steganalysis and certificateless signcryption. First with the Chest X-Ray images obtained as input, a Codeword Correlated Lagrangian Recurrent Neural Network-based image steganography model is applied to generate steg images. Second, to transfer the medical images securely the steg images provided as input is designed a model named a Hyper Elliptic Curve-based Certificateless Signcryption. The issue of providing the integrity and validity of the transmitted medical images and receiver anonymity is addressed by the application of Hyper Elliptic Curve. Chest X-Ray pictures were used in experimental simulations, and the findings showed that the LRS-HECS approach had more advantages over existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of higher peak signal to noise ratio with data integrity and with reduced encryption time and transmission cost.

Preferences for public engagement in decision-making regarding four COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions in the Netherlands: A survey study.

Worldwide, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were implemented during the COVID-19 crisis, which heavily impacted the daily lives of citizens. This study considers public perspectives on whether and how public engagement (PE) can contribute to future decision-making about NPIs. An online survey was conducted among a representative sample of the public in the Netherlands from 27 October to 9 November 2021. Perceptions and preferences about PE in decision-making on NPIs to control COVID-19 were collected. Preferences regarding four NPIs were studied: Nightly curfew (NC); Digital Covid Certificate (DCC); Closure of elementary schools and daycares (CED); and physical distancing (1.5M). Engagement was surveyed based on the five participation modes of the IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation, namely inform, consult, advice, collaborate and empower. Of the 4981 respondents, 25% expressed a desire to engage in decision-making, as they thought engagement could improve their understanding and the quality of NPIs, as well as increase their trust in the government. Especially for the NPIs DCC and NC, respondents found it valuable to engage and provide their perspective on trade-offs in values (e.g. opening up society versus division in society by vaccination status). Respondents agreed that the main responsibility in decision-making should stay with experts and policy-makers. 50% of respondents did not want to engage, as they felt no need to engage or considered themselves insufficiently knowledgeable. Inform was deemed the most preferred mode of engagement, and empower the least preferred mode of engagement. We reveal large variations in public preferences regarding engagement in NPI decision-making. With 25% of respondents expressing an explicit desire to engage, and considering the benefit of PE in other areas of (public) health, opportunities for PE in NPI decision-making might have been overlooked during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results provide guidance into when and how to execute PE in future outbreaks.

Privacy-Preserving Solution for European Union Digital Vaccine Certificates

The recent COVID-19 pandemic situation highlights the importance of digital vaccine certificates. In response, the European Union (EU) developed EU Digital Vaccine Certificates to enable proof of non-infectivity and completed vaccinations. However, these solutions suffer from several shortcomings, such as ineffective certificate holder identification and a high violation of user privacy with the disclosure of sensitive information. In this work, we present a novel solution for privacy-preserving EU Digital Vaccine Certificates. Our solution solves the aforementioned privacy and security shortcomings and is in line with current EU legislation, i.e., the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the upcoming revision of the electronic IDentification, Authentication, and trust Services (eIDAS), called regulation eIDAS 2.0, and the new tools that it envisages to be led by European digital identity. This identity is intended to allow citizens to prove their identity to access online services, share digital documents, or simply prove specific personal characteristics such as age without revealing their identity or other personal information. The core of our proposal is built on our novel attribute-based credential scheme, which can be easily implemented on various handheld devices, especially on Android smartphones and smartwatches. However, due to the lightweight nature of our scheme, it can also be implemented on constrained devices such as smart cards. In order to demonstrate the security, privacy, and practicality inherent in our proposal, we provide the security analysis of the cryptographic core along with a set of experimental results conducted on smartphones and smart cards.

Audit Team Communication and Risk in Trustworthy Digital Repository Certification

ABSTRACTThis paper aims to investigate the Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC) process by examining the communication practices and risk communication dynamics among auditors during the audit. Through an in‐depth, qualitative analysis of the audit process and the interactions between auditors, this paper provides valuable insights into the importance of diverse backgrounds, effective communication, and consensus building in the assessment of TRAC checklist requirements. Furthermore, the paper highlights potential areas of improvement within the audit process, addressing concerns related to disagreements, reliance on leadership, and the comprehensiveness of risk identification and communication.

Privacy-Preserving Outsourced Certificate Validation

Digital Covid certificates are the first widely deployed end-user cryptographic certificates. For service providers, such as airlines or event ticket vendors, that needed to check that their (global) customers satisfy certain health policies, the verification of such Covid certificates was challenging though - not because of the cryptography involved, but due to the multitude of issuers, different certificate types and the evolving nature of country-specific policies that had to be supported. As Covid certificates contain sensitive health information, their (online) presentation to non-health related entities also poses clear privacy risk. To address both challenges, the EU proposed a specification for outsourcing the verification process to a validator service, that executes the process and informs service providers of the result. The WHO announced to adapt this approach for general vaccination credentials beyond Covid-19. While being beneficial to improve security and privacy for service providers, their solution requires strong trust assumption for the (central) validation service that learns all health-related details of the users. In our work, we propose and formally model a privacy-preserving variant of such an outsourced validation service. Therein the validator learns the attributes it is supposed to verify, but not the users identity. Still, the validator’s assertion is blindly bound to the user’s identity to ensure the desired user-binding. We analyze the EU specification in our model and show that it only meets a subset of those goals. Our analysis further shows that the EU protocol is unnecessarily complex and can be significantly simplified while maintaining the same (weak) level of security. Finally, we propose a new construction for privacy-preserving certificate validation that provably satisfies all desired goals.