Symmetric Hash Research Articles

An Improved Authentication Scheme for Digital Rights Management System

With the increasing number and popularity of digital content, the management of digital access rights has become an utmost important field. Through digital rights management systems (DRM-S), access to digital contents can be defined and for this, an efficient and secure authentication scheme is required. The DRM authentication schemes can be used to give access or restrict access to digital content. Very recently in 2020, Yu et al. proposed a symmetric hash and xor-based DRM and termed their system to achieve both security and performance efficiency. Contrarily, in this study, we argue that their scheme has several issues including nonresistance to privileged insider and impersonation attacks. Moreover, it is also to show in this study that their scheme has an incorrect authentication phase and due to this incorrectness, the scheme of Yu et al. lacks user scalability. An improved scheme is then proposed to counter the insecurities and incorrectness of the scheme of Yu et al. We prove the security of the proposed scheme using BAN logic. For a clear picture of the security properties, we also provide a textual discussion on the robustness of the proposed scheme. Moreover, due to the usage of symmetric key-based hash functions, the proposed scheme has a comparable performance efficiency.

MD5( ) Bypassing Through SQL Injection

Web-based application attacks are growing dramatically in number and severity. They found that web applications that are poorly validated and verified are susceptible to attacks by the attacker. network related SQL attacks. The MD5 (message digest algorithm) hashing method is a one-way cryptographic function that accepts any text field as input and produces a fixed-length digest value that may be used to identify the original message as output. Most security experts advise replacing the MD hash algorithm with a much more secure message digest. ”Because of these collisions, a hacker or malicious user may construct files with almost the same exact hash as another, making it difficult to be certain that the file has not been interfered with. As a result, it should not be utilised for anything. Developers should instead use a Solid Cryptographic Hash function or a Symmetric Cryptographic Algorithm. this research paper demonstrates how md5 function in php can be bypassed when its parameter is set to ”TRUE” ie.,[ md5( ’x’, TRUE)], this makes the hashing value(x) to be raw bytes than hexa-coded value which is much more easier to inject a SQL Statement and retrieve the original String. The above is demonstrated using SQL Fiddle in which a sample php code value fields are hashed and when its md5() is set to TRUE ,how SQLI bypasses md5().The best approach for solving above problem is to use symmetric hash function like Sha1() , sha2(),CRC which does multiple layer of hashing and when using md5() not to set its parameter to” TRUE”.

Correcting “PALK: Password-based anonymous lightweight key agreement framework for smart grid”

Very recently in 2020, Khan et al. proposed an authentication scheme (PALK) for the smart grid infrastructure. Based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), symmetric hash functions and block cipher based encryption/decryption operations, the scheme was argued to work efficiently and securely in smart grid based infrastructure. However, in this paper, we prove that PALK has incorrect login and authentication phase; mainly, due to a superficial ECC operation involving the multiplication of two points over the curve. Moreover, in the scheme of Khan et al. the responding entity without knowing any clue of the initiator, uses the public key of the initiator for the completion of the authentication process, which is also not possible in the presence of multiple communicating devices. These design flaws lead to the situation, where the smart grid entities are unable to complete even a single cycle of authentication. Finally, we propose a quick solution to fix the pertinent flaws of the PALK. The security and correctness of the proposed solution iPALK is proved using formal BAN logic, automated tool ProVerif along with a brief discussion on the correctness of the scheme. The performance comparisons also show that the iPALK not only provides the correctness, but it is more efficient in terms of computation and communication costs.

Trust Management Scheme Based on Hybrid Cryptography for Secure Communications in VANETs

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are used to improve traffic management and reduce the number of road accidents by providing safety applications. However, VANETs are susceptible to a number of security attacks from malicious entities. To secure the network against these attacks, most of the researchers have proposed various security schemes based on cryptography and trust management. While both cryptography and trust management are effective to some extent, each scheme has some flaw to fully secure the network. In this paper, we propose a trust management scheme based on hybrid cryptography (TMHC) to secure VANET to a larger extent. As authentication is an integral part of trust establishment and secure communications between vehicles, the proposed TMHC integrates hybrid cryptography based authentication for efficient and robust trust management scheme. The hybrid cryptography includes, asymmetric identity-based (ID-based) digital signature and symmetric hash message authentication code (HMAC). The trusted road-side unit (RSU) evaluates trust-value, whereas, agent trusted authority (ATA) computes trust-value of vehicle based on its reward-points. The results are gained with extensive simulations to validate the proposed scheme. The results show that the proposed scheme meets security requirements and performs effectively. The communication overhead, computation overhead, storage overhead, and end-to-end delay of the proposed scheme were improved by 6% to 15%, 9% to 23%, 7% to 19%, and 4% to 15.85%, respectively, as compared to existing schemes.

Symmetric Hash Encryption Image as Key (SHEIK)

Cloud storage model have become a widely accepted solution for the growing demand of online storage and remote accessing. Cloud service provider (CSP) provides the online storage facility for the cloud customer (CC) as per pay-by-use model. Data security still remains a threat for the CC to have a complete trust on the technology. The existing symmetric key algorithms to some extent have been successful in providing the confidentiality of the data. The main issue in implementing the algorithm is sharing of the key, if the key is known to others the security of the data is exploited. This paper tries to sort out the problem by making image as a key for the algorithm. The CC can perform the encryption before uploading the data to have the control of the process. The selection of the algorithm decides the key length to be extracted from the image making the method more secure and reliable for the CC. The experimental results have shown that the proposed Symmetric Hash Encryption Image as Key(SHEIK) method works satisfactorily for encrypting and decrypting the data efficiently.

Security and performance enhancement of fingerprint biometric template using symmetric hashing

There are several fingerprint template protection methods among them the most common method is the symmetric hashing of the fingerprint template. The main problems still unsolved in the case of symmetric hashing are the excessive drop in accuracy, the reversibility and the linkability of hashed template. The experimental analysis of the existing hash method point out that there is an excessive drop in accuracy of matching. In this paper a modified symmetric hash method is proposed in which a key value is used as a multiplication parameter. The modified symmetric hash function is a combination of salting and non invertible transformation. Systematic experimentation point out that the accuracy of matching of the modified symmetric hash method is much better than the existing method. The security of the modified hashed fingerprint template is analysed based on irreversibility and unlinkability and the modified hashed fingerprint templates are more secure than the hashed fingerprint templates.

Discriminative deep metric learning for asymmetric discrete hashing

Thanks to its storage and computation efficiency, hashing as a kind of nearest neighbor search method can facilitate massive data processing in recent vision and learning studies. Particularly, deep supervised hashing methods have significantly improved the retrieval performance compared with non-deep supervised hashing methods. However, most existing deep supervised hashing methods approximate the similarity between two images with the hamming distance between the outputs of the same hash function, i.e., the symmetric strategy. Consequently, it is typically time-consuming to train these symmetric hashing methods, and these methods can hardly take full advantage of the supervised information in the large-scale database. In this paper, we propose a novel discriminative deep metric learning approach for asymmetric discrete hashing (ADMH) approach for supervised hashing learning. ADMH integrates an asymmetric strategy with a deep metric learning method to learn the hash function for the query images and the discrete hash codes for database images directly. More specifically, we train a deep neural network to extract the features of the query images. Subsequently, we introduce a metric learning scheme for learning the discrete discriminative hash codes of the database images directly. Finally, the feature learning procedure for generating the hash codes of the query images and the discrete coding procedure for generating the hash codes of the database images are integrated into an end-to-end learning framework. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets show that the proposed asymmetric deep hashing method outperforms the existing hashing methods.

Decentralized and Scalable Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme in VANETs

Existing authentication schemes are based on either symmetric or asymmetric cryptography such as public-key infrastructure (PKI). These PKI-based authentication schemes are highly recommended to address the security challenges in VANETs. However, they have certain shortcomings such as: 1) lack of privacy-preservation due to revealing of vehicle identity and broadcasting of safety-message and 2) lengthy certificates leading to communication and computation overheads. The symmetric cryptography based schemes on the other hand are faster because they use a single secret key and are very simple; however, it does not ensure nonrepudiation. In this paper, we present a decentralized and scalable privacy-preserving authentication (DSPA) scheme for secure vehicular ad hoc networks. The proposed scheme employs a hybrid cryptography. In DSPA, the asymmetric identity-based (ID-based) cryptography and the symmetric hash message authentication code (HMAC) based authentication are adopted during vehicle to infrastructure and vehicle to vehicle communications, respectively. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the proposed DSPA scheme by comparing the existing works based on PKI, ID-based, group signature, batch verification, and HMAC. The performance analysis showed that DSPA is more efficient, decentralized, scalable, and also a privacy-preserving secured scheme than the existing authentication schemes.

Extended Adaptive Join Operator with Bind-Bloom Join for Federated SPARQL Queries

The goal of query optimization in query federation over linked data is to minimize the response time and the completion time. Communication time has the highest impact on them both. Static query optimization can end up with inefficient execution plans due to unpredictable data arrival rates and missing statistics. This study is an extension of adaptive join operator which always begins with symmetric hash join to minimize the response time, and can change the join method to bind join to minimize the completion time. The authors extend adaptive join operator with bind-bloom join to further reduce the communication time and, consequently, to minimize the completion time. They compare the new operator with symmetric hash join, bind join, bind-bloom join, and adaptive join operator with respect to the response time and the completion time. Performance evaluation shows that the extended operator provides optimal response time and further reduces the completion time. Moreover, it has the adaptation ability to different data arrival rates.

Mobile Device Based Dynamic Key Management Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, wireless sensor network (WSN) applications have tended to transmit data hop by hop, from sensor nodes through cluster nodes to the base station. As a result, users must collect data from the base station. This study considers two different applications: hop by hop transmission of data from cluster nodes to the base station and the direct access to cluster nodes data by mobile users via mobile devices. Due to the hardware limitations of WSNs, some low-cost operations such as symmetric cryptographic algorithms and hash functions are used to implement a dynamic key management. The session key can be updated to prevent threats of attack from each communication. With these methods, the data gathered in wireless sensor networks can be more securely communicated. Moreover, the proposed scheme is analyzed and compared with related schemes. In addition, an NS2 simulation is developed in which the experimental results show that the designed communication protocol is workable.

DMAM: distributed mobility and authentication mechanism in next generation networks

Traditional centralized approaches toward mobility management such as MIPv6 and its variants suffer because of the performance issues like single-point failure, non-optimal routing, low scalability, authentication latency, and signaling messages overhead of the mobility protocols. In this paper, we propose a novel network-based Distributed Mobility and Authentication Mechanism DMAM to focus on these issues. DMAM decomposes centralized mobility functions into Home Address Allocation, mobility routing MR, and location management LM. A new entity is introduced in DMAM, called Location and Mobility Manager that distributes MR and LM among multiple routers to which mobile node can be attached. Furthermore, DMAM offers strong authentication mechanism based on symmetric cryptographic and collision-free one-way hash function. The performance of proposed scheme is analyzed and compared with existing approaches in terms of handover latency, handover blocking probability, packet loss, communication overhead, and computational cost. The conducted numerical results demonstrate that DMAM outperforms the existing approaches. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Human interactive secure key and identity exchange protocols in body sensor networks

A body sensor network (BSN) is typically a wearable wireless sensor network. Security protection is critical to BSNs, since they collect sensitive personal information. Generally speaking, security protection of BSN relies on identity (ID) and key distribution protocols. Most existing protocols are designed to run in general wireless sensor networks, and are not suitable for BSNs. After carefully examining the characteristics of BSNs, the authors propose human interactive empirical channel-based security protocols, which include an elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman version of symmetric hash commitment before knowledge protocol and an elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman version of hash commitment before knowledge protocol. Using these protocols, dynamically distributing keys and IDs become possible. As opposite to present solutions, these protocols do not need any pre-deployment of keys or secrets. Therefore compromised and expired keys or IDs can be easily changed. These protocols exploit human users as temporary trusted third parties. The authors, thus, show that the human interactive channels can help them to design secure BSNs.

On Producing High and Early Result Throughput in Multijoin Query Plans

This paper introduces an efficient framework for producing high and early result throughput in multijoin query plans. While most previous research focuses on optimizing for cases involving a single join operator, this work takes a radical step by addressing query plans with multiple join operators. The proposed framework consists of two main methods, a flush algorithm and operator state manager. The framework assumes a symmetric hash join, a common method for producing early results, when processing incoming data. In this way, our methods can be applied to a group of previous join operators (optimized for single-join queries) when taking part in multijoin query plans. Specifically, our framework can be applied by 1) employing a new flushing policy to write in-memory data to disk, once memory allotment is exhausted, in a way that helps increase the probability of producing early result throughput in multijoin queries, and 2) employing a state manager that adaptively switches operators in the plan between joining in-memory data and disk-resident data in order to positively affect the early result throughput. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed methods outperform the state-of-the-art join operators optimized for both single and multijoin query plans.

Recent Developments on Applying Biometrics in Cryptography

Biometrics is an identification technology widely used in physical access control and forensics. Cryptography is the science for information security. People generally agreed that biometric information needs to be protected with cryptography. Many researchers also believe that biometrics can enhance the security of cryptography. In this article I have surveyed recent developments on applying biometrics in cryptography, focusing on binding and generating a cryptographic key. The security of these proposals is briefly analyzed. Additionally I have reviewed some other developments, such as matching without removing chaff points, encrypted templates matching, symmetric hashing, and biometric random number generation.

Symmetric hash functions for secure fingerprint biometric systems

Securing biometrics databases from being compromised is an important research challenge that must be overcome in order to support widespread use of biometrics based authentication. In this paper we present a novel method for securing fingerprints by hashing the fingerprint minutia and performing matching in the hash space. Our approach uses a family of symmetric hash functions and does not depend on the location of the (usually unstable) singular points (core and delta) as is the case with other methods described in the literature. It also does not assume a pre-alignment between the test and the stored fingerprint templates. We argue that these assumptions, which are often made, are unrealistic given that fingerprints are very often only partially captured by the commercially available sensors. The Equal Error Rate (EER) achieved by our system is 3%. We also present the performance analysis of a hybrid system that has an EER of 1.96% which reflects almost no drop in performance when compared to straight matching with no security enhancements. The hybrid system involves matching using our secure algorithm but the final scoring reverts to that used by a straight matching system.

A novel mutual authentication and key agreement protocol based on NTRU cryptography for wireless communications

In this paper, the authors present a novel mutual authentication and key agreement protocol based on the Number Theory Research Unit (NTRU) public key cryptography. The symmetric encryption hash and “challenge-response” techniques were adopted to build their protocol. To implement the mutual authentication and session key agreement, the proposed protocol contains two stages: namely initial procedure and real execution stage. Since the lightweight NTRU public key cryptography is employed, their protocol can not only overcome the security flaws of secret-key based authentication protocols such as those used in Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), but also provide greater security and lower computational complexity in comparison with currently well-known public key based wireless authentication schemes such as Beller-Yacobi and M. Aydos protocols.