A New Ultralightweight RFID Protocol for Low-Cost Tags: R^{2}AP

Several ultralightweight radio frequency identification (RFID) authentication protocols have been proposed in recent years. However, all of these protocols are reported later that they are vulnerable to various kinds of attacks (such as replay attack, de-synchronization attack, full disclosure attack, etc.) and/or have user privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a new ultralightweight RFID protocol named reconstruction based RFID authentication protocol (R \(^{2}\) AP), which is based on the use of a new bitwise operation reconstruction. Operation reconstruction has three important properties: Hamming weight unpredictability, irreversibility and effectiveness. Some or all of these properties are absent in previous protocols and therefore has caused a lot of insecurity issues. The proposed R \(^{2}\) AP takes advantage of reconstruction to guarantee security of RFID system. Furthermore, we improve the Juels–Weis untraceability model so that the extended mathematic model can be used to analyze security functionality for ultralightweight RFID protocols. Our security analysis and performance evaluations demonstrate that (1) R \(^{2}\) AP can withstand all attacks mentioned in the paper and protect users’ privacy; (2) R \(^{2}\) AP is indeed an effective RFID protocol that can be implemented on low-cost tags.     

A lightweight anonymous two‐factor authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks in Internet of Vehicles

Internet of Vehicles (IoV), as the next generation of transportation systems, tries to make highway and public transportation more secure than used to be. In this system, users use public channels for their communication so they can be the victims of passive or active attacks. Therefore, a secure authentication protocol is essential for IoV; consequently, many protocols are presented to provide secure authentication for IoV. In 2018, Yu et al proposed a secure authentication protocol for WSNs in vehicular communications and claimed that their protocol could satisfy all crucial security features of a secure authentication protocol. Unfortunately, we found that their protocol is susceptible to sensor capture attack, user traceability attack, user impersonation attack, and offline sink node's secret key guessing attack. In this paper, we propose a new authentication protocol for IoV which can solve the weaknesses of Yu et al's protocol. Our protocol not only provides anonymous user registration phase and revocation smart card phase but also uses the biometric template in place of the password. We use both Burrow‐Abadi‐Needham (BAN) logic and real‐or‐random (ROR) model to present the formal analysis of our protocol. Finally, we compare our protocol with other existing related protocols in terms of security features and computation overhead. The results prove that our protocol can provide more security features and it is usable for IoV system.     

Security flaws in two improved remote user authentication schemes using smart cards

Understanding security failures of cryptographic protocols is the key to both patching existing protocols and designing future schemes. In this paper, we analyze two recent proposals in the area of password‐based remote user authentication using smart cards. First, we point out that the scheme of Chen et al. cannot achieve all the claimed security goals and report its following flaws: (i) it is vulnerable to offline password guessing attack under their nontamper resistance assumption of the smart cards; and (ii) it fails to provide forward secrecy. Then, we analyze an efficient dynamic ID‐based scheme without public‐key operations introduced by Wen and Li in 2012. This proposal attempts to overcome many of the well‐known security and efficiency shortcomings of previous schemes and supports more functionalities than its counterparts. Nevertheless, Wen–Li's protocol is vulnerable to offline password guessing attack and denial of service attack, and fails to provide forward secrecy and to preserve user anonymity. Furthermore, with the security analysis of these two schemes and our previous protocol design experience, we put forward three general principles that are vital for designing secure smart‐card‐based password authentication schemes: (i) public‐key techniques are indispensable to resist against offline password guessing attack and to preserve user anonymity under the nontamper resistance assumption of the smart card; (ii) there is an unavoidable trade‐off when fulfilling the goals of local password update and resistance to smart card loss attack; and (iii) at least two exponentiation (respectively elliptic curve point multiplication) operations conducted on the server side are necessary for achieving forward secrecy. The cryptanalysis results discourage any practical use of the two investigated schemes and are important for security engineers to make their choices correctly, whereas the proposed three principles are valuable to protocol designers for advancing more robust schemes. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Provable analysis and improvement of smart card–based anonymous authentication protocols

Nowadays, authentication protocols are essential for secure communications specially for roaming networks, distributed computer networks, and remote wireless communication. The numerous users in these networks rise vulnerabilities. Thus, privacy‐preserving methods have to be run to provide more reliable services and sustain privacy. Anonymous authentication is a method to remotely authenticate users with no revelation about their identity. In this paper, we analyze 2 smart card–based protocols that the user's identity is anonymous. However, we represent that they are vulnerable to privileged insider attack. It means that the servers can compromise the users' identity for breaking their privacy. Also, we highlight that the Wen et al protocol has flaws in both stolen smart card and stolen server attacks and the Odelu et al protocol is traceable. Then, we propose 2 modified anonymous authentication protocols. Finally, we analyze our improved protocols with both heuristic and formal methods.     

Multiuser access control searchable privacy‐preserving scheme in cloud storage

Searchable encryption scheme‐based ciphertext‐policy attribute‐based encryption (CP‐ABE) is a effective scheme for providing multiuser to search over the encrypted data on cloud storage environment. However, most of the existing search schemes lack the privacy protection of the data owner and have higher computation time cost. In this paper, we propose a multiuser access control searchable privacy‐preserving scheme in cloud storage. First, the data owner only encrypts the data file and sets the access control list of multiuser and multiattribute for search data file. And the computing operation, which generates the attribute keys of the users' access control and the keyword index, is given trusted third party to perform for reducing the computation time of the data owner. Second, using CP‐ABE scheme, trusted third party embeds the users' access control attributes into their attribute keys. Only when those embedded attributes satisfy the access control list, the ciphertext can be decrypted accordingly. Finally, when the user searches data file, the keyword trap door is no longer generated by the user, and it is handed to the proxy server to finish. Also, the ciphertext is predecrypted by the proxy sever before the user performs decryption. In this way, the flaw of the client's limited computation resource can be solved. Security analysis results show that this scheme has the data privacy, the privacy of the search process, and the collusion‐resistance attack, and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively reduce the computation time of the data owner and the users.     

A pairing‐free identity‐based handover AKE protocol with anonymity in the heterogeneous wireless networks

Nowadays, seamless roaming service in heterogeneous wireless networks attracts more and more attention. When a mobile user roams into a foreign domain, the process of secure handover authentication and key exchange (AKE) plays an important role to verify the authenticity and establish a secure communication between the user and the access point. Meanwhile, to prevent the user's current location and moving history information from being tracked, privacy preservation should be also considered. However, existing handover AKE schemes have more or less defects in security aspects or efficiency. In this paper, a secure pairing‐free identity‐based handover AKE protocol with privacy preservation is proposed. In our scheme, users' temporary identities will be used to conceal their real identities during the handover process, and the foreign server can verify the legitimacy of the user with the home server's assistance. Besides, to resist ephemeral private key leakage attack, the session key is generated from the static private keys and the ephemeral private keys together. Security analysis shows that our protocol is provably secure in extended Canetti‐Krawczyk (eCK) model under the computational Diffie‐Hellman (CDH) assumption and can capture desirable security properties including key‐compromise impersonation resistance, ephemeral secrets reveal resistance, strong anonymity, etc. Furthermore, the efficiency of our identity‐based protocol is improved by removing pairings, which not only simplifies the complex management of public key infrastructure (PKI) but also reduces the computation overhead of ID‐based cryptosystem with pairings. It is shown that our proposed handover AKE protocol provides better security assurance and higher computational efficiency for roaming authentication in heterogeneous wireless networks.     

User centric three‐factor authentication protocol for cloud‐assisted wearable devices

Wearable devices, which provide the services of collecting personal data, monitoring health conditions, and so on, are widely used in many fields, ranging from sports to healthcare. Although wearable devices bring convenience to people's lives, they bring about significant security concerns, such as personal privacy disclosure and unauthorized access to wearable devices. To ensure the privacy and security of the sensitive data, it is critical to design an efficient authentication protocol suitable for wearable devices. Recently, Das et al proposed a lightweight authentication protocol, which achieves secure communication between the wearable device and the mobile terminal. However, we find that their protocol is vulnerable to offline password guessing attack and desynchronization attack. Therefore, we put forward a user centric three‐factor authentication scheme for wearable devices assisted by cloud server. Informal security analysis and formal analysis using ProVerif is executed to demonstrate that our protocol not only remedies the flaws of the protocol of Das et al but also meets desired security properties. Comparison with related schemes shows that our protocol satisfies security and usability simultaneously.     

An enhanced scheme for mutual authentication for healthcare services

With the advent of state-of-art technologies, the Telecare Medicine Information System (TMIS) now offers fast and convenient healthcare services to patients at their doorsteps. However, this architecture engenders new risks and challenges to patients' and the server's confidentiality, integrity and security. In order to avoid any resource abuse and malicious attack, employing an authentication scheme is widely considered as the most effective approach for the TMIS to verify the legitimacy of patients and the server. Therefore, several authentication protocols have been proposed to this end. Very recently, Chaudhry et al. identified that there are vulnerabilities of impersonation attacks in Islam et al.'s scheme. Therefore, they introduced an improved protocol to mitigate those security flaws. Later, Qiu et al. proved that these schemes are vulnerable to the man-in-the-middle, impersonation and offline password guessing attacks. Thus, they introduced an improved scheme based on the fuzzy verifier techniques, which overcome all the security flaws of Chaudhry et al.'s scheme. However, there are still some security flaws in Qiu et al.'s protocol. In this article, we prove that Qiu et al.'s protocol has an incorrect notion of perfect user anonymity and is vulnerable to user impersonation attacks. Therefore, we introduce an improved protocol for authentication, which reduces all the security flaws of Qiu et al.'s protocol. We also make a comparison of our protocol with related protocols, which shows that our introduced protocol is more secure and efficient than previous protocols.     

Identity‐and‐data privacy forward security public auditing protocol in the standard model

To ensure the intactness of the stored data in cloud, numerous data public auditing mechanisms have been presented. However, most of these existing solutions suffer from several flaws: (a) identity privacy and data privacy of data owner are inevitably revealed to the auditor in the auditing process; (b) the existing public auditing mechanisms with resisting key exposure are only proved in the random oracle model. To address the problems above, in this paper, we propose an achieving identity‐and‐data privacy public auditing protocol with forward security in the standard model by incorporating knowledge proof signature, ring signature, and forward security technique. And then, we formalize the security model of forward security and anonymity of identity, in which the adversary is allowed to query private keys of some ring members. It can provide stronger security. Thus, our proposed scheme can not only achieve data owner's identity privacy and data privacy but also provide forward security for data owner's secret key. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first preserving privacy of identity‐and‐data public auditing scheme with forward security that is provably secure in the standard model. The security of the scheme is related to the computational Diffie–Hellman (CDH) problem and the subgroup decision problem. Finally, our scheme is simulatively tested; experimental results demonstrate that our mechanism is very efficient in terms of overall performance.     

基于非对称QKD的股票交易数据库隐私查询协议

证券交易所的股票交易数据库中包含大量敏感信息,用户查询该数据库时保障账户及数据库的隐私十分重要.分析了非对称量子密钥分配(QKD)及其优良特性,提出了一种基于非对称QKD的不经意集合元素映射判定协议.该协议在查询数据库时保证了用户和数据库的隐私.安全性分析结果表明,该协议能有效抵抗量子存储攻击、伪造量子态攻击和纠缠测量攻击,具有很高的信道损耗容忍度.     

A Strong Authentication Scheme with User Privacy for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used for many real‐time applications. User authentication is an important security service for WSNs to ensure only legitimate users can access the sensor data within the network. In 2012, Yoo and others proposed a security‐performance‐balanced user authentication scheme for WSNs, which is an enhancement of existing schemes. In this paper, we show that Yoo and others' scheme has security flaws, and it is not efficient for real WSNs. In addition, this paper proposes a new strong authentication scheme with user privacy for WSNs. The proposed scheme not only achieves end‐party mutual authentication (that is, between the user and the sensor node) but also establishes a dynamic session key. The proposed scheme preserves the security features of Yoo and others' scheme and other existing schemes and provides more practical security services. Additionally, the efficiency of the proposed scheme is more appropriate for real‐world WSNs applications.     

Scalability and Security Conflict for RFID Authentication Protocols

RFID technology continues to flourish as an inherent part of virtually every ubiquitous environment. However, it became clear that the public—implying the industry—seriously needs mechanisms emerging the security and privacy issues for increasing RFID applications. As the nodes of RFID systems mostly suffer from low computational power and small memory size, various attempts which propose to implement the existing security primitives and protocols, have ignored the realm of the cost limitations and failed. In this study, two recently proposed protocols—SSM and LRMAP—claiming to meet the standard privacy and security requirements are analyzed. The design of both protocols based on defining states where the server authenticates the tag in constant time in a more frequent normal state and needs a linear search in a rare abnormal states. Although both protocols claim to provide untraceability criteria in their design objectives, we outline a generic attack that both protocols failed to fulfill this claim. Moreover, we showed that the SSM protocol is vulnerable to a desynchronization attack which prevents a server from authenticating a legitimate tag. Resultantly, we conclude that defining computationally unbalanced tag states yields to a security/scalability conflict for RFID authentication protocols.     

A time-aware searchable encryption scheme for EHRs

Despite the benefits of EHRs (Electronic Health Records), there is a growing concern over the risks of privacy exposure associated with the technologies of EHR storing and transmission. To deal with this problem, a time-aware searchable encryption with designated server is proposed in this paper. It is based on Boneh's public key encryption with keyword search and Rivest's timed-release cryptology. Our construction has three features: the user cannot issue a keyword search query successfully unless the search falls into the specific time range; only the authorized user can generate a valid trapdoor; only the designated server can execute the search. Applying our scheme in a multi-user environment, the number of the keyword ciphertexts would not increase linearly with the number of the authorized users. The security and performance analysis shows that our proposed scheme is securer and more efficient than the existing similar schemes.     

Constructing designated server public key encryption with keyword search schemes withstanding keyword guessing attacks

Designated server public key encryption with keyword search (dPEKS) removes the secure channel requirement in public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS). With the dPEKS mechanism, a user is able to delegate the search tasks on the ciphertexts sent to him/her to a designated storage server without leaking the corresponding plaintexts. However, the current dPEKS framework inherently suffers from the security vulnerability caused by the keyword guessing (KG) attack. How to build the dPEKS schemes withstanding the KG attacks is still an unsolved problem up to now. In this work, we introduce an enhanced dPEKS (edPEKS) framework to remedy the security vulnerability in the current dPEKS framework. The edPEKS framework provides resistance to the KG attack by either the outside attacker or the malicious designated server. We provide a semi‐generic edPEKS construction that exploits the existing dPEKS schemes. Our security proofs demonstrate that the derived edPEKS scheme achieves the keyword ciphertext indistinguishability, the keyword ciphertext unforgeability, and the keyword trapdoor indistinguishability if the underlying dPEKS scheme satisfies the keyword ciphertext indistinguishability and the hash Diffie‐Hellman problem is intractable. In addition, a concrete edPEKS scheme is presented to show the instantiation of the proposed semi‐generic construction.     

A Low-Cost RFID Authentication Protocol Against Desynchronization with a Random Tuple

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology will become one of the most popular technologies to identify objects in the near future. However, the major barrier that the RFID system is facing presently is the security and privacy issue. Recently, a lightweight anti-desynchronization RFID authentication protocol has been proposed to provide security and prevent all possible malicious attacks. However, it is discovered that a type of desynchronization attacks can successfully break the proposed scheme. To overcome the vulnerability under the desynchronization attacks, we propose a low-cost RFID authentication protocol which integrates the operation of the XOR, build-in CRC-16 function, permutation, a random tuple and secret key backup technology to improve the security functionality without increasing any cost than the utralightweight protocols. The analysis shows that our proposal has a strong ability to prevent existing malicious attacks, especially the desynchronization attacks.     

保护私有信息的点包含协议研究

对现有保护私有信息的点包含协议进行研究,针对算法复杂度高、协议本身的的局限性等问题,在半诚实模型下,提出一种保护隐私的判断点与凸包位置关系协议。首先,利用 与矢量的几何性质,将传统的点线位置判断问题扩展,设计一种茫然安全点线位置关系判断协议;然后,将此协议作为基础协议,结合安全二分检索法提出最终解决方案。利用Goldreich证明法对协议进行安全性证明,同时分析协议的正确性与算法复杂度。分析结果表明,协议在效率上优于现有方案,并具有可扩展性。     

Verifiable attribute-based searchable encryption scheme based on blockchain

For the problem that the shared decryption key lacks of fine-grained access control and the search results lacks of correctness verification under one-to-many search model,a verifiable attribute-based searchable encryption scheme based on blockchain was proposed.The ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption mechanism was used on the shared key to achieve fine-grained access control.Ethereum blockchain technology was combined to solve the problem of incorrect search results returned by the semi-honest and curious cloud server model,so it could prompt both the cloud server and the user to follow the rules of the contract honestly and achieved service-payment fairness between the user and the cloud server in the pay-per-use cloud environment.In addition,based on the irreversible modification of the blockchain,the cloud server was guaranteed to receive the service fee,and the user was assured to obtain the correct retrieval results without additional verification which reduced the computational overhead of the user.The security analysis shows that the scheme satisfies the semantic security against adaptive chosen keyword attack and can protect the privacy of users and the security of data.The performance comparison and experimental results show that the scheme has certain optimizations in security index generation,search token generation,retrieval efficiency and transaction quantity,so it is more suitable for one-to-many search scenarios such as smart medical.     

An efficient chaos‐based 2‐party key agreement protocol with provable security

Key agreement protocol is an important cryptographic primitive, which allows 2 parties to establish a secure session in an open network environment. A various of key agreement protocols were proposed. Nowadays, there still exists some other security flaws waiting to be solved. Owing to reduce the computational and communication costs and improve the security, chaotic map has been studied in‐depth and treated as a good solution. Recently, Liu et al proposed a chaos‐based 2‐party key agreement protocol and demonstrated that it can defend denial‐of‐service attack and replay attack. We found, however, it cannot resist off‐line password‐guessing attack, and it also has some other security flaws. In this paper, we propose an improved chaos‐based 2‐party key agreement protocol. The results prove that the protocol can solve the threats of off‐line password‐guessing attack and other security flaws in the security proof section. What is more, performance analysis shows that the computational cost of the improved protocol is lower than Liu et al protocol.     

An enhanced bilinear pairing based authenticated key agreement protocol for multiserver environment

To circumvent using of multiple single servers, the theory of multiserver communication exists and numerous authentication protocols put forward for providing secure communication. Very recently, Amin‐Biswas proposes bilinear pairing–based multiserver scheme by describing some security pitfalls of Hsieh‐Leu protocol and claims that it is secured against related security threats. However, this paper claims that Amin‐Biswas protocol is still susceptible to off‐line identity and password guessing attack, user untraceability attack, and server masquerading attack. The cryptographic protocol should be attacks‐free for real‐time application. To achieve attacks‐free security, we put forward smart card–based multiserver authentication protocol by using the concept of bilinear pairing operation. The formal method strand space model has been used to prove the correctness of the proposed scheme. Additionally, rigorous security analysis ensures pliability of common security threats. The performance and security features of our scheme are also compared with that of the similar existing schemes. The comparison results show that our protocol achieves more security features with less complexity.