A trustworthy system for secure access to patient centric sensitive information

Smart technological innovations in healthcare are continuously generating digitized medical information about each patient, leading to the creation of Patient Centric Big Medical Data (PCBMD). Rapid adoption of PCBMD in healthcare ushers at the cost of its security and privacy concerns. Current methods focus on identifying authorized users who can access PCBMD but they barely identify the insider attackers. Alternatively, these methods do not prevent information leak by authorized users. Working towards this direction, this paper proposes a Trust based Access Control (TAC) system which not only identifies authorized users for PCBMD but also defends Sensitive Personal Information (SPI) of a patient from insider attacks. The proposed method calculates the trust value of each user by considering various quantitative parameters. Based on the calculated trust values, access rights are granted to each user such that SPI can be accessed by only highly trustworthy users. To implement access rights securely, a privacy scheme is also proposed. The experimental results show that the proposed security system can be efficiently used to protect the SPI of patients.     

Malleability Resilient Concealed Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

The objective of concealed data aggregation is to achieve the privacy preservation at intermediate nodes while supporting in-network data aggregation. The need for privacy preservation at intermediate nodes and the need for data aggregation at intermediate nodes can be simultaneously realized using privacy homomorphism. Privacy homomorphism processes the encrypted data without decrypting them at intermediate nodes. However, privacy homomorphism is inherently malleable. Although malicious adversaries cannot view transmitted sensor readings, they can manipulate them. Hence, it is a formidable challenge to realize conflicting requirements, such as end-to-end privacy and end-to-end integrity, while performing en route aggregation. In this paper, we propose a malleability resilient concealed data aggregation protocol for protecting the network against active and passive adversaries. In addition, the proposed protocol protects the network against insider and outsider adversaries. The proposed protocol simultaneously realizes the conflicting objectives like privacy at intermediate nodes, end-to-end integrity, replay protection, and en route aggregation. As per our knowledge, the proposed solution is the first that achieves end-to-end security and en route aggregation of reverse multicast traffic in the presence of insider, as well as outsider adversaries.     

Hide-n-Sense: Preserving Privacy Efficiently in Wireless mHealth

As healthcare in many countries faces an aging population and rising costs, mobile sensing technologies promise a new opportunity. Using mobile health (mHealth) sensing, which uses medical sensors to collect data about the patients, and mobile phones to act as a gateway between sensors and electronic health record systems, caregivers can continuously monitor the patients and deliver better care. Furthermore, individuals can become better engaged in monitoring and managing their own health. Although some work on mHealth sensing has addressed security, achieving strong privacy for low-power sensors remains a challenge. We make three contributions. First, we propose an mHealth sensing protocol that provides strong security and privacy properties at the link layer, with low energy overhead, suitable for low-power sensors. The protocol uses three novel techniques: adaptive security, to dynamically modify transmission overhead; MAC striping, to make forgery difficult even for small-sized Message Authentication Codes; and asymmetric resource requirements, in recognition of the limited resources in tiny mHealth sensors. Second, we demonstrate its feasibility by implementing a prototype on a Chronos wrist device, and evaluating it experimentally. Third, we provide a security, privacy, and energy analysis of our system.     

An Efficient Ticket Based Authentication Protocol with Unlinkability for Wireless Access Networks

The concept of anonymous channel ticket is one of the effective measures to protect user privacy and to reduce the overhead of re-authentication for wireless environments. Most recently, Hsieh et al. proposed an anonymous authentication protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography to enhance the efficiency and security strength. However, we identify that Hsieh et al.’s scheme has four weaknesses. (1) The scheme fails to provide identity anonymity. (2) The ticket authentication phase of the scheme suffers from desynchronization attack. (3) The scheme is vulnerable to the privileged insider attack. (4) Users cannot change passwords when required. We further propose an improved authentication scheme, which not only preserves the merits of the scheme of Hsieh et al., but also enjoys several other advantages. Our improved scheme is effective in protection from the weaknesses identified and achieves user anonymity and unlinkability. We compare the functionality and performance of our improved scheme with other related schemes, which indicates that our scheme is more secure and yet efficient for wireless access networks.     

Machine Learning Protocol for Secure 5G Handovers

The fifth generation (5G) networks are characterized with ultra-dense deployment of base stations with limited footprint. Consequently, user equipment’s handover frequently as they move within 5G networks. In addition, 5G requirements of ultra-low latencies imply that handovers should be executed swiftly to minimize service disruptions. To preserve security and privacy while at the same time maintaining optimal performance during handovers, numerous schemes have been developed. However, majority of these techniques are either limited to security and privacy or address only performance aspect of the handover mechanism. As such, there is need for a novel handover authentication protocol that addresses security, privacy and performance simultaneously. This paper presents a machine learning protocol that not only facilitates optimal selection of target cell but also upholds both security and privacy during handovers. Formal security analysis using the widely adopted Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic shows that the proposed protocol achieves all the six formulated under this proof. As such, the proposed protocol facilitates strong and secure mutual authentication among the communicating entities before generating the shares session key. The derived session key protected the exchanged packets to avert attacks such as forgery. In addition, informal security evaluation of the proposed protocol shows that it offers perfect forward key secrecy, mutual authentication any user anonymity. It is also demonstrated to be robust against attacks such as denial of service (DoS), man-in-the-middle (MitM), masquerade, packet replays and forgery. In terms of performance, simulation results shows that it has lower packets drop rate and ping–pong rate, with higher ratio of packets received compared with improved 5G authentication and key agreement (5G AKA’) protocol. Specifically, using 5G AKA’ as the basis, the proposed protocol reduces the handover rate by 94.4%, hence the resulting handover signaling is greatly minimized.

     

An efficient anonymous authentication and confidentiality preservation schemes for secure communications in wireless body area networks

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is utilized in various healthcare applications due to its ability to provide suitable medical services by exchanging the biological data between the patient and doctor through a network of implantable or wearable medical sensors connected in the patients’ body. The collected data are communicated to the medical personals through open wireless channels. Nevertheless, due to the open wireless nature of communication channels, WBAN is susceptible to security attacks by malicious users. For that reason, secure anonymous authentication and confidentiality preservation schemes are essential in WBAN. Authentication and confidentiality play a significant role while transfers, medical images securely across the network. Since medical images contain highly sensitive information, those images should be transferred securely from the patients to the doctor and vice versa. The proposed anonymous authentication technique helps to ensure the legitimacy of the patient and doctors without disclosing their privacy. Even though various cryptographic encryption techniques such as AES and DES are available to provide confidentiality, the key size and the key sharing are the main problems to provide a worthy level of security. Hence, an efficient affine cipher-based encryption technique is proposed in this paper to offer a high level of confidentiality with smaller key size compared to existing encryption techniques. The security strength of the proposed work against various harmful security attacks is proven in security analysis section to ensure that it provides better security. The storage cost, communication cost and computational cost of the proposed scheme are demonstrated in the performance analysis section elaborately. In connection to this, the computational complexity of the proposed scheme is reduced around 29% compared to the existing scheme.

     

面向ZigBee网络节点安全定位的消息签名方案

针对ZigBee网络节点定位中消息的安全性问题,该文提出一种带隐私保护的消息签名方案。方案基于椭圆曲线(ECC)上的无双线性对运算,设计了带身份隐私保护的定位请求消息签名算法和坐标隐私保护的定位参照消息签名算法。理论证明了所提方案可抵御伪造攻击、重放攻击等多种外部攻击,同时具备隐私保护、身份追踪等功能。性能分析结果表明,与同类方案相比,所提方案计算开销和通信开销均具有优势。     

Secure encrypted-data aggregation for wireless sensor networks

This paper proposes a secure encrypted-data aggregation scheme for wireless sensor networks. Our design for data aggregation eliminates redundant sensor readings without using encryption and maintains data secrecy and privacy during transmission. Conventional aggregation functions operate when readings are received in plaintext. If readings are encrypted, aggregation requires decryption creating extra overhead and key management issues. In contrast to conventional schemes, our proposed scheme provides security and privacy, and duplicate instances of original readings will be aggregated into a single packet. Our scheme is resilient to known-plaintext attacks, chosen-plaintext attacks, ciphertext-only attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks. Our experiments show that our proposed aggregation method significantly reduces communication overhead and can be practically implemented in on-the-shelf sensor platforms.     

一种高效的按需路由协议安全性改进方法

研究了移动AdHoc网络(MANET)按需路由协议的安全问题,分析了现有的安全改进方案的优缺点.以一种基于椭圆曲线密码体制的高效数字签名算法为基础,提出一种适合按需路由协议的安全性改进方法,对其执行效率和安全性进行了分析,并在QualNet仿真平台下对应用该方法改进的AODV协议进行验证.仿真过程实现了真实的安全算法,针对blackholes和rushing两种常见攻击分别构建了攻击模型,结果表明改进后协议以很小的延时和协议开销代价得到了较高的安全性.     

一种基于ECDH的可认证密钥协商协议

针对Diffie-Hellman密钥交换协议和ECDH密钥协商协议的缺陷,给出了一种改进后的可认证密钥协商协议。该协议具有等献性、密钥不可控、密钥确认、完美前向安全以及抗已知密钥攻击等安全特性。跟以往的密钥协商协议相比,其管理简单、开销较低、安全性高、扩展性较好且实现了身份认证,以较低的计算成本和较高的运算效率实现了通信双方安全的会话密钥协商与密钥验证,能够较好地适用于大规模网络的端到端密钥管理。     

Privacy Addressing-Based Anonymous Communication for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicle ad-hoc network (VANET) technology is a basic component of the future intelligent transportation system. With the advances in modern information society, privacy issues have become important considerations. However, most routing proposals for VANETs lack privacy support, namely anonymity or pseudonymity and unlinkability aspects. This paper presents a novel privacy addressing-based anonymous communication approach for VANETs, which prevents eavesdroppers from identifying a particular vehicle by its address. The proposed scheme is a kind of end-to-end solution, so it can potentially be extended to work with many traditional routing protocols. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms previous approaches with privacy support in terms of protocol overhead and packet latency.     

Attacks on and Countermeasures for Two RFID Protocols

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is expected to play a key role in the Internet of Things (IoT) and has applications in a wide variety of domains ranging from automation to healthcare systems. Therefore, the security and privacy of RFID communication is critical. In this paper, we analyze two recent RFID protocols proposed by researchers. Specifically we show that the ownership transfer protocol proposed by Wang et al., is vulnerable to tracing attacks while the mutual authentication protocol proposed by Cho et al. is vulnerable to key disclosure and backward traceable attacks. We propose secure improvements to these protocols to address the vulnerabilities, and improve the scalability of these schemes making them suitable for large-scale deployments.

     

Cryptanalysis and improvement of 2 mutual authentication schemes for Session Initiation Protocol

Recently, Chaudhry et al and Kumari et al proposed an advanced mutual authentication protocol for Session Initiation Protocol on the basis of the protocol of Lu et al. The authors claimed that their schemes can be resistant to various attacks. Unfortunately, we observe some important flaws in their respective schemes. We point out that their schemes are prone to off‐line password guessing and privileged insider attacks. To remedy their protocols's drawbacks, in this paper, we present a new improved authentication scheme keeping apart the threats encountered in the design of the schemes of Chaudhry et al and Kumari et al. Furthermore, the security analysis illustrates that our proposed scheme not only removes these drawbacks in their schemes but also can resist all known attacks and provide session key security. We give a heuristic security analysis and also provide the security analysis of the proposed scheme with the help of widespread Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham Logic. Finally, our scheme is compared with the previously proposed schemes on security and performance.     

Efficient design and hardware implementation of a secure communication scheme for smart grid

In smart grid, bidirectional communications between the smart meters and control center are subject to several security challenges. Since the smart meters have limited storage space and processing capability, the suggested communication scheme not only must consider the security requirements but also should put the least possible burden on the smart meters' resources. In 2014, an interesting communication scheme has been proposed for the secure consumption reports transmission of the smart meters to the neighbor gateways. In this paper, we first show that this scheme is vulnerable to the smart meter's memory modification, pollution, and denial of service attacks; then, we propose an authenticated communication scheme, which not only is secure against the aforementioned attacks, but also is much more efficient in terms of storage space, communication overhead, and computational complexity. Moreover, our scheme also presents the details of control messages transmission from the neighborhood gateways to the smart meters. Our comparative analysis with several recently published schemes indicates that the proposed scheme is more suitable than the previous ones. More significantly, our realistic implementation on ATmega2560, as a suitable candidate to be used for the smart meters, confirms our claim.     

基于测量设备无关协议的量子身份认证方案

借助测量设备无关量子密钥分配协议的安全性,提出了测量设备无关的量子身份认证协议。在此协议下,认证中心和认证方以共享密钥加密认证信息和认证密钥,将其发送至第三方进行贝尔态测量以提取安全的认证信息,实现认证中心对认证方有效认证,并更新共享密钥。分析协议性能显示,系统在不同攻击下认证过程是安全且有效的。     

A Secure Path Selection Scheme for Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Mobile ad hoc network is open medium, infrastructure-less and easy to install. Despite these features, mobile ad hoc network is vulnerable to various security attacks. Black hole and gray hole security attacks outrank among all security attacks. This paper proposes a distributed delegation-based scheme, namely, a secure path selection scheme. The proposed scheme identifies and allows only trusted nodes to become part of active path. The simulation results revealed that proposed scheme improved the packet delivery ratio, packet loss rate, throughput by 8% and routing overhead by 5% as compared to other system.

     

LPPA: Lightweight privacy‐preservation access authentication scheme for massive devices in fifth Generation (5G) cellular networks

Because of the requirements of stringent latency, high‐connection density, and massive devices concurrent connection, the design of the security and efficient access authentication for massive devices is the key point to guarantee the application security under the future fifth Generation (5G) systems. The current access authentication mechanism proposed by 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) requires each device to execute the full access authentication process, which can not only incur a lot of protocol attacks but also result in signaling congestion on key nodes in 5G core networks when sea of devices concurrently request to access into the networks. In this paper, we design an efficient and secure privacy‐preservation access authentication scheme for massive devices in 5G wireless networks based on aggregation message authentication code (AMAC) technique. Our proposed scheme can accomplish the access authentication between massive devices and the network at the same time negotiate a distinct secret key between each device and the network. In addition, our proposed scheme can withstand a lot of protocol attacks including interior forgery attacks and DoS attacks and achieve identity privacy protection and group member update without sacrificing the efficiency. The Burrows Abadi Needham (BAN) logic and the formal verification tool: Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) and Security Protocol ANimator for AVISPA (SPAN) are employed to demonstrate the security of our proposed scheme.     

Privacy-preserving telecardiology sensor networks: toward a low-cost portable wireless hardware/software codesign.

Recently, a remote-sensing platform based on wireless interconnection of tiny ECG sensors called Telecardiology Sensor Networks (TSN) provided a promising approach to perform low-cost real-time cardiac patient monitoring at any time in community areas (such as elder nursing homes or hospitals). The contribution of this research is the design of a practical TSN hardware/software platform for a typical U.S. healthcare community scenario (such as large nursing homes with many elder patients) to perform real-time healthcare data collections. On the other hand, due to the radio broadcasting nature of MANET, a TSN has the risk of losing the privacy of patients' data. Medical privacy has been highly emphasized by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This research also designs a medical security scheme with low communication overhead to achieve confidential electrocardiogram data transmission in wireless medium.     

An Enhanced Authentication Scheme with Privacy Preservation for Roaming Service in Global Mobility Networks

Global mobility network (GLOMONET) provides global roaming service to ensure ubiquitous connectivity for users traveling from one network to another. It is very crucial not only to authenticate roaming users, but to protect the privacy of users. However, due to the broadcast nature of wireless channel and resource limitations of terminals, providing efficient user authentication with privacy preservation is challenging. Recently, He et al. proposed a secure and lightweight user authentication scheme with anonymity for roaming service in GLOMONETs. However, in this paper, we identify that the scheme fails to achieve strong two-factor security, and suffers from domino effect, privileged insider attack and no password change option, etc. Then we propose an enhanced authentication scheme with privacy preservation based on quadratic residue assumption. Our improved scheme enhances security strength of He et al.’s protocol while inheriting its merits of low communication and computation cost. Specifically, our enhanced scheme achieves two-factor security and user untraceability.     

Cryptanalysis of smart‐card‐based password authenticated key agreement protocol for session initiation protocol of Zhang et al.

As the core signaling protocol for multimedia services, such as voice over internet protocol, the session initiation protocol (SIP) is receiving much attention and its security is becoming increasingly important. It is critical to develop a roust user authentication protocol for SIP. The original authentication protocol is not strong enough to provide acceptable security level, and a number of authentication protocols have been proposed to strengthen the security. Recently, Zhang et al. proposed an efficient and flexible smart‐card‐based password authenticated key agreement protocol for SIP. They claimed that the protocol enjoys many unique properties and can withstand various attacks. However, we demonstrate that the scheme by Zhang et al. is insecure against the malicious insider impersonation attack. Specifically, a malicious user can impersonate other users registered with the same server. We also proposed an effective fix to remedy the flaw, which remedies the security flaw without sacrificing the efficiency. The lesson learned is that the authenticators must be closely coupled with the identity, and we should prevent the identity from being separated from the authenticators in the future design of two‐factor authentication protocols. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.