New efficient user identification and key distribution scheme providing enhanced security

Apart from user identification and key distribution, it is very useful for the login process to achieve user anonymity. Recently, Wu and Hsu proposed an efficient user identification scheme with key distribution while preserving user anonymity by extending an earlier work of Lee and Chang. We however find out that the Wu and Hsu scheme has a serious weakness, which can be exploited by the service provider to learn the secret token of the user who requests services from the service provider. We further propose a scheme to overcome this limitation while attaining the same set of objectives as the previous works. Performance analyses have shown that efficiency in terms of both computation and communication is not sacrificed in our scheme.     

An efficient mutual authentication and key agreement protocol preserving user anonymity in mobile networks

We address the problem of mutual authentication and key agreement with user anonymity for mobile networks. Recently, Lee et al. proposed such a scheme, which is claimed to be a slight modification of, but a security enhancement on Zhu et al.’s scheme based on the smart card. In this paper, however, we reveal that both schemes still suffer from certain weaknesses which have been previously overlooked, and thus are far from the desired security. We then propose a new protocol which is immune to various known types of attacks. Analysis shows that, while achieving identity anonymity, key agreement fairness, and user friendliness, our scheme is still cost-efficient for a general mobile node.     

A novel electronic cash system with trustee-based anonymity revocation from pairing

Untraceable electronic cash is an attractive payment tool for electronic-commerce because its anonymity property can ensure the privacy of payers. However, this anonymity property is easily abused by criminals. In this paper, several recent untraceable e-cash systems are examined. Most of these provide identity revealing only when the e-cash is double spent. Only two of these systems can disclose the identity whenever there is a need, and only these two systems can prevent crime. We propose a novel e-cash system based on identity-based bilinear pairing to create an anonymity revocation function. We construct an identity-based blind signature scheme, in which a bank can blindly sign on a message containing a trustee-approved token that includes the user’s identity. On demand, the trustee can disclose the identity for e-cash using only one symmetric operation. Our scheme is the first attempt to incorporate mutual authentication and key agreement into e-cash protocols. This allows the proposed system to attain improvement in communication efficiency when compared to previous works.     

可分发密钥的双向口令认证方案

研究在认证服务器拥有公私钥对和客户端有容易记忆的弱口令条件下,实现强认证和密钥交换的安全协议.对Wangr的方案进行了安全性分析,发现该协议不能抵抗许多种攻击方式.提出一种在不安全网络上集口令认证、口令更改和密钥建立的方案,通过对新方案与Hwang-Yeh方案、Peyravian-Zunic方案、Peyravian-Jeffries方案和Wang方案进行的安全性对比分析,分析结果表明新口令认证方案具有更高的安全性和实用性.     

A novel key pre-distribution scheme for wireless distributed sensor networks

A novel key pre-distribution scheme for sensor networks is proposed, which enables sensor nodes to communicate securely with each other using cryptographic techniques. The approach uses the rational normal curves in the projective space with the dimension n over the finite field F q . Both secure connectivity and resilience of the resulting sensor networks are analyzed. By choosing the parameters q and n properly, this key pre-distribution scheme has some advantages over the previous known schemes. In addit...     

An efficient secure authentication scheme with user anonymity for roaming user in ubiquitous networks

Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications - Recently the advances in a variety of hardware/software technologies and wireless networking have brought explosive growth of mobile network/device...     

一种可认证密钥分配方案

给出一种新的可认证密钥分配方案，该方案基于差错控制编码理论中的系统线性分组码，而不使用任何加算法，它不仅对于抵御内外攻击者的攻击具有较高的安全性，而且还可以提高通信的可靠性。     

一种健壮的计算安全的分布式密钥分发方案

对基于DecisionalDiffie-Hellmen假设计算安全的分布式密钥分发方案进行改进,在其基础上利用可验证秘密共享和知识证明,提出一种健壮的计算安全的分布式密钥分发方案,以抵抗主动攻击,从而具有更高的安全性。     

A user friendly authentication scheme with anonymity for wireless communications

Secure user authentication is an important issue for wireless environment such as GSM, CDPD, and 3G and 4G wireless systems. Especially, anonymity of the mobile users should be guaranteed to protect the privacy of the mobile users. This paper proposes a user friendly authentication scheme with anonymity for wireless communications that not only can overcome the weaknesses of the previous related schemes, but also can provide efficiency and security to suitable for battery-powered mobile devices in wireless communication systems.     

A strong user authentication scheme with smart cards for wireless communications

Seamless roaming over wireless network is highly desirable to mobile users, and security such as authentication of mobile users is challenging. Recently, due to tamper-resistance and convenience in managing a password file, some smart card based secure authentication schemes have been proposed. This paper shows some security weaknesses in those schemes. As the main contribution of this paper, a secure and light-weight authentication scheme with user anonymity is presented. It is simple to implement for mobile user since it only performs a symmetric encryption/decryption operation. Having this feature, it is more suitable for the low-power and resource-limited mobile devices. In addition, it requires four message exchanges between mobile user, foreign agent and home agent. Thus, this protocol enjoys both computation and communication efficiency as compared to the well-known authentication schemes. As a special case, we consider the authentication protocol when a user is located in his/her home network. Also, the session key will be used only once between the mobile user and the visited network. Besides, security analysis demonstrates that our scheme enjoys important security attributes such as preventing the various kinds of attacks, single registration, user anonymity, no password/verifier table, and high efficiency in password authentication, etc. Moreover, one of the new features in our proposal is: it is secure in the case that the information stored in the smart card is disclosed but the user password of the smart card owner is unknown to the attacker. To the best of our knowledge, until now no user authentication scheme for wireless communications has been proposed to prevent from smart card breach. Finally, performance analysis shows that compared with known smart card based authentication protocols, our proposed scheme is more simple, secure and efficient.     

One-time encryption-key technique for the traditional DL-based encryption scheme with anonymity

In modern cryptosystem, Anonymity means that in some sense any adversary cannot tell which one of public keys has been used for encrypting a plaintext, and was first formally defined as the indistinguishability of keys by Bellare et al. in 2001. Recently, several well-known techniques have been proposed in order to achieve the anonymity of public-key encryption schemes. In this paper, anonymity is considered first from a new perspective. And then basing on this new perspective, a one-time encryption-key technique is proposed to achieve the anonymity of traditional discrete-logarithm-based (DL-based) encryption scheme. In this new technique, for each encryption, a random one-time encryption-key will be generated to encrypt the plaintext, instead of the original public-key. Consequently, in roughly speaking, by the randomness of the generated one-time encryption-key, this new technique should achieve the anonymity. Furthermore, in the formal proof of anonymity, only based on several weaker conditions, the one-time encryption-key technique efficiently achieves the provable indistinguishability of keys under chosen ciphertext attack (IK-CCA anonymity). As a result, compared with the work of Hayashi and Tanaka in 2006, the one-time encryption-key technique presented here has fewer requirements for achieving the provable anonymity.     

Bounds and constructions for unconditionally secure distributed key distribution schemes for general access structures

In this paper we investigate the issues concerning the use of a single server across a network, the key distribution center (KDC) to enable private communications within groups of users. After providing several motivations, showing the advantages related to the distribution of the task accomplished by this server, we describe a model for such a distribution, and present bounds on the amount of resources required in a real-world implementation: random bits, memory storage, and messages to be exchanged. Moreover, we introduce a linear algebraic approach to design optimal schemes distributing a KDC, and we point out that some previous constructions belong to the proposed framework.     

A new method for using hash functions to solve remote user authentication

Recently, Peyravian and Zunic proposed the remote password authentication schemes only based on the collision-resistant hash function. The schemes are, therefore, easy to implement and simple to use. The attractive properties cause a series of discussion. Several security flaws are found and remedied. Unfortunately, most of the remedies either are insecure or violate the original advantages because of involving public-key cryptosystems or modular exponential operations. Hence, it is still a challenge to design a secure scheme abiding by the beneficial assumption of the Peyravian-Zunic schemes. The proposed scheme not only keeps the original advantages (user friendness and computational cheapness) but also highlights certain of valuable features, such as (1) mutual authentication (higher security level), (2) server’s ignorance of users’ passwords (further security guaranee to users, specially for financial services), (3) immunity from maintaining security-sensitive table (maintaining burden reduction to servers), and so forth.     

Recursive protocol for group-oriented authentication with key distribution

The authors propose a recursive protocol for group-oriented authentication with key exchange, in which a group of n entities can authenticate with each other and share a group session key. The proposed protocol has the following characteristics: First, it requires O(n) rounds of messages, O(log n) completion time, O(log n) waiting time, and O(n log n) communication overhead in average for the completion of the recursion. Second, it not only meets the five principles suggested by Diffie et al. [Diffie, W., van Oorschot, P.C., Wiener, M.J., 1992. Authentication and authenticated key exchange. Designs, Codes, and Cryptography 2 (2), 107-125] on the design of a secure key exchange protocol, but also achieves the properties of nondisclosure, independency, and integrity addressed by Janson and Tsudik [Janson, P., Tsudik, G., 1995. Secure and minimal protocols for authenticated key distribution. Computer Communications 18 (9), 645-653] for the authentication of the group session key. Third, we describe the beliefs of trustworthy entities involved in our authentication protocol and the evolution of these beliefs as a consequence of communication by using BAN logic. Finally, it is practical and efficient, because only one-way hash function and exclusive-or (XOR) operations are used in implementation.     

Improvement of the secure dynamic ID based remote user authentication scheme for multi-server environment

Recently, Liao and Wang proposed a secure dynamic ID based remote user authentication scheme for multi-server environment, and claimed that their scheme was intended to provide mutual authentication, two-factor security, replay attack, server spoofing attack, insider and stolen verifier attack, forward secrecy and user anonymity. In this paper, we show that Liao and Wang's scheme is still vulnerable to insider's attack, masquerade attack, server spoofing attack, registration center spoofing attack and is not reparable. Furthermore, it fails to provide mutual authentication. To remedy these flaws, this paper proposes an efficient improvement over Liao–Wang's scheme with more security. The computation cost, security, and efficiency of the improved scheme are well suited to the practical applications environment.     

TinyPBC: Pairings for authenticated identity-based non-interactive key distribution in sensor networks

Key distribution in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is challenging. Symmetric cryptosystems can perform it efficiently, but they often do not provide a perfect trade-off between resilience and storage. Further, even though conventional public key and elliptic curve cryptosystems are computationally feasible on sensor nodes, protocols based on them are not, as they require the exchange and storage of large keys and certificates, which is expensive.Using Pairing-Based Cryptography (PBC) protocols parties can agree on keys without any interaction. In this work, we (i) show how security in WSNs can be bootstrapped using an authenticated identity-based non-interactive protocol and (ii) present TinyPBC, to our knowledge, the most efficient implementation of PBC primitives for 8, 16 and 32-bit processors commonly found in sensor nodes. TinyPBC is able to compute pairings, the most expensive primitive of PBC, in 1.90 s on ATmega128L, 1.27 s on MSP430 and 0.14 s on PXA27x.     

A random key establishment scheme for multi-phase deployment in large-scale distributed sensor networks

Several symmetric-key distribution mechanisms are proposed in the literature, but most of them are not scalable or they are vulnerable to a small number of captured nodes. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic random key establishment mechanism in large-scale distributed sensor networks, which supports deployment of sensor nodes in multiple phases. In the existing random key distribution schemes, nodes do not refresh their own keys, and thus, the keys in their key rings remain static throughout the lifetime of the network. One good property of our dynamic key distribution scheme is that the already deployed nodes in a deployment phase refresh their own keys in key rings before another deployment phase occurs. The strength of the proposed scheme is that it provides high resilience against node capture as compared to that for the other existing random key distribution schemes. Through analysis and simulation results, we show that our scheme achieves better network performances as compared to those for the existing random key distribution schemes. Finally, we propose an extended version of our scheme for practical usefulness to support high network connectivity and resilience against node capture.     

A secure user anonymity-preserving biometric-based multi-server authenticated key agreement scheme using smart cards

Advancement in communication technology provides a scalable platform for various services, where a remote user can access the server from anywhere without moving from its place. It provides a unique opportunity for online services such that a user does not need to be physically present at the service center. These services adopt authentication and key agreement protocols in order to ensure authorized and secure access to the resources. Most of the authentication schemes proposed in the literature support a single-server environment, where the user has to register with each server. If a user wishes to access multiple application servers, he/she requires to register with each server. The multi-server authentication introduces a scalable platform such that a user can interact with any server using single registration. Recently, Chuang and Chen proposed an efficient multi-server authenticated key agreement scheme based on a user’s password and biometrics (Chuang and Chen, 2014). Their scheme is a lightweight, which requires the computation of only hash functions. In this paper, we first analyze Chuang and Chen’s scheme and then identify that their scheme does not resist stolen smart card attack which causes the user’s impersonation attack and server spoofing attack. We also show that their scheme fails to protect denial-of-service attack. We aim to propose an efficient improvement on Chuang and Chen’s scheme to overcome the weaknesses of their scheme, while also retaining the original merits of their scheme. Through the rigorous informal and formal security analysis, we show that our scheme is secure against various known attacks including the attacks found in Chuang and Chen’s scheme. Furthermore, we simulate our scheme for the formal security verification using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool and show that our scheme is secure against the replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. In addition, our scheme is comparable in terms of the communication and computational overheads with Chuang and Chen’s scheme and other related existing schemes.     

A lightweight anonymous routing protocol without public key en/decryptions for wireless ad hoc networks

More attention should be paid to anonymous routing protocols in secure wireless ad hoc networks. However, as far as we know, only a few papers on secure routing protocols have addressed both issues of anonymity and efficiency. Most recent protocols adopted public key Infrastructure (PKI) solutions to ensure the anonymity and security of route constructing mechanisms. Since PKI solution requires huge and expensive infrastructure with complex computations and the resource constraints of small ad hoc devices; a two-layer authentication protocol with anonymous routing (TAPAR) is proposed in this paper. TAPAR does not adopt public key computations to provide secure and anonymous communications between source and destination nodes over wireless ad hoc networks. Moreover, TAPAR accomplishes mutual authentication, session key agreement, and forward secrecy among communicating nodes; along with integration of non-PKI techniques into the routing protocol allowing the source node to anonymously interact with the destination node through a number of intermediate nodes. Without adopting PKI en/decryptions, our proposed TAPAR can be efficiently implemented on small ad hoc devices while at least reducing the computational overhead of participating nodes in TAPAR by 21.75%. Our protocol is certainly favorable when compared with other related protocols.