Search

Universal Serial Bus (USB) is widely used, for example to facilitate hot-swapping and plug-and-play. However, USB ports can be exploited by an adversary to extract private or personal data from the connected devices. Hence, a number of organizations and workplaces have prohibited their employees from using USB devices, and there have been efforts to design secure USB storage device schemes to more effectively resist different known security attacks. However, designing such schemes is challenging. For example, in this article we revisit the Wei et al.’s scheme, and demonstrate that it is vulnerable to attacks such as password guessing and user impersonation. We also explain that the scheme does not verify the correctness of user’s input in the login phase, which is another design flaw. Then, we present an improved scheme and prove it secure in the random oracle model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital signature schemes have been extensively studied in the literature, where a large number of such schemes with different properties have been designed for different applications. For example, identity-based signature (IBS) schemes can efficiently map a user’s digital public key to his/her real-world identity (e.g., e-mail address). However, existing implementations of IBS schemes are not generally designed for white-box security (WBS), particularly concerning the protection of the private key when special attackers have full access to the execution environment. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the first white-box implementation for the classical Shamir’s IBS scheme. The basic idea is to utilize a mathematical transformation for embedding private key into some special tables, such that the original private key could be “invisible” during the execution process. We then analyze the security requirements achieved in our implementation, including the conventional black-box security under the random oracle model and WBS (e.g., key recovery attack resilience). This is the first IBS scheme implementation that satisfies WBS. It is also shown from the simulation that the implementation incurs a constant computational cost, which is realistic in deployments where a high security level is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A wireless sensor network (WSN) typically consists of a large number of resource-constrained sensor nodes and several control or gateway nodes. Ensuring the security of the asymmetric nature of WSN is challenging, and designing secure and efficient user authentication and key agreement schemes for WSNs is an active research area. For example, in 2016, Farash et al. proposed a user authentication and key agreement scheme for WSNs. However, we reveal previously unpublished vulnerabilities in their scheme, which allow an attacker to carry out sensor node spoofing, password guessing, user/sensor node anonymity, and user impersonation attacks. We then present a scheme, which does not suffer from the identified vulnerabilities. To demonstrate the practicality of the scheme, we evaluate the scheme using NS-2 simulator. We then prove the scheme secure using Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The automatic-dependent surveillance-broad-cast (ADS-B) is generally regarded as the most important module in air traffic surveillance technology. To obtain better airline security, ADS-B system will be deployed in most airspace by 2020, where aircraft will be equipped with an ADS-B device that periodically broadcasts messages to other aircraft and ground station controllers. Due to the open communication environment, the ADS-B system is subject to a broad range of attacks. To simultaneously implement both integrity and authenticity of messages transmitted in the ADS-B system, Yang et al. proposed a new authentication frame based on the three-level hierarchical identity-based signature (TLHIBS) scheme with batch verification, as well as constructing two schemes for the ADS-B system. However, neither TLHIBS schemes are sufficiently lightweight for practical deployment due to the need for complex hash-to-point operation or expensive certification management. In this paper, we construct an efficient TLHIBS scheme with batch verification for the ADS-B system. Our scheme does not require hash-to-point operation or (expensive) certification management. We then prove the TLHIBS scheme secure in the random oracle model. We also demonstrate the practicality of the scheme using experiments, whose findings indicate that the TLHIBS scheme supports attributes required by the ADS-B system without the computation cost in Chow et al.’s scheme and Yang et al.’s TLHIBS schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A modified version of the Bellare and Rogaway (1993) adversarial model is encoded using Asynchronous Product Automata (APA). A model checker tool, Simple Homomorphism Verification Tool (SHVT), is then used to perform state-space analysis on the Automata in the setting of planning problem. The three-party identity-based secret public key protocol (3P-ID-SPK) protocol of Lim and Paterson (2006), which claims to provide explicit key authentication, is used as a case study. We then refute its heuristic security argument by revealing a previously unpublished flaw in the protocol using SHVT. We then show how our approach can automatically repair the protocol. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first work that integrates an adversarial model from the computational complexity paradigm with an automated tool from the computer security paradigm to analyse protocols in an artificial intelligence problem setting – planning problem – and, more importantly, to repair protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We revisit the password-based group key exchange protocol due to Lee et al. (2004), which carries a claimed proof of security in the Bresson et al. model under the intractability of the Decisional Diffie–Hellman problem (DDH) and Computational Diffie–Hellman (CDH) problem. We reveal a previously unpublished flaw in the protocol and its proof, whereby we demonstrate that the protocol violates the definition of security in the model. To provide a better insight into the protocol and proof failures, we present a fixed protocol. We hope our analysis will enable similar mistakes to be avoided in the future. We also revisit protocol 4 of Song and Kim (2000), and reveal a previously unpublished flaw in the protocol (i.e., a reflection attack). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]