The Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) is the amalgamation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods and the Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure, which are deployed there to improve the overall performance of the system. AIoT can be deployed to achieve more efficient IoT operations; thereby can improve human‐machine interactions and provide better data analysis. AI methods can be used to transform IoT data into useful information for the better decision‐making processes, and it further increases the overall usability of the system. AIoT frameworks are very useful and applicable in a variety of applications, like security and surveillance system, smart home, intelligent transportation system, smart farming, secure and safe healthcare monitoring, industrial automation and control, eCommerce, logistics operations and control, and many more. However, AIoT frameworks may have issues related to data security and privacy as they are vulnerable to various types of information security‐related attacks. These issues further cause the serious consequences, like the unauthorized data leakage and data update. Blockchain is a specific type of database. It is a digital ledger of transactions, which is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems. It stores data in the form of some blocks, which are then chained together. Blockchain is tamper proof and provides more security as compared to the traditional security mechanisms. Hence, blockchain can be integrated in various AIoT applications to provide more security. A generalized blockchain‐envisioned secure authentication framework for AIoT has been proposed. The adversary model of blockchain‐envisioned secure authentication framework for AIoT is also highlighted that covers most of the potential threats of a kind of communication environment. Various applications of the proposed framework are also discussed. Furthermore, different issues and challenges of the proposed framework are highlighted. In the end, we also provide some future research directions relevant to the proposed framework.
Myeonghyun Kim, Joonyoung Lee, Kisung Park, Yohan Park · 6 authors
Car-sharing systems can solve various urban problems by providing shared vehicles to people and reducing the operation of personal vehicles. With the development of the Internet of Things, people can easily use a shared car through simple operations on their mobile devices. However, the car-sharing system has security problems. Sensitive information, such as the user’s identity, location information, and access code, is transmitted through a public channel for car-sharing. Hence, an attacker can access this information for illegal purposes, making the establishment of a secure authentication protocol essential. Furthermore, the traditional car-sharing system is established on the centralized structure, so there is a single point of failure. Thus, the design of a decentralized car-sharing scheme is vital for solving the centralized problem. This study designed a decentralized car-sharing scheme using blockchain. Specifically, blockchain technology was used to provide a decentralization car-sharing service and ensure data integrity. The participant entities of the proposed system can be authenticated anonymously. The proposed car-sharing system can be secured against various attacks and provide mutual authentication using informal analysis, automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) simulation, and BAN logic analysis. The computation costs and communication costs of the proposed scheme were also analyzed.
Biometric verification has been widely deployed in current authentication solutions as it proves the physical presence of individuals. Several solutions have been developed to protect the sensitive biometric data in such systems that provide security against honest-but-curious (a.k.a. semi-honest) attackers. However, in practice, attackers typically do not act honestly and multiple studies have shown severe biometric information leakage in such honest-but-curious solutions when considering dishonest, malicious attackers. In this paper, we propose a provably secure biometric verification protocol to withstand malicious attackers and prevent biometric data from any leakage. The proposed protocol is based on a homomorphically encrypted log likelihood-ratio (HELR) classifier that supports any biometric modality (e.g., face, fingerprint, dynamic signature, etc.) encoded as a fixed-length real-valued feature vector. The HELR classifier performs an accurate and fast biometric recognition. Furthermore, our protocol, which is secure against malicious adversaries, is designed from a protocol secure against semi-honest adversaries enhanced by zero-knowledge proofs. We evaluate both protocols for various security levels and record a sub-second speed (between 0.37s and 0.88s) for the protocol secure against semi-honest adversaries and between 0.95s and 2.50s for the protocol secure against malicious adversaries.
Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) supporting the seamless operation of autonomous vehicles introduce various network-connected devices. The widespread devices are engaged in VANETs so that users can enjoy advantageous computing and reliable services. The combination brings in massive real-time message propagation and dissemination, which would be leveraged by the adversaries to perform data association, integration analysis and privacy mining. To address such challenges, existing authentication schemes use n pseudonym certificates for pre-defined k times and try to keep the vehicles anonymous. These schemes require fresh certificates for each authentication process, which cost more communication and storage resources. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy-preserving authentication protocol (P2BA) in bilinear groups, where a registered vehicle signs a traffic-related message and sends it to the nearby Road-side Unit (RSU) together with its blinded certificate. The RSU is able to independently check the message for validity based on a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof protocol. In this way, the computation time has been reduced fromO(n) toO(1) while the storage overhead fromO(nk) toO(n) compared to anonymous authentication protocols. Moreover, our scheme provides privacy properties such as anonymity and unlinkability. The simulations show that the message authentication can be processed by individual RSUs within 1 ms under the batch-enabled scheme, which outperforms the existing schemes in terms of computation overhead and latency.
Sasha Shilina, Dato Kavazi, Victor Smirnov, Viktor Smirnov · 9 authors
The advent of blockchain technology has led to a massive wave of different decentralized ledger technology (DLT) solutions. Such projects as Bitcoin and Ethereum have shifted the paradigm of how to transact value in a decentralized manner, but their various core technologies have their own advantages and disadvantages. This paper aims to describe an alternative to modern decentralized financial networks by introducing the Humanode network. Humanode is a network safeguarded by cryptographically secure bio-authorized nodes. Users will be able to deploy nodes by staking their encrypted biometric data. This approach can potentially lead to the creation of a public, permissionless financial network based on consensus between equal human nodes with algorithm-based emission mechanisms targeting real value growth and proportional emission. Humanode combines different technological stacks to achieve a decentralized, secure, scalable, efficient, consistent, immutable, and sustainable financial network: 1) a bio-authorization module based on cryptographically secure neural networks for the private classification of 3D templates of users' faces 2) a private Liveness detection mechanism for identification of real human beings 3) a Substrate module as a blockchain layer 4) a cost-based fee system 5) a Vortex decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governing system 6) a monetary policy and algorithm, Fath, where monetary supply reacts to real value growth and emission is proportional. All of these implemented technologies have nuances that are crucial for the integrity of the network. In this paper we address these details, describing problems that might occur and their possible solutions. The main goal of Humanode is to create a stable and just financial network that relies on the existence of human life.
Xudong Jia, Ning Hu, Shi Yin, Yan Zhao · 6 authors
The fifth-generation mobile communication technology (5G) provides high-bandwidth and low-latency data channels for massive IoT terminals to access the core business network. At the same time, it also brings higher security threats and challenges. Terminal identity authentication is an important security mechanism to ensure the core business network; however, most of the existing solutions adopt a centralized authentication model. Once the number of authentication requests exceeds the processing capacity of the authentication center service, it will cause authentication request congestion or deadlock. The decentralized authentication model can effectively solve the above problems. This article proposes a decentralized IoT authentication scheme called A2 Chain. First, A2 Chain uses edge computing to decentralize the processing of authentication requests and eliminate the burden on authentication services and the network. Second, to implement cross-domain identity verification of IoT devices, A2 Chain uses blockchain, and sidechain technologies are used to securely share the identity verification information of IoT devices. Additionally, A2 Chain replaces public key infrastructure (PKI) algorithm with identity-based cryptography (IBC) algorithm to eliminate the management overhead caused by centralized authentication model.
Mamun Ahmed, Saha Reno, Nelofa Akter, Fahmida Haque
Forensic pathology applies medical skills and knowledge to a criminal inquiry that recognizes or develops the information regarding the accidental or unlawful death of an innocent person or the victims of significant physical injury. It is a legal process which collects, examines, analyzes and reports the evidence. Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned and private blockchain structure which includes the present estimation of the element's property and the historical backdrop of transactions. In forensic department, every piece of evidence should be properly identified, collected, preserved, analyzed and finally admitted to the proper authority. But in reality assembling, evaluating, storing evidence is not secured enough. So in this paper, we are focused on creating a blockchain based medical forensic system using Hyperledger. The system can track any unauthorized access and modification by retrieving the Historian Record and Asset Registries and thus guarantees the impartiality of evidence, secrecy and validity of transactions.
The Internet of Things (IoT), which uses the internet to connect users (devices) from various fields, has become widely popular nowadays. It is predicted that IoT will play an increasingly important role and be deployed in people ' s daily life. However, there are still various security issues to be addressed in IoT, such as decentralized authentication, low power device and lightweight cryptographic framework, privacy problems, and so on. Blockchain technology, with the characteristics of decentralization, permissionless, transparency, and immutable, has received great attention. To address these security risks, especially the decentralized authentication problem of IoT, and improve the credibility of the authentication, this paper presents a Blockchain-Based Secure Framework (BBSF) for IoT applications. With a smart contract, BBSF supports certificate issuance, update, revocation, and audit functions. We also conduct security analysis and show that the proposed BBSF provides confidentiality, availability, data integrity, and so on. In addition, We deploy BBSF with Ethereum to verify the system stability, scalability, and efficiency.
Pouriya Alikhani, Nicolas Brunner, Claude Crépeau, Sébastien Designolle · 8 authors
Protecting secrets is a key challenge in our contemporary information-based era. In common situations, however, revealing secrets appears unavoidable, for instance, when identifying oneself in a bank to retrieve money. In turn, this may have highly undesirable consequences in the unlikely, yet not unrealistic, case where the bank's security gets compromised. This naturally raises the question of whether disclosing secrets is fundamentally necessary for identifying oneself, or more generally for proving a statement to be correct. Developments in computer science provide an elegant solution via the concept of zero-knowledge proofs: a prover can convince a verifier of the validity of a certain statement without facilitating the elaboration of a proof at all. In this work, we report the experimental realisation of such a zero-knowledge protocol involving two separated verifier-prover pairs. Security is enforced via the physical principle of special relativity, and no computational assumption (such as the existence of one-way functions) is required. Our implementation exclusively relies on off-the-shelf equipment and works at both short (60 m) and long distances ($\geqslant$400 m) in about one second. This demonstrates the practical potential of multi-prover zero-knowledge protocols, promising for identification tasks and blockchain applications such as cryptocurrencies or smart contracts.
Open access
3 source records
Cryptography and Data Security
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
D.R. Anita Sofia Liz, M. Stefi Vinciya, H. Saagarika, Aravind Ramachandran
The rapid improvement of a secure machine for mobile computing, statistics storage and retrieval prompts the idea of blockchain-primarily based healthcare. Top notch healthcare services is needed which can be provided with the modern-day technology to aid patients and hospitals alike. The blockchain may be a comfortable platform that allows health care organisations to manage, store data of patients, their wellbeing in a transparent manner. The need for quality health care services with advanced technologies which could satisfy patients and health care organisation mutually. The proposed system is to store the patient’s details in a very secured way, to trace the patient’s prescription, to check the provision of the prescribed medicines within the nearby pharmacies and to permit only the rightful user to access the data. Blockchain technology has been gaining attraction from a wide range of stakeholders such as finance, healthcare, utilities, actual estate, and government groups.
Traditional security solutions that rely on public key infrastructure present scalability and transparency challenges when deployed in Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we develop a blockchain based authentication mechanism for IoT that can be integrated into the traditional transport layer security protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS). Our proposed mechanism is an alternative to the traditional Certificate Authority (CA)-based Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that relies on x.509 certificates. Specifically, the proposed solution enables the modified TLS/DTLS a viable option for resource constrained IoT devices where minimizing memory utilization is critical. Experiments show that blockchain based authentication can reduce dynamic memory usage by up to 20%, while only minimally increasing application image size and time of execution of the TLS/DTLS handshake.
Since a smart dust Internet of Things (IoT) system includes a very large number of devices sometimes deployed in hard-access areas, it is very difficult to prevent security attacks and to alleviate bottleneck phenomena. In this paper, we propose a lightweight blockchain scheme that helps device authentication and data security in a secure smart dust IoT environment. To achieve our goals, (1) we propose the structure of the lightweight blockchain and the algorithm of processing the blockchain. In addition, (2) we reorganize the linear block structure of the conventional blockchain into the binary tree structure in such a way that the proposed blockchain is more efficient in a secure smart dust IoT environment. Experiments show that the proposed binary tree-structured lightweight blockchain scheme can greatly reduce the time required for smart dust device authentication, even taking into account the tree transformation overhead. Compared with the conventional linear-structured blockchain scheme, the proposed binary tree-structured lightweight blockchain scheme achieves performance improvement by up to 40% (10% in average) with respect to the authentication time.
The interconnection of private resources on public infrastructure, user mobility and the emergence of new technologies (vehicular networks, sensor networks, Internet of things, etc.) have added new requirements in terms of security on the server side as well as the client side. Examples include the processing time, mutual authentication, client participation in the choice of security settings and protection against traffic analysis. Internet of Things (IoT) is in widespread use and its applications cover many aspects of today's life, which results in a huge and continuously increasing number of objects distributed everywhere.Security is no doubt the element that will improve and strengthen the acceptability of IoT, especially that this large scale deployment of IoT systems will attract the appetite of the attackers. The current cyber-attacks that are operational on traditional networks will be projected towards the Internet of Things. Security is so critical in this context given the underlying stakes; in particular, authentication has a critical importance given the impact of the presence of malicious node within the IoT systems and the harm they can cause to the overall system. The research works in this thesis aim to advance the literature on IoT authentication by proposing three authentication schemes that satisfy the needs of IoT systems in terms of security and performance, while taking into consideration the practical deployment-related concerns. One-Time Password (OTP) is an authentication scheme that represents a promising solution for IoT and smart cities environments. This research work extends the OTP principle and propose a new approach to generate OTP based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Isogeny to guarantee the security of such protocol. The performance results obtained demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach in terms of security and performance.We also rely on blockchains in order to propose two authentication solutions: first, a simple and lightweight blockchain-based authentication scheme for IoT systems based on Ethereum, and second, an adaptive blockchain-based authentication and authorization approach for IoT use cases. We provided a real implementation of our proposed solutions. The extensive evaluation provided, clearly shows the ability of our schemes to meet the different security requirements with a lightweight cost in terms of performance.
Jeffrey A. Young, Amar Rasheed, Ray R. Heshemi, Ayman Bagabas
The Internet of Things (IoT) is completely transforming the way network-connected devices are made. Manufacturers and intelligent transportation systems are using thousands of IoT devices and machine-to-machine communication to drive industrial automation. Existing access control schemes for IoT authentication fail to support user anonymity. They rely on the surrendering of the device/user authentication parameters to the trusted server, which hence can be utilized by the IoT infrastructure to track users' behavioral patterns. Furthermore, existing access control mechanisms lack the support of run-time integrity assessment capabilities that are used to verify the authenticity of an authentication process during execution. This paper presents a parametrized crypto-based privacy-preserving authentication protocol that support anonymity, it is based on Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP). Without the loss of anonymity, a methodological framework for bootstrapping a parametrized authentication process's integrity is introduced herein. We show that run-time integrity assessment of an authentication process running on an IoT device can be achieved through the utilization of the IoT device's physical characteristics, specifically energy consumption and computation time. Behavioral patterns based on the device's power/energy consumption for the ZKP-based protocol were captured and recorded during this effort. In addition, fine-grained behavioral patterns that capture the authentication protocol's processing time were collected and analyzed. To validate the proposed scheme, it was fully implemented and deployed on an IoT testbed. We have tested the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of power consumption and computation time.
A significant challenge in blockchain and cryptocurrencies is protecting private keys from potential hackers because nobody can rollback a transaction made with a stolen key once the blockchain network confirms the transaction. The technical solution to protect private keys is cryptocurrency wallets, a piece of software, hardware, or a combination of them to manage the keys. In this paper, we propose a multilayered architecture for cryptocurrency wallets based on a Defense-in-Depth strategy to protect private keys with a balance between convenience and security. The user protects the private keys in three restricted layers with different protection mechanisms. So, a single breach cannot threaten the entire fund, and it saves time for the user to respond. We implement a proof-of-concept of our proposed architecture on both a smart card hardware wallet and an Android smartphone wallet with no performance penalty. Furthermore, we analyze the security of our proposed architecture with two adversary models.
U. P. Ellewala, W.D.H.U Amarasena, H.V Sachini Lakmali, L.M.K Senanayaka · 5 authors
The boundaries between personal and business communications is a key issue faced by most organizations. Use of unsecured and unsafe applications in workplaces pose enormous security risks. Companies are not adequately aware about the applications that are being used in their employees' devices. When it comes to critical business communication involving exchanging trade secrets, making business referrals and strategic business decisions, protecting of messages and shared files becomes a challenge. Most publicly available communication platforms do not empower organizations to regulate, track and scale their communication and does not provide compliance with data protection frameworks, which can result in cross industry system risks. As a result, both individuals and organizations express deep concern about data security and protection of privacy when using Instant Messaging applications. Non-repudiation in communications not only conveys to the user, recognition of the communication process, but it is also a crucial way to establish a relationship of trust and to overcome trust disputes. Our primary objective, through this research, is to develop a chat application with more secure channels of enterprise level communication. Using new technologies such as blockchain, which operate on a decentralized model, we can surmount the drawbacks of traditional messaging applications, thereby ensuring confidentiality, integrity and availability of official data, along with advanced auditing features.
User identity and personal information remain to be hot targets for attackers. From recent surveys, we can categorize that 65.5% of all cyberattacks in 2018 target user information. Sadly, most of the time, the system's security depends on how secure it is the implementation from the provider-side. One defense technique that the user can take part in is applying a two-factor authentication (2FA) system for their account. However, we observe that state-of-the-art 2FAs have several weaknesses and limitations. In this paper, we propose TwoChain, a blockchain-based 2FA system for web services to overcome those issues. Our implementation facilitates an alternative 2FA system that is more secure, disposable, and decentralized. Finally, we release TwoChain for public use.
Security is one of the major challenges of the Internet of Things (IoT). In an IoT network, data are processed and exchanged without human intervention. Because of this autonomy, objects must authenticate each other as well as to ensure the integrity of the exchanged data. An efficient authentication scheme allows to protect the network against several attacks. Several IoT authentication schemes have already been proposed but they are mostly ineffective and sometimes have limitations. This work proposes a new mutual authentication scheme for IoT based on digital signatures, the Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) and the blockchain technology. The Global Assessment and analyses show that our new protocol gives more resistance to different types of attacks, and that it also provides a better performance in terms of computing load although it requires fewer storage resources.
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
In 2008, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which is equivalent to the original idea of a blockchain, emerged as a new currency and revolutionized the digital exchange of value. Despite the great user and research interest, the customary practice is still complex. Poor usability and negative user experience lead to several security threats. This work examines the mitigation of third party attack vectors and non-malicious human failure types identified in the personal payment process. Current approaches are analyzed and a new payment protocol is specified to foster the exchange of preparatory payment information. The qualitative evaluation reveals a significant improvement over the current best-practice exchange procedure. The system demonstrates a balance between security and usability and provides a method for more user-friendly blockchain transactions.
Dec 1, 2020·2020 IEEE 22nd International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications; IEEE 18th International Conference on Smart City; IEEE 6th International Conference on Data Science and Systems (HPCC/SmartCity/DSS)
The Internet of Things, which connects users (devices) from various fields, has attracted great attention of the public nowadays. It is predicted that IoT will play an increasingly important role in people's daily life. The rapid expansion and extensive applications of IoT pose a significant challenge of authentication due to huge amount of IoT devices. Blockchain offers a promising approach for decentralized authentication in IoT networks with its inherent characteristics. To provide an efficient decentralized mutual authentication and privacy protection for IoT users, this paper presents a blockchain based authentication framework for IoT applications. We conduct security analysis and show that the proposed framework achieves sufficient security provision such as identity anonymity, perfect secrecy, traceability, and resistance to common attacks, etc. In addition, the framework is deployed to the Ethereum to verify its efficiency in terms of storage cost, computational and communication overheads.