Basudeb Bera, Ashok Kumar Das, Mohammad S. Obaidat, Pandi Vijayakumar · 6 authors
In Internet of Everything (IoE), malicious attacks detection and mitigation are important issues. These issues can be resolved through an access control framework where two entities first authenticate each other prior to establishing any secret key for their secure communication. The sensing data of various smart devices in an IoE environment are processed securely at the nearby fog servers and at the same time legitimate users can also access the real-time data directly from designated smart devices through access control mechanism. We first discuss various attack trends in an IoE environment. After that, we discuss evolution of the blockchain technology in the IoE. An artificial intelligence based blockchain-envisioned access control framework for malicious attacks detection and mitigation has been suggested to secure the IoE environment. Finally, a blockchain-based implementation has been conducted on the proposed blockchain-envisioned access control framework for measuring the computational time needed for varying number of blocks mined in the blockchain and also for varying number of transactions per block.
Raising incidents of security threats among active sessions is an increasing concern in IoT environment. Continuous authentication was introducing to be superior to traditional authentication schemes by constantly verify users’ identities on an ongoing basis and spot the moment at which an illicit attacker seizes control of the session. However, several challenges remain unsolved. This research aims to investigate the power of Blockchain technology to provide real-time and non-intrusive continuous authentication for the IoT environment. Accordingly, a distributed and scalable continuous authentication solution based on Blockchain technology called CAB-IoT was proposed. It enabled fog nodes layer that tackles the limitations of IoT resources by providing localized processing of heavy continuous authentication-related tasks for a group of IoT devices. Besides, CAB-IoT introduced a trust module that depends on the face recognition machine learning model to detect outliers and abnormal access. Moreover, mutual authentication between end-users and fog nodes is also designed, as well as secure communication between the authenticated nodes. The results demonstrate a lightweight continuous authentication solution that achieved the desired balance between security and performance requirements where it was observed in a real-world environment for truly performance results. Security analysis and attack analysis are also considered during the evaluation.
In tracing the (robotically automated) logistics of large quantities of goods, inexpensive passive RFID tags are preferred for cost reasons. Accordingly, security between such tags and readers have primarily been studied among many issues of RFID. However, the authenticity of data cannot be guaranteed if logistics services can give false information. Although the use of blockchain is often discussed, it is simply a recording system, so there is a risk that false records may be written to it. As a solution, we propose a design in which a digitally signing, location-constrained and tamper-evident reader atomically writes an evidence to blockchain along with its reading and writing a tag. By semi-formal modeling, we confirmed that the confidentiality and integrity of the information can be maintained throughout the system, and digitally signed data can be verified later despite possible compromise of private keys or signature algorithms, or expiration of public key certificates. We also introduce a prototype design to show that our proposal is viable. This makes it possible to trace authentic logistics information using inexpensive passive RFID tags. Furthermore, by abstracting the reader/writer as a sensor/actuator, this model can be extended to IoT in general.
Blockchain is one of the most trending technologies in past five years and it is called the new generation of the internet. Bitcoin was the first technology that used blockchain concept in its system. Blockchain has intense attention from academic community, developers and programmers, because of its distinctive properties such as decentralization, persistency, anonymity and auditability. Blockchain technology has evolved and is applicable in various applications outside the field. This paper provides background on blockchain technology and presents a suitable and logical solution for user authentication based on blockchain via the unified smart pass platform that allows the user to login with all service providers channels.
Yujian Zhang, Fei Tong, Yuwei Xu, Jun Tao · 5 authors
The authentication protocol is commonly served as the first defense line against various attacks in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Conventional schemes usually employ public key infrastructure or cryptography-based algorithms, which suffer from high computational and storage cost. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving authentication scheme for VANETs based on consortium blockchain. The authenticity of a vehicle or a road-side unit is represented by its transaction capability on blockchain instead of a certificate or a cryptographic key. In support of that, we design a novel data structure based on the unspent transaction output (UTXO) combined with a set of online operations, including issue, transfer, query and revocation. Thus, the authentication between two entities is accomplished by on-chain verification and corresponding communications. We conduct a set of security and privacy analysis as well as implementing a prototype on the Hyperledger Fabric platform, to evaluate the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed scheme.
Dongcheng Li, W. Eric Wong, Matthew Chau, Sean Pan · 5 authors
Near-field communication (NFC) is one of the essential technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) that has facilitated mobile payment across different services. The technology has become increasingly popular, as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have revolutionized how payment systems can be designed. However, this technology is subject to security problems, such as man-in-the-middle attacks, doublespending, and replay attacks, raising the need to incorporate other solutions such as blockchain technology. Concerns about the security and privacy of payments using NFC technology raise the need to adopt blockchain-based cryptocurrency payment. For instance, NFC payment has been criticized for a lack of measures to counter potential attacks, such as brute force or double-spending. Thus, incorporating blockchain technology is expected to improve the security features of the NFC mobile payment protocol and improve user experience. Blockchain technology has been praised for enabling fair payment, as it permits direct transactions without engaging a third party. Therefore, integrating blockchain cryptocurrency in IoT devices will revolutionize the NFC payment method and provide value transfer using IoT devices. Combining NFC with blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies is necessary to address security and privacy problems. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential behind incorporating blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in the NFC payment protocol.
Biometric authentication is the preferred authentication scheme in modern computing systems. While it offers enhanced usability, it also requires cautious handling of sensitive users' biometric templates. In this paper, a distributed scheme that eliminates the requirement for a central node that holds users' biometric templates is presented. This is replaced by an Ethereum/IPFS combination to which the templates of the users are stored in a homomorphically encrypted form. The scheme enables the biometric authentication of the users by any third party service, while the actual biometric templates of the user never leave his device in non encrypted form. Secure authentication of users in enabled, while sensitive biometric data are not exposed to anyone. Experiments show that the scheme can be applied as an authentication mechanism with minimal time overhead.
2 source records
User Authentication and Security Systems
Biometric Identification and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In recent years there have been increased efforts to make supply chains transparent and traceable to better protect the end consumer's interests against counterfeiting, contamination, false claims, and inadequate processes. The actors in the supply chain can also leverage additional visibility to proactively tune their operations in response to upstream or downstream disruptions. Blockchain technology, with its promise of immutability, transparency, and provenance is a natural fit to supply chain problems. Several works have discussed the improved design of supply chains leveraging blockchain technology. There have been attempts to address some of the privacy concerns of participants on the blockchain network by using encryption schemes to hide confidential data and group signatures to hide the participant identities. But these do not handle the complexities of the supply chain, where items are constantly packaged, repackaged, and transformed before reaching the end consumer. Our work presents a blockchain-based model for the supply chain that provides privacy and traceability with efficient contamination tracing while accounting for the aforementioned complexities of the supply chain operations. The last property enables an end consumer to be convinced about a product to be unaffected by identified faulty upstream processes (contamination) without access to the entire history of the product. Our solution makes novel use of cryptographic tools such as zero-knowledge proofs and cryptographic accumulators to provide these guarantees. The choice of the cryptographic components is grounded in concrete efficiency, and we present an experimental evaluation of the implementation of our protocol on Hyperledger Fabric, a popular platform for enterprise blockchains.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
User Authentication and Security Systems
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Shashank Agrawal, Saikrishna Badrinarayanan, Pratyay Mukherjee, Peter Rindal
We use biometrics like fingerprints and facial images to identify ourselves to our mobile devices and log on to applications everyday. Such authentication is internal-facing: we provide measurement on the same device where the template is stored. If our personal devices could participate in external-facing authentication too, where biometric measurement is captured by a nearby external sensor, then we could also enjoy a frictionless authentication experience in a variety of physical spaces like grocery stores, convention centers, ATMs, etc. The open setting of a physical space brings forth important privacy concerns though. We design a suite of secure protocols for external-facing authentication based on the cosine similarity metric which provide privacy for both user templates stored on their devices and the biometric measurement captured by external sensors in this open setting. The protocols provide different levels of security, ranging from passive security with some leakage to active security with no leakage at all. With the help of new packing techniques and zero-knowledge proofs for Paillier encryption -- and careful protocol design, our protocols achieve very practical performance numbers. For templates of length 256 with elements of size 16 bits each, our fastest protocol takes merely 0.024 seconds to compute a match, but even the slowest one takes no more than 0.12 seconds. The communication overhead of our protocols is very small too. The passive and actively secure protocols (with some leakage) need to exchange just 16.5KB and 27.8KB of data, respectively. The first message is designed to be reusable and, if sent in advance, would cut the overhead down to just 0.5KB and 0.8KB, respectively.
N Sivaselvan, Vivekananda Bhat K, Muttukrishnan Rajarajan
Authentication and access control techniques are fundamental security elements to restrict access to critical resources in IoT environment. In the current state-of-the-art approaches in the literature, the architectures do not address the security features of authentication and access control together. Besides, they don't completely fulfill the key Internet-of-Things (IoT) features such as usability, scalability, interoperability and security. In this paper, we introduce a novel blockchain-based architecture for authentication and capability-based access control for IoT environment. A capability is a token which contains the access rights authorized to the device holding it. The architecture uses blockchain technology to carry out all the operations in the scheme. It does not embed blockchain technology into the resource-constrained IoT devices for the purpose of authentication and access control of the devices. However, the IoT devices and blockchain are connected by means of interfaces through which the essential communications are established. The authenticity of such interfaces are verified before any communication is made. Consequently, the architecture satisfies usability, scalability, interoperability and security features. We carried out security evaluation for the scheme. It exhibits strong resistance to threats like spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, and Denial-of-Service (DoS). We also developed a proof of concept implementation where cost and storage overhead of blockchain transactions are studied.
Anders Dalskov, Daniele Lain, Enis Ulqinaku, Kari Kostiainen · 5 authors
Encrypted cloud storage services are steadily increasing in popularity, with many commercial solutions currently available. In such solutions, the cloud storage is trusted for data availability, but not for confidentiality. Additionally, the user's device is considered secure, and the user is expected to behave correctly. We argue that such assumptions are not met in reality: e.g., users routinely forget passwords and fail to make backups, and users' devices get stolen or become infected with malware. Therefore, we consider a more extensive threat model, where users' devices are susceptible to attacks and common human errors are possible. Given this model, we analyze 10 popular commercial services and show that none of them provides good confidentiality and data availability. Motivated by the lack of adequate solutions in the market, we design a novel scheme called Two-Factor Encryption (2FE) that draws inspiration from two-factor authentication and turns file encryption and decryption into an interactive process where two user devices, like a laptop and a smartphone, must interact. 2FE provides strong confidentiality and availability guarantees, as it withstands compromised cloud storage, one stolen or compromised user device at a time, and various human errors. 2FE achieves this by leveraging secret sharing with additional techniques such as oblivious pseudorandom functions and zero-knowledge proofs. We evaluate 2FE experimentally and show that its performance overhead is small. Finally, we explain how our approach can be adapted to other related use cases such as cryptocurrency wallets.
Communication security between IoT devices is a major concern in this area, and the blockchain has raised hopes that this concern will be addressed. In the blockchain concept, the majority or even all network nodes check the validity and accuracy of exchanged data before accepting and recording them, whether this data is related to financial transactions or measurements of a sensor or an authentication message. In evaluating the validity of an exchanged data, nodes must reach a consensus in order to perform a special action, in which case the opportunity to enter and record transactions and unreliable interactions with the system is significantly reduced. Recently, in order to share and access management of IoT devices information with distributed attitude a new authentication protocol based on blockchain is proposed and it is claimed that this protocol satisfies user privacy preserving and security. However, in this paper, we show that this protocol has security vulnerabilities against secret disclosure, replay, traceability, and <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M1"> <a:mtext>Token</a:mtext> </a:math> reuse attacks with the success probability of 1 and constant complexity of also 1. We also proposed an improved blockchain-based authentication protocol (IBCbAP) that has security properties such as secure access management and anonymity. We implemented IBCbAP using JavaScript programming language and Ethereum local blockchain. We also proved IBCbAP’s security both informally and formally through the Scyther tool. Our comparisons showed that IBCbAP could provide suitable security along with reasonable cost.
Yang Xia, Bing Li, Yan Zhang, Jiaxin Wu · 5 authors
With the development of the Internet of Things technology, the use of smart devices is ubiquitous, thereby making the smart home become an innovative IoT application to change our lives. However, the application of smart home should serve thousands of families and the number of edge servers and terminal devices s huge. Thus, it is difficult for a single central server or cluster to manage such large-scale devices with high efficiency. In addition, the structure of IoT is flexible and the edge or terminal devices can join a certain IoT system without strict restriction. The system may suffer from unauthorized access from malicious devices. In this paper, a physically secure authentication scheme for smart home based on a hybrid blockchain is proposed. A novel structure of the blockchain is leveraged to relieve the stress of the central server and storage device’s information permanently. Physical unclonable functions are used to provide identities for authorized devices. The security and evaluation analysis shows that our scheme has reliable security features and is the potential to improve the efficiency of the smart home system.
Filippos Fotopoulos, Vangelis Malamas, Thomas K. Dasaklis, Panayiotis Kotzanikolaou · 5 authors
The healthcare sector is rapidly integrating the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) technologies and adopting new practices regarding how patient data are collected, processed, and stored. Although various medical device authentication mechanisms have been proposed so far, most of them are power consuming, not cost-effective, or face scalability issues. We propose a novel IoMT authentication framework incorporating new concepts and technologies such as self-sovereign identity, zero-knowledge proofs, and blockchain technology to cover this gap. The architecture is built upon key elements of the healthcare ecosystem (hospital entities, device manufacturers, medical devices) and provides multientity IoMT authentication functionalities with revocation. We demonstrate the proposed architecture's efficiency through a proof of concept implementation based on Hyperledger Aries, Indy, and Ursa.
Dana Haj Hussein, Ragunath Anbarasu, Ashraf Matrawy, Mohamed Ibnkahla
The Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are transforming traditional businesses into digital-based platforms allowing for more service innovation, performance efficiency and customer satisfaction. Novel services enable users to utilize their personal devices (eg. mobile phones or laptops) to access the IoT platform, process data, and control the IoT infrastructure. However, these services impose critical user authentication and access control requirements. In this paper, we propose a decentralized user authentication and access control system for the IoT platforms via a permissioned blockchain network. We define an authorization sensitivity factor to provide clients with specific access control privileges and we consider an ehealth system as a use case example to demonstrate our solution. The proposed system is implemented using Ethereum platform. Besides, we investigate a threat model that considers an insider Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The proposed defense mechanism utilizes a modifier function in the smart contract and keeps a real-time record of legitimate users to restrict function calls. The results illustrate the benefits of the defense mechanism in terms of the system response time.
WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is one of the most popular technologies that provide the infrastructure for real-time data communications. Many applications used in military and civilian life depend on WebRTC technology directly or indirectly in the background. Due to its wide area of applications, the security of WebRTC communications is of great importance. In this paper, we improve the existing security infrastructure of WebRTC. The proposed solution provides a real-time communication infrastructure between peers on the network by making use of quite new and popular blockchain and smart contract technologies. Within the scope of the paper, a web-based application with video calling feature demonstrating blockchain interactions and suggested security enhancements have been developed. In the application, operations such as adding, updating, and authorizing users can be performed on the smart contract deployed on the live Ethereum network. Based on the principle of immutability of blockchains, users on the smart contract are mapped to the peers (nodes) in the WebRTC communication to be established and used in the identity verification process. Consequently, this paper proposes a secure identity verification method that could be used by real-time WebRTC communication peers to verify each other on the blockchain. The proposed solution is shown to resilient against man-in-the-middle attacks.
An important feature of Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains is full dynamic availability, allowing miners to go online and offline while requiring only 50% of the online miners to be honest. Existing Proof-of-stake (PoS), Proof-of-Space and related protocols are able to achieve this property only partially, either putting the additional assumption that adversary nodes to be online from the beginning and no new adversary nodes come online afterwards, or use additional trust assumptions for newly joining nodes.We propose a new PoS protocol PoSAT which can provably achieve dynamic availability fully without any additional assumptions. The protocol is based on the longest chain and uses a Verifiable Delay Function for the block proposal lottery to provide an arrow of time. The security analysis of the protocol draws on the recently proposed technique of Nakamoto blocks as well as the theory of branching random walks. An additional feature of PoSAT is the complete unpredictability of who will get to propose a block next, even by the winner itself. This unpredictability is at the same level of PoW protocols, and is stronger than that of existing PoS protocols using Verifiable Random Functions.
Oday Ali Hassen, Ansam A. Abdulhussien, Saad M. Darwish, Zulaiha Ali Othman · 6 authors
Blockchain technology has been commonly used in the last years in numerous fields, such as transactions documenting and monitoring real assets (house, cash) or intangible assets (copyright, intellectual property). The internet of things (IoT) technology, on the other hand, has become the main driver of the fourth industrial revolution, and is currently utilized in diverse fields of industry. New approaches have been established through improving the authentication methods in the blockchain to address the constraints of scalability and protection in IoT operating environments of distributed blockchain technology by control of a private key. However, these authentication mechanisms do not consider security when applying IoT to the network, as the nature of IoT communication with numerous entities all the time in various locations increases security risks resulting in extreme asset damage. This posed many difficulties in finding harmony between security and scalability. To address this gap, the work suggested in this paper adapts multimodal biometrics to strengthen network security by extracting a private key with high entropy. Additionally, via a whitelist, the suggested scheme evaluates the security score for the IoT system with a blockchain smart contract to guarantee that highly secured applications authenticate easily and restrict compromised devices. Experimental results indicate that our system is existentially unforgeable to an efficient message attack, and therefore, decreases the expansion of infected devices to the network by up to 49 percent relative to traditional schemes.
Oct 8, 2020·Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing
The constantly growing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and their resource-constrained nature makes them particularly vulnerable and increasingly attractive for exploitation by cyber criminals. Current estimates commonly reach the tens of billions for the number of connected 'things'. The heterogeneous capabilities of these devices serve as a motivation for resource sharing among them. However, for effective resource sharing, it is essential that trust be retained in the multitude of pervasive and diverse IoT devices. Remote attestation is a well-known technique used to build such trust. Thus, this paper proposes a blockchain based remote attestation protocol to establish trust between IoT devices. The blockchain offers a secure framework for device registration while the attestation is based on Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF). This combination of technologies results in a tamper resistant scheme with protection against physical and proxy attacks.
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
It is well known that users on open blockchains are tracked by an industry providing services to governments, law enforcement, secret services, and alike. While most blockchains do not protect their users' privacy and allow external observers to link transactions and addresses, a growing research interest attempts to design add-on privacy solutions to help users regain their privacy on non-private blockchains. In this work, we propose to our knowledge the first censorship resilient mixer, which can reward its users in a privacy-preserving manner for participating in the system. Increasing the anonymity set size, and diversity of users, is, as we believe, an important endeavor to raise a mixer's contributed privacy in practice. The paid-out rewards can take the form of governance tokens to decentralize the voting on system parameters, similar to how popular "DeFi farming" protocols operate. Moreover, by leveraging existing "Defi" lending platforms, AMR is the first mixer design that allows participating clients to earn financial interests on their deposited funds. Our system AMR is autonomous as it does not rely on any external server or third party. The evaluation of our AMR implementation shows that the system supports today on Ethereum anonymity set sizes beyond thousands of users, and a capacity of over $66,000$ deposits per day, at constant system costs. We provide a formal specification of our zksnark-based AMR system, a privacy and security analysis, implementation, and evaluation with both the MiMC and Poseidon hash functions.
Open access
2 source records
cs.CR
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Han Deng, Xiangwei Meng, Jun Guo, Erhui Xi · 5 authors
Purposed to collect and store human physiological data, WBANs as a telemedicine system play a significant role in sensor networks. The complex network environment presents a formidable challenge to the stability of the system and the security of the database. The traditional centralized architecture is to store the registration data of the sensor node and the patient's physiological data in the hub node. When the hub node is subjected to Denial of Service attacks (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS), there will be a single point of failure, so that the sensor node cannot establish a communication connection with the hub node. In this paper, a cloud server layer architecture based on blockchain technology is proposed for WBNAs to ensure system stability and patient data security. Meanwhile, Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) scheme is used to ensure patient physiological data safety.