The increasing prevalence of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and the substantial market requirements for IoT devices have led to a proliferation of malware attacks within the IoT environment. To ensure the security of IoT devices, it is imperative for device owners to maintain the currency of their device’s firmware. Nevertheless, the procedure of updating the firmware can pose significant difficulties for device owners who lack technological proficiency. The firmware upgrade process poses potential hazards for internet adversaries to initiate assaults against IoT devices. This paper introduces a firmware update framework that is both resilient and lightweight, employing skipchain technology. The primary objective of this framework is to guarantee the integrity of disseminated firmware and safeguard the process of firmware distribution. The proposed firmware update framework was supported by the development of two protocols: the secure firmware update release protocol and the secure firmware distribution protocol. A prototype is created to demonstrate the practicality of the suggested firmware update framework design. In order to evaluate the security robustness of the two proposed protocols, performance and security analyses were conducted.

In recent years, scholars have developed Identity-Based Matching Encryption (IB-ME), which enables both the sender and the receiver to specify identities, ensuring ciphertext confidentiality only when these identities match. Building on this concept, our work introduces Revocable Identity-Based Matching Encryption (RIB-ME), which incorporates a revocable mechanism to withdraw decryption rights from unauthorized users. Current RIB-ME schemes rely on a variant of the Diffie-Hellman assumption, rendering it susceptible to quantum computing attacks. To address this vulnerability, we propose a generic construction of RIB-ME inspired by Wang et al. Our approach employs two-level Revocable Hierarchical Identity-Based Encryption (RHIBE) and Identity-Based Signature (IBS) and is compatible with post-quantum encryption schemes. This enables the development of a generic construction of RIB-ME and the creation of the first post-quantum RIB-ME through the use of post-quantum constructions.

Nowadays, smartphone has become a vital tool for both productivity and entertainment that most people can't live without it. Due to the widespread usage of smartphone for both personal and professional purposes, many people consider them as private property. This means other people should not be able to freely gain access to their smartphone, because it contains a lot of sensitive data. Therefore, its security is a very important research area with the potential to benefit millions of people in the world. A security system that protects owners from any breaches of privacy is needed to ensure the data inside the device stays private. In this paper, we propose a new system for securing smartphone. We incorporate a multi-factor authentication method to provide high security. Our system also incorporates an implicit authentication method to continuously authenticate the user and prevent unauthorized individuals from accessing the device. A prototype based on the proposed system is also constructed.

Constructing intelligent and efficient transportation systems for modern metropolitan areas has become a very important quest for nations possessing metropolitan cities with ever-increasing populations. A new trend is the development of smart vehicles with multiple sensors able to dynamically form a temporary vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) or a vehicular sensor network (VSN). Along with a wireless-enabled roadside unit (RSU) network, drivers in a VSN can efficiently exchange important or urgent traffic information and make driving decisions accordingly. In order to support secure communication and driver privacy for vehicles in a VSN, we develop a new identity-based (ID-based) signature based on the elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) and then adopt it to propose a novel conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme based on our invented ID-based signature. This scheme provides secure authentication process for messages transmitted between vehicles and RSUs. A batch message verification mechanism is also supported by the proposed scheme to increase the message processing throughput of RSUs. To further enhance scheme efficiency, both pairing operation and MapToPoint operation are not applied in the proposed authentication scheme. In comparison with existing pseudo-ID-based authentication solutions for VSN, this paper shows that the proposed scheme has better performance in terms of time consumption.

Abstract Modern individuals heavily rely on the support of information systems. Various applications and information processing systems provide all kinds of assistance for people's lives such as information search, work scheduling, entertainment, and online shopping. For a user, in order to access an Internet‐connected system or an internal system within an enterprise, in general, a unique password is given to the user to log into the system. Therefore, how to conveniently maintain or remember multiple passwords has become a serious headache for people. In this study, a new chaotic maps‐based authenticated key agreement protocol is first proposed for multi‐server environments. A trusted third party, called the registration center (RC), is introduced in our protocol. Once a legal user has registered with the RC, this user can log into any server with only one memorable password in a multi‐server environment as long as the user has been granted access rights in advance. As security robustness of our protocol is built on randomly generated nonces and chaotic maps, there is no time synchronization issue. Security analyses and comparisons on performance efficiency and security features among existing protocols show that our protocol is computationally efficient, and withstands password‐guessing attacks and other well‐known security threats. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Privacy protection issues in Social Networking Sites (SNS) usually raise from insufficient user privacy control mechanisms offered by service providers, unauthorized usage of user's data by SNS, and lack of appropriate privacy protection schemes for user's data at the SNS servers.In this paper, we propose a privacy protection model based on danger theory concept to provide automatic detection and blocking of sensitive user information revealed in social communications.By utilizing the dynamic adaptability feature of danger theory, we show how a privacy protection model for SNS users can be built with system effectiveness and reasonable computing cost.A prototype based on the proposed model is constructed and evaluated.Our experiment results show that the proposed model achieves 88.9% detection and blocking rate in average for user-sensitive data revealed by the services of SNS.

ABSTRACT Recently, mobile networks and radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies are both widely applied by many enterprises to develop their applications. The third‐generation (3G) mobile network technology is one of the popular mobile network technologies because service providers can serve users anytime and anywhere through 3G mobile network technology. A solution that combines RFID technology with 3G mobile network technology could identify users anytime and anywhere. However, RFID tags are limited in computation power and suffered from security threats, especially on mobile networks. An authentication with low‐cost RFID tags in Mobile Networks should be proposed in this paper. This paper designs a key agreement mechanism to achieve consistency, integration, legality, and safety. In order to design a low‐cost scheme, our authentication mechanism is built of simple XOR operations and one‐way hash function. Although the computation cost of our proposed mechanism is not the best, our proposed mechanism can achieve more security requirements for practical applications. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Smart card based authentication scheme has been widely utilized for various transaction-oriented services such as electronic currency exchange, social insurance payment and e-commerce payment charge in modern society. How to develop a smart card based authentication scheme to support initiator untraceability and defend against major security threats for a transaction service user has become a crucial topic for researchers. Recent efforts for developing anonymous authentication scheme with smart card have failed to provide initiator untraceability for user or been vulnerable to some security attacks. This paper first presents a security model for anonymous authentication and then proposes a new anonymous authentication scheme using smart card. Security robustness of the proposed scheme is constructed by one-way hash function and elliptic curve cryptosystem. Our security analysis shows that the proposed scheme achieves general security requirement and offers initiator untraceability for user without requiring database support. Performance analysis on communication overhead and computation cost shows that the proposed scheme has better or similar efficiency in comparison with other existing smart card based authentication schemes.

In order to protect privacy of RFID tag against malicious tag tracing activities, many RFID authentication protocols with the secret key update scheme have been proposed to support forward security. These proposals are symmetric key based in common due to the lack of computational resource to perform heavy asymmetric cryptographic operations in low-cost tags. In this paper, we have demonstrated that four RFID authentication protocols are vulnerable to a de-synchronization attack. The secret values shared between any given tag and the backend server can easily be de-synchronized through a series of attack process (or incomplete protocol runs). Our results indicate that these four schemes are naturally limited by their essential design and more rigorous security analyses are accordingly required. In addition, any extension from these four protocols may incur the insecurity owing to the same underlying protocol design.

Recently, lightweight RFID authentication protocol has been investigated extensively due to the awareness of practical requirements on individual privacy, robust system security and resource limitation of low-cost tags. Research studies have demonstrated major advancements in the direction of designing a secure access control mechanism for RFID system with resource-constrained tags. In 2008, Burmester and Medeiros developed an EPC Class 1 Generation 2 (EPC Gen2) compliant authentication protocol, called TRAP-3, to support tag anonymity, data confidentiality and forward security in which only primitive computation functions such as 32-bit pseudo random generator and simple exclusive-or operation are required. Nevertheless, TRAP-3 is vulnerable to desynchronization attack. The secret key value, which is shared between the tag and the backend database, can be out of synchronization by just performing a series of challenge-response operations. To remedy this authentication flaw, in this study we develop a countermeasure mechanism and accordingly gain security enhancement for TRAP-3.

Fault tolerant algorithms are presented for broadcasting on the star graph. In our algorithm, fault tolerance is achieved by constructing an isomorphism of the star network, such that the faulty nodes minimally disrupt the message passing sequence. It is shown that, in the presence of r(1/spl les/r/spl les/k-2) faults, at most r extra steps are required by our algorithm to perform a one-to-all broadcasting in the k-star network. Our algorithm has the same time complexity as an optimal broadcasting algorithm, and, since it takes advantage of the hierarchical nature of the star graph network, it can be implemented easily. Our algorithm can also be used to perform all-to-all broadcasting in a faulty star graph.