Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) has been a popular mechanism in daily traffic monitoring, and entrance control. Most of the ALPR devices are statically installed on the street posts or on the entrances. However, in Taiwan and some other countries, the public security greatly relies on the police mobile patrolling. The polices, on the motorbikes or on the cars, regularly patrol the streets and identify suspicious cars. This study aims at designing low-cost mobile ALPR systems using some affordable notebooks or Raspberry Pis. Based on the experiments, we suggest several models of hardware and various resolution images for satisfactory performance.

Daily inspection of bee colony status and monitoring for hornet attacks are important tasks in apiary management. Traditionally, these tasks require beekeepers to regularly check the apiaries, which is a labor-intensive and knowledge-intensive operation. With the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning, we can now use modern technology to improve the efficiency of these operations. This paper designs and implements a bee and hornet recognition and real-time notification system to reduce labor costs and improve apiary management. By collecting online and onsite photos and videos of bees/hornets, we trained a YOLO v7 model. The trained model is then downloaded to a Raspberry Pi device, which uses a web camera to capture onsite photos and videos for system recognition and notifies the beekeeper. To avoid excessive or uncertain notifications that may disrupt the beekeeper's work and cause anxiety, we designed an appropriate algorithm to adjust the notification threshold and frequency. After testing with actual data, the precision and recall rates of our bee and hornet recognition system and the notification time meet the requirements.

Coffee has become one of the daily beverages to people around the world. However, there is a significant difference in the caffeine content between different coffee varieties, such as Arabica and Robusta beans, leading to substantial differences in prices. Consequently, there have been incidents of unscrupulous traders mixing low-cost beans with high-cost ones (or counterfeit beans) for sale, significantly impacting consumer rights and health. While there are some chemical and optical inspection techniques available in the market (such as gas chromatography and liquid chromatography for testing), these methods have several drawbacks that make them less accessible to the general public: sample destructiveness, time-consuming processes, high costs, and the need for professional operators. This study utilizes the FieldSpec 4 spectrometer combined with machine learning (ML) techniques to explore the feasibility of developing rapid screening technology for coffee varieties (coffee powder, hot brewed coffee, cold brewed coffee). Preliminary results indicate that the developed technology can identify the types of coffee beans used. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work that leverage infrared spectra and ML to develop fast coffee variety classification. The findings of this research could pave the way for further development of low-cost rapid screening technology for coffee varieties, holding significant potential in safeguarding consumer health and rights.

The over-the-air (OTA) updating mechanism is one critical mechanism for Internet of Things (IoT); the OTA updating mechanism facilitates the systems remotely update the firmware/software without recalling the devices or visiting the remote sites. However, the existent MQTT-based OTA models (like Amazon, Infineon, etc.) ignore the privacy against a curious broker: they assume the users trust the broker and the broker would not peek at the transmission contents. This strong assumption is dangerous as we can see that many high-profile-security IT servers (like Coinbase) have been compromised either from the internal staff or from the external hackers. This article, based the end-to-end (E2E) channel establishment, designs, implements, and evaluates a new MQTT-based OTA scheme. The E2E channel ensures the security and the privacy. The AVISPA-based formal proof validates its security goals. The evaluation, based on the implementations, shows that the proposed scheme enhances the security/privacy while keeping the efficiency.

Secure group key distribution is essential for many group-oriented applications such as sensor networks, multimedia broadcast services, and Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. There are several challenges and requirements in designing secure group key distribution. Among them, computational efficiency, communication efficiency, adaptability to dynamic group membership change, robustness to various security threats, self-healing capacities, and source authentication are desirable. It is very challenging to design an efficient group distribution that satisfies all the requirements and challenges. Based on block codes, we propose an efficient self-healing group key distribution that facilitates both message source authentication and secure group key distribution, where the source identification and authentication can facilitate intrusion detection and identification. Both the privacy of the group key and the authentication of message sources are computationally secure. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first codes-based scheme that satisfies all the above requirements and facilitates message source authentication. The merits of the proposed scheme include the following: (1) it is highly efficient in terms of computation and communication, (2) it provides self-healing capacities for unstable environments, (3) it is very robust to various security threats and attacks, (4) it facilitates both message source authentication and secure group key distribution, and (5) it greatly improves the communication performance, compared to the state-of-the-art schemes. The security properties are analyzed, and the performance evaluations confirm its efficiency and practicality.

In many Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) scenarios, the environments are hostile. Those resources-limited devices are usually dynamically deployed in these environments and are vulnerable to various attacks and threats. In these environments, secure public key encryptions and Diffie-Hellman key agreements could be very helpful mechanisms to cope the hostility. However, the connection to an on-line Certificate Authority (CA) is usually not available or unstable. In this study, based on Krawczyk-Rabin's chameleon hash and signature, we propose a novel certificate concept, called Dynamic Public Key Certificate (DPKC), that can support the subject (the owner) dynamically change the public/private key pairs without renewing the certificate. This DPKC facilitates devices perform public key encryptions with the dynamic public keys. Integrating DPKC with Chien's Modified Computational Diffie-Hellman (MCDHP) key agreement schemes, devices can achieve key agreement with higher efficiency and stronger security.

Authenticating the Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in mobile systems is extremely challenging, because there will be billions of the IoT devices. Most existent proposals only focus on reducing the number of interactions to reduce the authentication overhead. However, there are several critical issues that need to be tackled. In this paper, we address the aggregated authentication overhead issue, the secure key agreement challenges, and the homogeneous trust and authorization issue in the mobile-system-based IoT scenarios. Based on the range-bound key assignment technique and our grouping mechanism, we propose the group-oriented-range-bound authenticated key agreement to solve these challenges. The main contributions are threefold. First, it drastically reduces the aggregated authentication overhead. Second, it greatly improves the security properties of the key agreement. Third, it facilitates the service providers the fine-grained control of the authentication delegation. To the best of our knowledge, the scheme demands the least authentication overhead among its counterparts; it is the first key agreement scheme that deals specifically with the homogeneous trust and authorization issue and facilitates the dynamic and adaptive authentication delegation. The security properties of the key agreement schemes are verified using a formal security verification tool, the AVISPA, and are analytically proved.

Group authentication aims at facilitating efficient authentication of a group of provers by a group of verifiers. A new group authentication scheme is proposed to improve the security of existent asynchronous group authentication schemes and to achieve better computational performance. The new scheme allows any groups of legitimate members to execute multiple authentication trials even under the participation of active attackers.

Authenticated Diffie–Hellman key (D-H key) agreement is the de facto standard for establishing secure session keys in many security systems. However, the modular exponentiation computation of D-H key puts a heavy load of those thin clients like Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID), NFC and Zigbee, where either the computational capacity or the battery is limited and precious. Therefore, many standards and implementations of these thin clients opt out key agreement schemes to meet computational efficiency requirements thereby accepting some security risks. As these devices are becoming more popular and security threats are increasing, it is desirable to reduce the computational load of key agreement while still providing sound security. In this paper, we propose a new problem—the modified Computational Diffie–Hellman Problem (MCDHP) and prove its security being equivalent to the Computational Diffie–Hellman Problem. Based on the MCDHP, we propose a general technique to enhance the computational load for thin clients when establishing secure D-H keys. The proposed approach achieves the same security of conventional authenticated D-H key agreement except the perfect forward secrecy. Examples of secure applications on existing D-H key agreement schemes are demonstrated in this paper.

ABSTRACT In 2008, Cao et al. proposed an identity‐based multi‐user broadcast authentication scheme (called IMBAS) for wireless sensor networks. The IMBAS consists of one elliptic curve‐based signature scheme, called variant of Bellare‐Namprempre‐Neven' Identity‐Based Signature (vBNN‐IBS), for user broadcast authentication; a new Schnorr signature with partial message recovery for sink broadcast authentication; and a password‐based private key protection to eliminate the threat caused by possible user device compromise. Compared with its counterparts, IMBAS owns better performance in terms of security, scalability, and efficiency. Unfortunately, this letter will show that (1) the password‐based protection scheme and the vBNN‐IBS scheme are not secure—a compromised user device will disclose the user private key—and (2) the new Schnorr signature with partial message recovery is vulnerable to existential forgery attack. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

ABSTRACT As the concept of radio‐frequency identification (RFID) relay attack has been successfully implemented and demonstrated, the research of RFID distance‐bounding protocols to deter RFID relay attacks has drawn much attention from both the industry and academia. Conventionally, researchers adopted linear composition of secrets to resist terrorist fraud attacks. Recently, Peris‐Lopez et al. studied the weaknesses of previous RFID distance‐bounding protocols and proposed that non‐linear composition of secrets and inclusion of more random nonce could help RFID resist key disclosure attack and terrorist fraud attack. In this paper, we will show that non‐linear composition of secrets cannot help enhance the security actually. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In 2010, Fan et al. proposed an efficient anonymous multi-receiver identity-based encryption scheme. This scheme allows a sender to send an encrypted message to a set of designated receivers while preserving receiver anonymity. The scheme is highly efficient for each receiver as it requires only two pairing operations. However, we found that the scheme failed to protect receiver anonymity and the security notation for receiver anonymity captures only semantics in the case of a single receiver, but does not for multiple recipients. In this paper, we present the weaknesses and propose an improved scheme. The improved scheme enhances both security and computational performance.

Forward security and resistance to denial-of-service (DOS) attack are two critical properties for low-cost Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems because low-cost tags are prone to be compromised once they are captured and wireless communications are relatively easier to be manipulated. In 2011, Duc et al. proposed two RFID authentication protocols called O-FRAP+and O-RAP+to enhance the forward security and resistance to DOS attacks. Unfortunately, we find that even if only a single tag is compromised in the O-FRAP+and the O-RAP+, then all the other tags would be vulnerable to DOS attacks. In this paper, we report the weaknesses, analyze the design flaws and propose a new scheme to improve the security. Security analysis and performance evaluation show that the proposed scheme out-performs its counterparts.

A password-based three-party encrypted key exchange (3PEKE) is a protocol that enables any pair of two registered clients to establish session keys with the help of a trusted server such that each client shares only one password with the server. This approach greatly improves the scalability of key agreement protocol in distributed environments and provides great user convenience. This article proposes a new password-based 3PEKE scheme that completes its entire job in only a record low four steps, which we prove that it is optimal for password-based 3PEKE protocols. The security of the proposed scheme, as we will detail later, has been proved in the random oracle model.

One of the challenges to secure wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is to design secure pair-wise key agreement between any pair of resources-limited sensors while keeping strong connectivity. In this paper, we point out the fatal security weaknesses of Cheng-Agrawal's pair-wise key agreement scheme for WSNs, and then propose a new scheme. Compared to the existing schemes, the proposed scheme owns two outstanding merits- assurance of connectivity between any pair of nodes and security robustness against node capture attack.

Applying Varying Pseudonyms (VP) to Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) authentication out-performs the other approaches in several respects; however, this approach is prone to the denial-of-service (DOS) attack. In this paper, we examine the de-synchronization problems of VP-based RFID authentication protocols.

Applying Varying Pseudonyms (VP) to Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) authentication out-performs the other approaches in several respects; however, this approach is prone to the denial-of-service (DOS) attack. In this paper, we examine the de-synchronization problems of VP-based RFID authentication protocols.

A ring signature scheme enables a signer, in an ad hoc manner, to sign a signature on behalf of a group of users including himself such that a verifier can be convinced that one of the identified users actually generated the signature but he cannot identify the actual signer. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient ID-based ring signature from pairings that requires only one pairing operation, which is the least complexity among its counterparts. Additional merits of the scheme include (1) no requirement of admissible encoding function like the MaptoPoint, and (2) parallelism of computing operations of the ring signature generation.

Conventionally, a verified digital signature releases information about both the signing event and the signed content simultaneously, where the signing event proves the truth that someone actually signed something. However, in many cases, the information of the signing event and the signed content have different uses and distinct degrees of importance on various occasions. In such cases, the conventional digital signature, the current authenticated encryption schemes and the current signcryption schemes cannot satisfy the needs of selectively releasing either the information about the signing event or that about the signed content or both depending on the situation. In this paper, we shall propose a selectively convertible authenticated encryption scheme where either the sender or the designated receiver can selectively convert the encryption such that the signing event and that of the signed content can be released adaptively. The security of the scheme is proved in the random oracle model. Applications based on the proposed scheme are also introduced.

As low-cost RFIDs become more and more popular, it is imperative to design ultralightweight RFID authentication protocols to resist all possible attacks and threats. However, all of the previous ultralightweight authentication schemes are vulnerable to various attacks. In this paper, we propose a new ultralightweight RFID authentication protocol that provides strong authentication and strong integrity protection of its transmission and of updated data. The protocol requires only simple bit-wise operations on the tag and can resist all the possible attacks. These features make it very attractive to low-cost RFIDs and very low-cost RFIDs.

This paper points out the weaknesses of Weis et al. 's authentication schemes for Radio Frequency IdentiJication (RFID) systems, and proposes two lightweight schemes. Compared to the previous schemes, the new schemes have better performance in security, anonymity, sewer's maintenance, and scalability.

Many smart card-based remote authentication schemes have been proposed, due to its convenience and secure computation of the smart card. However, these schemes didn't protect the users' identities while authenticating the users, even though user anonymity is an important issue in many e-commerce applications. In 2004, Das et al. proposed a remote authentication scheme to authenticate users while preserving the users' anonymity. Their scheme adopted dynamic identification to achieve this function. This article points out Das et al.'s scheme fails to protect the user's anonymity, and propose a new scheme to conquer the weakness.

Robust and simple authentication protocol (ROSI) is a highly efficient authentication protocol. However, its state-synchronization property makes it vulnerable to the denial of service (DOS) attack. This paper shows the DOS attack on the ROSI protocol, and proposes an improved scheme that conquers the weakness and extends its key agreement function, and improves the server's performance.

The access privileges in distributed systems can be effectively organized as a hierarchical tree that consists of distinct classes. A hierarchical time-bound key assignment scheme is to assign distinct cryptographic keys to distinct classes according to their privileges so that users from a higher class can use their class key to derive the keys of lower classes, and the keys are different for each time period; therefore, key derivation is constrained by both the class relation and the time period. We propose, based on a tamper-resistant device, a new time-bound key assignment scheme that greatly improves the computational performance and reduces the implementation cost.

Password-based authentication protocols are currently the conventional authentication protocols in many distributed systems. However, the security of these protocols is falling behind the times because more and more attacks can now break them. The security weaknesses of the Simple And Secure (SAS) protocol, the Optimal Strong-Password Authentication (OSPA) protocol, and the revised SAS protocols are examined in this paper. We then propose our RObust and SImple (ROSI) protocol to help raise security levels. The ROSI protocol can be easily implemented and has lower communication costs than most other protocols.

With a partially blind signature scheme, the signer inoculates non-removable common information into his blind signature. This common information may represent the date or the amount of cash. Due to its untraceability and partial blindness property, the partially blind signature plays an important role in many e-commerce applications. Based on the RSA scheme, we propose a partially blind signature with low computation which makes it attractive for mobile client and smart-card implementation.