Model Checking M2M and Centralised IOT authentication Protocols.

It is very difficult to develop a perfect security protocol for communication over the IoT network and developing a reliable authentication protocol requires a detailed understanding of cryptography. To ensure the reliability of security protocols of IoT, the validation method is not a good choice because of its several disadvantages and limitations. To prove the high reliability of Cryptographic Security Protocols(CSP) for IoT networks, the functional correctness of security protocols must be proved secure mathematically. Using the Formal Verification technique we can prove the functional correctness of IoT security protocols by providing the proofs mathematically. In this work, The CoAP Machine to Machine authentication protocol and centralied IoT network Authentication Protocol RADIUS is formally verified using the well-known verification technique known as model checking technique and we have used the Scyther model checker for the verification of security properties of the respective protocols. The abstract protocol models of the IoT authentication protocols were specified in the security protocol description language and the security requirements of the authentication protocols were specified as claim events.

Can Formal Security Verification Really Be Optional? Scrutinizing the Security of IMD Authentication Protocols

The need for continuous monitoring of physiological information of critical organs of the human body, combined with the ever-growing field of electronics and sensor technologies and the vast opportunities brought by 5G connectivity, have made implantable medical devices (IMDs) the most necessitated devices in the health arena. IMDs are very sensitive since they are implanted in the human body, and the patients depend on them for the proper functioning of their vital organs. Simultaneously, they are intrinsically vulnerable to several attacks mainly due to their resource limitations and the wireless channel utilized for data transmission. Hence, failing to secure them would put the patient’s life in jeopardy and damage the reputations of the manufacturers. To date, various researchers have proposed different countermeasures to keep the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of IMD systems with privacy and safety specifications. Despite the appreciated efforts made by the research community, there are issues with these proposed solutions. Principally, there are at least three critical problems. (1) Inadequate essential capabilities (such as emergency authentication, key update mechanism, anonymity, and adaptability); (2) heavy computational and communication overheads; and (3) lack of rigorous formal security verification. Motivated by this, we have thoroughly analyzed the current IMD authentication protocols by utilizing two formal approaches: the Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic (BAN logic) and the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA). In addition, we compared these schemes against their security strengths, computational overheads, latency, and other vital features, such as emergency authentications, key update mechanisms, and adaptabilities.

Proving authentication property of PUF-based mutual authentication protocol based on logic of events

PUF (Physical unclonable function) is a new hardware security primitive, and the research on PUFs is one of the emerging research focuses. For PUF-based mutual authentication protocols, a method to abstract the security properties of hardware by using logic of events is proposed, and the application aspects of logic of events are extended to protocols based on hardware security. With the interaction of PUF-based mutual authentication protocol formally described by logic of events, the basic sequences are constructed and the strong authentication property in protocol interaction process is verified. Based on the logic of events, the freshness of nonces is defined, and the persist rule is proposed according to the concept of freshness, which ensures the consistency of the protocol state and behavior predicate in the proof process, and reduces the complexity and redundancy in the protocol analysis process. Under reasonable assumptions, the security of the protocol is proven, and the fact that logic of events applies to PUF-based mutual authentication protocols is shown.

Conformal Chebyshev chaotic map-based remote user password authentication protocol using smart card

With the rapid advancement and growth of computer networks, there have been greater and greater demands for remote user password authentication protocols. In current ages, smartcard-based authentication protocol has formed the standard with their incredibly insubstantial, user-friendly equipment and low-cost apps. In this study, we proposed an effective robust authentication protocol using the conformable chaotic map, where a conformable calculus is a branch of newly appearing fractional calculus. It has a magnificent property, because it formulates using a controller term. We shall also offer formal proof of smooth execution of the proposed authenticated protocol. Our new protocol is more secure as compared to several comparable protocols.

ZPiE: Zero-Knowledge Proofs in Embedded Systems

Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) are cryptographic primitives allowing a party to prove to another party that the former knows some information while keeping it secret. Such a premise can lead to the development of numerous privacy-preserving protocols in different scenarios, like proving knowledge of some credentials to a server without leaking the identity of the user. Even when the applications of ZKPs were endless, they were not exploited in the wild for a couple of decades due to the fact that computing and verifying proofs was too computationally expensive. However, the advent of efficient schemes (in particular, zk-SNARKs) made this primitive to break into the scene in fields like cryptocurrencies, smart-contracts, and more recently, self-sovereign scenarios: private-by-design identity management and authentication. Nevertheless, its adoption in environments like the Internet of Things (IoT) remains unexplored due to the computational limitations of embedded systems. In this paper, we introduce ZPiE, a C library intended to create ZKP applications to be executed in embedded systems. Its main feature is portability: it can be compiled, executed, and used out-of-the-box in a wide variety of devices. Moreover, our proof-of-concept has been proved to work smoothly in different devices with limited resources, which can execute state-of-the-art ZKP authentication protocols.

Lessons Learned: Analysis of PUF-based Authentication Protocols for IoT

The service of authentication constitutes the spine of all security properties. It is the phase where entities prove their identities to each other and generally establish and derive cryptographic keys to provide confidentiality, data integrity, non-repudiation, and availability. Due to the heterogeneity and the particular security requirements of IoT (Internet of Things), developing secure, low-cost, and lightweight authentication protocols has become a serious challenge. This has excited the research community to design and develop new authentication protocols that meet IoT requirements. A recent technology, called PUFs (Physical Unclonable Functions), has been the subject of many subsequent publications on lightweight, low-cost, and secure-by-design authentication protocols. This has turned our attention to investigate the most recent PUF-based authentication protocols for IoT. In this paper, we review the security of these protocols. We first provide the necessary background on PUFs, their types, and related attacks. Also, we discuss how PUFs are used for authentication. Then, we analyze the security of PUF-based authentication protocols to identify and report common security issues and design flaws, as well as to provide recommendations for future authentication protocol designers.

Fast Software Implementation of Serial Test and Approximate Entropy Test of Binary Sequence

In many cryptographic applications, random numbers and pseudorandom numbers are required. Many cryptographic protocols require using random or pseudorandom numbers at various points, e.g., for auxiliary data in digital signatures or challenges in authentication protocols. In NIST SP800-22, the focus is on the need for randomness for encryption purposes and describes how to apply a set of statistical randomness tests. These tests can be used to evaluate the data generated by cryptographic algorithms. This paper will study the fast software implementation of the serial test and the approximate entropy test and propose two types of fast implementations of these tests. The first method is to follow the basic steps of these tests and replace bit operations with byte operations. Through this method, compared with the implementation of Fast NIST STS, the efficiency of the serial test and approximate entropy test is increased by 2.164 and 2.100 times, respectively. The second method is based on the first method, combining the statistical characteristics of subsequences of different lengths and further combining the two detections with different detection parameters. In this way, compared to the individual implementation of these tests, the efficiency has been significantly improved. Compared with the implementation of Fast NIST STS, the efficiency of this paper is increased by 4.078 times.