Pragmatic authenticated key agreement for IEEE Std 802.15.6

The IEEE Std 802.15.6 is the latest international standard for Wireless Body Area Networks. The security of communication in this standard is based upon four elliptic-curve-based key agreement protocols. These protocols have been shown to exhibit serious security vulnerabilities but surprisingly, do not provision any privacy guarantees. To date, no suitable key agreement protocol has been proposed which fulfills all the requisite objectives for IEEE Std 802.15.6. In this paper, two key agreement protocols are presented which, in addition to being efficient and provisioning advance security properties, also offer the essential privacy attributes of anonymity and unlinkability. We develop a formal security and privacy model in an appropriate complexity-theoretic framework and prove the proposed protocols secure in this model.

A risk-level assessment system based on the STRIDE/DREAD model for digital data marketplaces

Security is a top concern in digital infrastructure and there is a basic need to assess the level of security ensured for any given application. To accommodate this requirement, we propose a new risk assessment system. Our system identifies threats of an application workflow, computes the severity weights with the modified Microsoft STRIDE/DREAD model and estimates the final risk exposure after applying security countermeasures in the available digital infrastructures. This allows potential customers to rank these infrastructures in terms of security for their own specific use cases. We additionally present a method to validate the stability and resolution of our ranking system with respect to subjective choices of the DREAD model threat rating parameters. Our results show that our system is stable against unavoidable subjective choices of the DREAD model parameters for a specific use case, with a rank correlation higher than 0.93 and normalised mean square error lower than 0.05.