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There are many marketing methods used to attract customers' attention and customers search for special discounts and conduct research to get products cheaper. Using discount coupons is one of the widely used methods for obtaining discounts. With the development of technology, classical paper-based discount coupons become e-coupons and then turn into mobile coupons (m-coupons). It is inevitable that retailers will use m-coupon technology to attract customers while mobile devices are used in daily life. As a result, m-coupon technology is a promising technology. One of the significant problems with using m-coupons is security. Here it is necessary to ensure the safety of the seller's and retailer's data and to prevent unnecessary loss of income. In this study, a new m-coupon protocol is proposed and analyzed against well-known attacks: impersonation, man-in-the-middle, eavesdropping, replay, data modification, unauthorized coupon copying/generation, and multiple cash-in attacks. Then, to show that both the client and the retailer's data are at the highest level of security, the protocol is subjected to security analysis with a powerful protocol analysis tool, Scyther. Thus, the proposed protocol is proved to meet all safety criteria. To the best of our knowledge, this protocol is the first m-coupon protocol for which formal security analysis is conducted by the protocol's developers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology enables unique identification and tracking of the tag attached to an object. Widespread usage of RFID technologies in supply chain management (SCM) has drawn attention for developing security protocols to protect data stored in the tag. In SCM objects move from one place/department to another, the same RFID readers are not used throughout the supply chain. So, current reader delegates its access right to the new reader. When an object is moved inside the organization, delegation takes place between the readers. Many of the existing delegation protocols use trusted third party (TTP), which is practically difficult to incorporate or requires a keyed hash function/symmetric key encryption to be executed in the RFID tag, whereas tags are computationally intensive. Our work aims to simplify the delegation process by removing the usage of a TTP as well as eliminating reader-to-reader communication which avoids fixing the reader sequence in advance. Also, it preserves the security and privacy requirements for cloud-based applications. The proposed protocol withstands many attacks like tracing attack, tag impersonation attack, reader impersonation attack, and privacy attack. The proposed protocol not only resists the above-mentioned attacks but also achieves mutual authentication, anonymity property, and forward/backward secrecy. The proposed protocol is analyzed formally using GNY logic, which ensures that the protocol achieves mutual authentication. Performance analysis is carried out and it shows that our protocol is relatively better than the existing related schemes with respect to tag computation and communication cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User authentication over the Internet has long been an issue for Internet service providers and users. A good authentication protocol must provide high security and mutual authentication on both sides. In addition, it must balance security and usability, which has been shown in the literature to be a difficult problem. To solve this problem, we propose a novel mutual authentication protocol with high security and usability. The proposed protocol was developed for quick response code, a type of two-dimensional barcode that can be photographed and quickly decoded by smartphones. We implemented a prototype using the proposed mutual authentication protocol and demonstrated how the prototype improves usability in a mobile communication system. We also used the Gong-Needham-Yahalom logic with several well-known attack models to analyze the security of the proposed protocol, and we obtained satisfactory results. We expect that using the proposed protocol, Internet service providers will be able to provide a mutual authentication mechanism with high security and usability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With trillions of machines connecting to mobile communication networks to provide a wide variety of applications, supporting a massive number of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications devices has been considered an essential requirement for mobile operators. Meanwhile, cyber security is of paramount importance in M2M as all applications involving M2M cannot be widely accepted without security guarantees. In this article we focus on the standardization activities of 3GPP, especially group-based security for largescale M2M communications in 3GPP networks. We first introduce the main components of the machine-type communication (MTC) security architecture. Then we discuss several major challenges for group-oriented secure M2M communications in 3GPP systems, i.e. authentication signalling congestion and overload, and group message protection. Specifically, we identify the performance issues of authentication signalling congestion and overload in no/low mobility scenarios, and propose three group access authentication and key agreement protocols. Moreover, several 3GPP candidate solutions for group message protection are introduced. Finally, we present key issues and research directions related to group-based secure M2M communications, including security, privacy, and efficiency in mobility scenarios of MTC, and flexible and efficient group key management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work proposes a new direction in quantum cryptography called quantum authencryption. Quantum authencryption (QA), a new term to distinguish from authenticated quantum secure direct communications, is used to describe the technique of combining quantum encryption and quantum authentication into one process for off-line communicants. QA provides a new way of quantum communications without the presence of a receiver on line, and thus makes many applications depending on secure one-way quantum communications, such as quantum E-mail systems, possible. An example protocol using single photons and one-way hash functions is presented to realize the requirements on QA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We motivate and present two designs for the composition of the authentication protocol, Kerberos, and the key transport protocol, Multimedia Internet KEYing (MIKEY) for authenticated transport of cryptographic keys for secure group-communication in enterprise and public-safety settings. A technical challenge, and our main contribution, is the analysis of the security of the composition. Towards this, we design our compositions to have intuitive appeal and thereby less prone to security vulnerabilities. We then employ protocol composition logic (PCL), a state-of-the-art approach for analyzing our composition. For this, we first articulate two properties that are of interest. Both properties are on the group key that is transported; we call them Group Key Confidentiality and Acquisition. Group Key Confidentiality is the property that if a principal possesses the key, then it is an authorized member of the group. Group Key Acquisition is the property that if a principal is a member of the group, then it is able to acquire the group key. In the course of our rigorous analysis, we discovered a flaw in our first design, which we point out, and which lead us to our second design. We have implemented both designs starting with the publicly available reference implementation of Kerberos, and an open-source implementation of MIKEY. Our implementations are available as open-source. We discuss our experience from the implementation, and present empirical results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We take a model-theoretic viewpoint on security goals and how to establish them. The models are (possibly fragmentary) executions. Security goals such as authentication and confidentiality are geometric sequents, i.e. implications Φ→Ψ where Φ and Ψ are built from atomic formulas without negations, implications, or universal quantifiers.Security goals are then statements about homomorphisms, where the source is a minimal (fragmentary) model of the antecedent Φ. If every homomorphism to a non-fragmentary, complete execution factors through a model in which Ψ is satisfied, then the goal is achieved. One can validate security goals via a process of information enrichment. We call this approach enrich-by-need protocol analysis.This idea also clarifies protocol transformation. A protocol transformation preserves security goals when it preserves the form of the information enrichment process. We formalize this idea using simulation relations between labeled transition systems. These labeled transition systems formalize the analysis of the protocols, i.e. the information enrichment process, not the execution behavior of the protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three-party key exchange protocol is one of the most essential cryptographic technique in the secure communication areas. In this protocol, two clients, each shares a human-memorable password, working with a trusted server, can agree a secure session key. Recently, Lu and Cao proposed a new simple three-party key exchange (S-3PAKE) protocol and claimed that it is not only very simple and efficient, but also can survive against various known attacks. However, Nam et al. pointed out that S-3PAKE is vulnerable to both off-line password guessing attack and undetectable on-line password guessing attack. Based on their finding, Nam et al. proposed an improved method to resolve this weakness. They further claimed that so far no off-line password guessing attack has been successful against their proposed protocol. In this paper, we demonstrate that Nam et al.'s improved protocol, unfortunately, is still vulnerable to an undetectable on-line password guessing attack. We therefore propose a simple and powerful method to address this issue. Which results in an improved three-party key exchange protocol that can protect against an undetectable on-line password guessing attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a wireless sensor network, we often require the deployment of new nodes to extend the lifetime of the network because some sensor nodes may be lost due to power exhaustion problem or they may be also malicious nodes. In order to protect malicious nodes from joining the sensor network, access control mechanism becomes a major challenging problem in the design of sensor network protocols. Existing access control protocols designed for wireless sensor networks require either high communication overheads or they are not scalable due to involvement of the base station during authentication and key establishment processes. In this paper, we propose a new access control scheme for large-scale distributed wireless sensor networks, which not only identifies the identity of each node but it has also ability to differentiate between old nodes and new nodes. The proposed scheme does not require involvement of the base station during authentication and key establishment processes, and it can be easily implemented as a dynamic access control protocol. In addition, our scheme significantly reduces communication costs in order to authenticate neighbor nodes among each other and establish symmetric keys between neighbor nodes as compared with existing approaches. Further, our scheme is secure against different attacks and unconditionally secure against node capture attacks. The simulation results of our scheme using the AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool ensure that our scheme is safe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a secure protocol for spontaneous wireless ad hoc networks which uses an hybrid symmetric/asymmetric scheme and the trust between users in order to exchange the initial data and to exchange the secret keys that will be used to encrypt the data. Trust is based on the first visual contact between users. Our proposal is a complete self-configured secure protocol that is able to create the network and share secure services without any infrastructure. The network allows sharing resources and offering new services among users in a secure environment. The protocol includes all functions needed to operate without any external support. We have designed and developed it in devices with limited resources. Network creation stages are detailed and the communication, protocol messages, and network management are explained. Our proposal has been implemented in order to test the protocol procedure and performance. Finally, we compare the protocol with other spontaneous ad hoc network protocols in order to highlight its features and we provide a security analysis of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SUMMARY This paper focuses on two interesting radio-frequency identification (RFID) cryptographic protocols: the server-less RFID authentication protocol that allows readers to authenticate tags without the help of any online backend servers, and the RFID searching protocol in which the verifier explicitly specifies the target tag to be searched and authenticated. These two kinds of RFID protocols play important roles in many RFID applications; however, the existing protocols either had security weaknesses or exhibited poor efficiency. This paper shows the weaknesses, and then proposes our server-less RFID authentication protocol and RFID searching protocol. The proposed protocols greatly enhance the security using one more hashing. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper deals with device connections in a trust-based ad hoc network. Because a temporary device frequently joins or leaves a network, the authentication and security technology should be prepared for the malicious devices used in third-party attacks. An authentication scheme with the existing certification and ID, and security technology using symmetric and public keys are used. Therefore, in this paper we propose using two devices that have not shared information for mutual generation of authentication ID. The use of an authentication ID can establish mutual trust and provide security and efficiency for communication and generation of a symmetric key. Our analysis results show that an authentication operation reduction of up to 57%, compared to related work, is achieved by our protocol. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is taking the place of barcodes to become electronic tags of the new generation. EPC Class 1 Generation 2 has served as the most popular standard for passive RFID tags. In 2010, Yeh et al. proposed a new RFID authentication protocol conforming to EPC Class 1 Generation 2 standard. However, this paper demonstrates that Yeh et al.’s protocol has two serious security problems such as DATA integrity problem and forward secrecy problem unlike their claims. An improved protocol is also proposed which can prevent the security problems and be applied in low-cost RFID environments requiring a high level of security. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Key agreement protocols are multi-party protocols in which entities exchange public information allowing them to create a common secret key that is known only to those entities and which cannot be predetermined by any party. Key agreement can be achieved using a public key infrastructure or identity-based cryptography. However, the former suffers from a heavy certificate management burden, while the latter is subject to the so-called key escrow problem. Recently, the notion of certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) was introduced to mitigate these limitations. In this paper, we introduce the notion of three-party authenticated key agreement into CL-PKC and propose a concrete certificateless three-party authenticated key agreement protocol. We show that the proposed protocol is secure (i.e. conforms to defined security attributes) while being efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Many authentication and key agreement protocols were proposed for protecting communicated messages. In previous protocols, if the userʼs identity is transmitted in plaintext, an adversary can tap the communications and employ it to launch some attacks. In most protocols with user anonymity, they focus on satisfaction of several security requirements. From a clientʼs point of view, those protocols are not admired since the cost of storage, computation and communication is high. In pervasive computing, a client usually uses a limited-resource device to access multiple servers. The storage and computation are very important issues especially in this kind of environments. Also, for a convenience of designing protocol, most protocols use timestamps to prevent the replay attack. As we know, the serious time synchronization problem exists in timestamp-based protocols. Finally, most protocols do not have formal proofs for the security. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient identification and key agreement protocol with user anonymity based on the difficulty of cracking the elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman assumption. In addition, we also propose an augmented protocol for providing the explicit mutual authentication. Compared with the related protocols, the proposed protocolsʼ computation cost is lower and the key length is shorter. Therefore, our protocols are suitable even for applications in low power computing environments. Finally, we formally prove the security of the proposed protocols by employing the random oracle model. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Password-based authentication is widely used for systems that control remote access to computer networks. In order to address some of the security and management problems that occur in traditional password authentication protocols, research in recent decades has focused on smart card based password authentication. In this paper, we show that the improved smart card authentication scheme proposed by Xu-Zhu-Feng is vulnerable to internal and impersonation attacks. We propose an improvement of their solution, present a new efficient strong smart card authentication protocol, and demonstrate that the new protocol satisfies the requirements of strong smart card authentication and is more efficient. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: There have been many security events in the Internet. Many of them are due to arbitrary access permissions to the network resources of the malicious users, especially their free sending packets to anywhere in the network. However, current existing solutions such as ingress filtering and network firewalls cannot solve the problem of malicious access to the network flexibly and effectively. In this paper, we present an efficient access control method based on host identifiers, in which a safe and bidirectional authentication process is introduced whenever the host begins to access the network. Meanwhile, all the succeeding information exchanges between the host and the network can be controlled through the encrypt scheme negotiated during the access authentication process. Through analysis and experiments, we find that the proposed method has the following merits. First, our method has the capability to support various end-nodes to access the Internet in a uniform way. Second, with our method, end-nodes and the core network can establish a mutual trustworthy relationship to avoid any spoof from the other side. Third, our method can support host mobility very well. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Due to the potential wide deployment of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), the security of RFID systems has drawn extensive attention from both academia and industry, and the RFID authentication protocol is an important mechanism in the security of RFID systems. The desired security requirements of RFID authentication protocols include privacy, integrity, authentication, anonymity/untraceability, and even availability. To design an efficient protocol that satisfies all the requirements with limited resources is a challenge. This paper proposes a new RFID authentication protocol based on Error Correction Codes (ECC). The proposed scheme has excellent performance in terms of security, efficiency, server’s maintenance, robustness, and cost. The tag only performs simple operations, such as random number generation and simple bitwise computations. The lightweight feature makes it attractive to those low-cost RFIDs that support only simple operations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The IEEE 802.1X is utilized in mobile Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) authentication. This procedure incurs a long delay in WiMAX handoff. To resolve this issue, this paper proposes a key caching mechanism to eliminate the nonnecessary IEEE 802.1X authentication cost in WiMAX handoff. This mechanism is investigated through analytic and simulation modeling. Our study indicates that the key caching scheme can effectively speed up the handoff process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote user authentication and key agreement system through smartcard is a viable practical solution to validate the eligibility of a remote user and thus to provide a secure communication. This paper suggests a Secure Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol (SAKEP) for Credential Sen/ices. The major intrinsic worth of this scheme include that, the system do not require any verification table and the user is at liberty to choose and change the password. Further, with this system, the computation and communication costs are lower as the scheme adopts one-way hash functions, block ciphers and smartcard. In addition, the proposed scheme offers mutual authentication between the server and the user by a nonce-based plan and is free from timesynchronisation problem. The proposed scheme is secured against Id-theft, also resists to replay attacks, stolen verifier attacks, guessing attacks, reflection attack, and offers forward secrecy and known-key security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an attempt to expand Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) usage to a ubiquitous and mobile computing environment, we found that the deployment of the PKI on a resource-constrained device such as an 8-bit microprocessor leads to user-obstructive latency or additional circuitry for the operations. To alleviate these limitations, we propose a new PKI-based authentication protocol and security infrastructure, namely, PKASSO, which is enhanced with the single sign-on and delegation technology that is used especially for mobile devices with restricted computation power. PKASSO offloads complex PKI operations from the mobile devices to the infrastructure so as to keep the hardware and software complexity of the devices as low as possible. In addition, even though a conventional delegation mechanism cannot support a nonrepudiation mechanism against malicious user behavior, PKASSO can provide such a mechanism by devising a referee server that, on one hand, generates binding information between a device and authentication messages and, on the other hand, retains the information in its local storage for future accusation. We present the detailed design and performance evaluation of PKASSO and offer a protocol analysis in terms of user authentication latency and the completeness of the protocol. According to the performance evaluation, the authentication latency of our infrastructure (which averages 0.082 second) is much shorter than the authentication latency of a conventional PKI-based authentication latency (which averages 5.01 seconds). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Menezes et al. developed an MQV key exchange protocol that does not use a one-way hash function in 1995. Harn–Lin and Hwang–Shiau–Lai later respectively proposed efficient authenticated key exchange protocols. Lee and Wu recently proposed an enhanced authentication key exchange protocol to solve the drawbacks of the Hwang–Shiau–Lai protocol. Based on the Lee–Wu protocol, this work presents two new authenticated multiple key exchange protocols based on ECC and bilinear pairing. The proposed ECC-based protocol is more efficient than the Harn–Lin, Hwang–Shiau–Lai, and Lee–Wu protocols. Moreover, the proposed pairing-based protocol is better than other protocols in terms of the number of available shared session keys because all agreed session keys can be adopted by the communicating parties in the protocol. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The A-GDH.2 and SA-GDH.2 authenticated group key agreement protocols showed to be flawed in 2001. Even though the corresponding attacks (or some variants of them) have been rediscovered in several different frameworks, no fixed version of these protocols has been proposed until now. In this paper, we prove that it is in fact impossible to design a scalable authenticated group key agreement protocol based on the same design assumptions as the A-GDH ones. We proceed by providing a systematic way to derive an attack against any A-GDH-type protocol with at least four participants and exhibit protocols with two and three participants which we cannot break using our technique. As far as we know, this is the first generic insecurity result reported in the literature concerning authentication protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Password authentication, which is widely used for authenticated method, also is important protocol by requiring a username and password before being allowed access to resources. In 2001, Lin et al. proposed the optimal strong-password authentication protocol, called (OSPA) which is a one-time password method by verifying with the different verifier every time for affirming its identity. However, Chen-Ku and Tsuji-Shimizu pointed respectively out that OSPA is vulnerable to the stolen-verifier attack and impersonation attack. In this paper, we shall propose the improved protocol secure against the known attacks to enhance the security [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Hsu et al. showed that Ku and Wang''s authenticated key agreement protocol is vulnerable to the modification attack and then proposed an improved protocol, called HWWM protocol. In this paper, we argue that the HWWM protocol is still vulnerable to the modification attack and cannot also withstand the password guessing attack. Then, we propose an improved protocol to solve these problems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

SSH and AKA are recent, practical protocols for secure connections over an otherwise unprotected network. This paper shows that, despite the use of public-key cryptography, SSH and AKA do not provide authentication as intended. The flaws of SSH and AKA can be viewed as the result of their disregarding a basic principle for the design of sound authentication protocols: the principle that messages should be explicit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design-implement-fix process is sufficient for previously unknown attack vectors. However, engineers should use established knowledge, such as known attack patterns, in the analysis of security protocols prior to their acceptance and implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although wireless sensor network is considered as one of promising technologies for ubiquitous computing environment, more researches for re-authentication of mobile nodes in wireless sensor network are required due to user mobility, one of important properties in ubiquitous computing environment. As the citizens in a city can be mobile user in wireless sensor network and the resource of the sensor nodes is limited, scalability of re-authentication is important. In other words, re-authentication with less communication cost should be proposed. In this paper, we suggest an efficient method of membership verification for re-authentication of mobile node and show the performance analysis of our membership verification. Using this method, we propose an efficient and scalable reauthentication protocol over wireless sensor network. Also, we provide performance and security analysis of our protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]