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Publisher Copyright: IEEE Mobile and wireless communication continues its rapid development. Beyond 5G, heterogeneous networks (HetNets) will be merged with the integration of various networking technologies. Unique characteristics of such an integrated converged network cause new security challenges, such as difficulty of key agreement and theft of communication content, especially when crossing network domains happens. In order to ensure secure and reliable communications, end-to-end (E2E) communication security is highly expected, especially for cross-trust-domain communications in HetNets. Unfortunately, little existing research touches this issue and the literature lacks a deep-insight review on the current state-of-the-art. In this article, we summarize current E2E secure communication scenarios and basic techniques. We propose a number of requirements based on security threat analysis and employ them as a measure to evaluate existing works. Through review and analysis, we finally determine open issues to highlight future research directions.

Protecting cryptographic keys in hardware devices is challenging. In this work, we reinvestigate a family of key protection schemes proposed by Fung, Golin and Gray (2001), which use permutations to protect keys stored in Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM). Our analysis discovers vulnerabilities in the use of mathematical permutations. Specifically, we successfully identify two practical attacks-batch card attack and relative probing attack-which allow an adversary to discover the secret key stored in the EEPROM. Contrary to the claims of Fung et al., these attacks are realizable with a relatively small number of probes. Moreover, we examine the rationale of their security assumptions, which are mainly based on the modification attack described by Anderson and Kuhn (1997), and conclude that recent advances in hardware security (w.r.t. both attacks and countermeasures) suggest a stronger adversary model on designing such secure devices.

There are various reader/tag authentication protocols proposed for the security of RFID systems. Such a protocol normally contains several rounds of conversations between a tag and a reader and involves cryptographic operations at both reader and tag sides. Currently there is a lack of benchmarks that provide a fair comparison platform for (a) the time cost of cryptographic operations at the tag side and (b) the time cost of data exchange between a reader and a tag, making it impossible to evaluate the total time cost for executing a protocol. Based on our experiments implemented on IAIK UHF tag emulators (known as DemoTags), in this paper we present detailed benchmarks of both time costs for RFID authentication protocols. Our results reveal that the data exchange dominates the time cost for running a protocol. We also give a classification for the existing protocols and summarise formulae of time cost evaluation for each type of protocols in a way so that a user can evaluate the time cost of a protocol amongst several choices of cryptographic operations in an application.

In 2006 EPCglobal and the International Organization for Standards (ISO) ratified the EPC Class-1 Generation-2 (Gen-2) [1] and the ISO 18000-6C standards [2], respectively. These efforts represented major advancements in the direction of universal standardization for low-cost RFID tags. However, a cause for concern is that security issues do not seem to be properly addressed. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight RFID tag-reader mutual authentication scheme for use under the EPCglobal framework. The scheme is based on previous work by Konidala and Kim [3]. We attempt to mitigate the weaknesses observed in the original scheme and, at the same time, consider other possible adversarial threats as well as constraints on low-cost RFID tags requirements.

The EPC Class-1 Generation-2 RFID standard provides little security, as has been shown in previous works such as [S. Karthikeyan, M. Nesterenko, RFID security without extensive cryptography, in: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Workshop on Security of Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, 2005, pp. 63-67; D.N. Duc, J. Park, H. Lee, K. Kim, Enhancing security of EPCglobal Gen-2 RFID tag against traceability and cloning, in: The 2006 Symposium on Cryptography and Information Security, 2006; H.Y. Chien, C.H. Chen, Mutual authentication protocol for RFID conforming to EPC Class 1 Generation 2 standards, Computer Standards & Interfaces 29 (2007) 254-259; P. Peris-Lopez, J.C. Hernandez-Castro, J.M. Estevez-Tapiador, A. Ribagorda, Cryptanalysis of a novel authentication protocol conforming to EPC-C1G2 standard, in: Proceedings of Int'l Conference on RFID Security (RFIDSec)'07, Jul 2007; T.L. Lim, T. Li, Addressing the weakness in a lightweight RFID tag-reader mutual authentication scheme, in Proceedings of the IEEE Int'l Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM) 2007, Nov 2007, pp. 59-63]. In particular, the security of an RFID tag's access and kill passwords is almost non-existent. Konidala and Kim recently proposed a new mutual authentication scheme [D.M. Konidala, Z. Kim, K. Kim, A simple and cost-effective RFID tag-reader mutual authentication scheme, in: Proceedings of Int'l Conference on RFID Security (RFIDSec)'07, Jul 2007, pp. 141-152] - an improved version of their first attempt [D.M. Konidala, K. Kim, RFID tag-reader mutual authentication scheme utilizing tag's access password, Auto-ID Labs White Paper WP-HARDWARE-033, Jan 2007] - in which a tag's access and kill passwords are used for authentication. In this paper, we show that the new scheme continues to present serious security flaws. The 16 least significant bits of the access password can be obtained with probability 2^-^2, and the 16 most significant bits with a probability greater than 2^-^5. Finally, we show how an attacker can recover the entire kill password with probability 2^-^2.

In 2006, EPCglobal and the International Organization for Standards (ISO) ratified the EPC Class-1 Generation-2 (Gen-2) standard and the ISO 18000 standard respectively. These efforts represented major advancements in the direction of universal standardization for low-cost RFID tags. However, a cause for concern is that security issues do not seem to be properly addressed in these standards. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight RFID tag-reader mutual authentication scheme for use under the EPCglobal framework. The scheme is based on previous work by Konidala and Kim. We attempt to mitigate the weaknesses observed in the original scheme, and at the same time, consider other possible adversarial threats, as well as constraints on low-cost RFID tags requirements.

In this paper, we propose two RFID identification and authentication schemes based on the previously proposed triggered hash chain scheme by Henrici and Muller. The schemes are designed to mitigate the shortcomings observed in the triggered hash chain scheme and to ensure privacy preserving identification, tag-reader mutual authentication, as well as forward-privacy in the case of RFID tags that have been compromised. The first scheme uses a challenge-response mechanism to defend against an obvious weakness of the triggered hash chain scheme. The second scheme uses an authenticated monotonic counter to defend against a session linking attack that the first scheme is vulnerable to. We compare the level of security offered by our proposed schemes against other previous schemes and find that the schemes perform well, while keeping within reasonable overheads in terms of computational, storage and communication requirements.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) systems have been aggressively deployed in a variety of applications. RFID security and privacy issues have been intensively studied in the research field, of which the authentication between RFID reader and tag is the fundamental theme. Most of the existing authentication protocols draw assumptions on classic cryptographic primitives. However, for extremely resource constraint RFID tags, only lightweight primitives can be incorporated. In this paper, we propose an RFID mutual authentication protocol employing ultra-lightweight mathematic primitives to achieve secure tag/reader authentication. The proposed scheme is secure in sense of tag anonymity, man-in-the-middle resistance, and forgery prevention that are shown in our analysis. The scheme is also efficient due to fast calculation on reduced hardware implementation.

In this paper, we introduce a randomized bit encoding scheme that can strengthen the privacy protection on RFID tags. This scheme is used together with the backward channel protection method proposed by Choi and Roh (2006), which serves to protect the unique identifier of an RFID tag from disclosure to close-range eavesdroppers. Choi and Roh's method faces the 'same-bit' problem, in which some bits of the unique identifier could be disclosed, thereby revealing critical information. Our proposed scheme alleviates the 'same-bit' problem to a negligible level. Furthermore, we propose an enhanced system model that can protect the unique tag identifier from disclosure not only against eavesdroppers, but against unauthorized interrogators as well. A metric based on entropy was defined and used to measure the amount of protection offered by the scheme. A method to construct an optimal randomized n-bit encoding scheme was also described. In addition, theoretical analysis and simulations were conducted, which show that the proposed encoding scheme provides significant improvement (achieving almost twice the entropy) over no encoding.

In this paper, we analyze the security vulnerabilities of EMAP, an efficient RFID mutual authentication protocol recently proposed by Peris-Lopez et al. (2006). We present two effective attacks, a de-synchronization attack and a full-disclosure attack, against the protocol. The former permanently disables the authentication capability of a RFID tag by destroying synchronization between the tag and the RFID reader. The latter completely compromises a tag by extracting all the secret information stored in the tag. The de-synchronization attack can be carried out in just round of interaction in EMAP while the full-disclosure attack is accomplished across several runs of EMAP. We also discuss ways to counter the attacks

It is an open problem of how to protect the traffics and at the same time, to support in-network processing in sensor networks. This paper tackles the problem by proposing an efficient model of categorizing encrypted data transmitted on sensor networks. An aggregator, an intermediate sensor node in our setting, is embedded with a set of searching keywords in encrypted format. Upon receiving an encrypted message, it matches the message with the keywords and then processes the message based on certain policies such as forwarding the original message to the next hop, updating it and forwarding or simply dropping it on detecting duplicates. The messages are encrypted before being sent out and decrypted only at their destination. Although the intermediate classifiers can categorize the messages, they learn nothing about the encrypted messages except several encrypted keywords, even the statistic information. The secure and efficient aggregation SEA scheme uses Bloom filter to further reduce transmission cost. The performance analysis shows that the computational cost and communication cost are well balanced

In this paper, we propose an efficient key encapsu- lation protocol (in essence, it is a CCA-2 public key encryption scheme) that is provably secure in the standard computational complexity model from which an efficient one-way authentication protocol together with a key agreement protocol can be derived immediately for low-state devices within the group. With the help of these cryptographic protocols, the group controller device is able to compute group level session key using the state-of-the-art protocols for multi-casting device revocation information.

Secure scalar product protocols provide fundamental security components for distributed data mining with privacy concerns. This paper makes two contributions in the shared-scalar-product protocols. In the first fold, a security model for shared-scalar-product protocols in the malicious model is introduced and formalized. In the second fold, an implementation for shared-scalar-product protocols based on the homomorphic cryptographic primitives is proposed which is provably secure assuming that the underling homomorphic encryption scheme is semantically secure and the homomorphic commitment scheme is statistically hiding and computationally binding in the public reference string model. The potential areas of application of this protocol are numerous (e.g., computation of Euclidean distance, oblivious linear auxiliary information computation and so on...).

Mobile agent technology applied into EC is facing many problems. Security should be the first concern. But in large scale multi-agent systems, the most challenging problems encountered are locating and communicating of these autoprocessing agents. Some approaches have used several different methods to solve these problems. But unfortunately, they were not satisfied either for their complexity, poor performance or their lack of applicability. In our approach, we propose a secure group communication solution toward the security, locating and communication problems. We differentiated the ”Agent-Based” Multicast concept from the traditional ”Host-Based” Multicast. We then described the requirements for providing secure group services and introduce the key distribution method. A cryptographic method is complemented for further protect the agents. Finally, we analyzed the security and performance issues and conclude our solution.

Sequential aggregate signature, first introduced and formalized by A. Lysyanskaya et al. (see EUROCRYPT 2004, p.74-90, 2004), is emerging as a useful tool to ensure routing security and at the same time to improve performance. We propose a new mechanism to construct sequential aggregate signatures based on the cipher block chaining (CBC) mode, which is different from previous known results. We then construct an efficient sequential aggregate signature scheme and show that our construction is provably secure in the random oracle paradigm, assuming that the RSA problem is hard. Finally, we propose an interesting aggregate routing protocol for wireless ad hoc networks as an immediate application of our protocol.

Multimedia community is moving from monolithic applications to more flexible and scalable integrated solutions. Stream authentication is more complex since a stream may consist of multiple sources and be transcoded by intermediate proxies. In this paper, we propose a multi-source stream authentication (mSSA) framework based on MPEG-4 stream format. We describe the overall authentication architecture and elaborate the encoding, hashing, signing, amortizing and verifying methods used in the basic scheme. Further on, we utilize advanced cryptographic primitives-aggregate signature schemes, to reduce the signatures’ size and improve the performance. We illustrate the scheme and discuss the extensions. Our analysis shows that the scheme is secure and efficient.

In this paper, we proposed a new agent-assisted secure payment protocol LITESET/A++, which aims at enabling the dispatched consumer-agent to choose the "best" one after negotiating with merchants to close a deal, autonomously sign contracts and make the payment on behalf of the cardholder without the possibility of disclosing any secret to any participant. This is realized by adopting the signature-share and signcryption-share schemes, and employing a trusted third party (TTP). In LITESET/A++, the principle that each participant knows what is strictly necessary for his/her role is followed as in SET payment protocol while the non-repudiation property is improved.

End-to-end security mechanisms, like SSL, may seriously limit the capability of in-network processing that is the most critical function in sensor networks. Supporting in-network processing can significantly improve the performance of extremely resource-constrained sensor networks featuring many-to-one traffic patterns. How to protect the traffic and support in-network processing at the same time is an open problem. The paper tackles the problem by proposing a model for categorizing encrypted messages in wireless sensor networks. A classifier, an intermediate sensor node in our setting, is embedded with a set of searching keywords in encrypted format. Upon receiving an encrypted message, it matches the message with the keywords and then processes the message based on certain policies such as forwarding the original message to the next hop, updating and forwarding it or simply dropping it on detecting a duplicate. The messages are encrypted before being sent out and decrypted only at their destinations. Although the intermediate classifiers can categorize the messages, except for several encrypted keywords, they learn nothing about the encrypted messages, not even statistical information. The scheme is efficient, flexible and resource saving. The performance analysis shows that the computational cost and communication cost are minimized. Furthermore, it is resilient to node capture attack and many other kinds of attacks. We are prototyping the model on our mote testbed.