Arturo Ribagorda

M 2 AP: a minimalist mutual-authentication protocol for low-cost RFID tags

Low-cost Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags affixed to consumer items as smart labels are emerging as one of the most pervasive computing technologies in history. This presents a number of advantages, but also opens a huge number of security problems that need to be addressed before its successful deployment. Many proposals have recently appeared, but all of them are based on RFID tags using classical cryptographic primitives such as Pseudorandom Number Generators (PRNGs), hash functions, or block ciphers. We believe this assumption to be fairly unrealistic, as classical cryptographic constructions lie well beyond the computational reach of very low-cost RFID tags. A new approach is necessary to tackle the problem, so we propose a minimalist lightweight mutual authentication protocol for low-cost RFID tags that offers an adequate security level for certain applications, which could be implemented even in the most limited low-cost tags as it only needs around 300 gates.

EMAP: an efficient mutual-authentication protocol for low-cost RFID tags

RFID tags are devices of very limited computational capabilities, which only have 250-3K logic gates that can be devoted to security-related tasks Many proposals have recently appeared, but all of them are based on RFID tags using classical cryptographic primitives such as PRNGs, hash functions, block ciphers, etc We believe this assumption to be fairly unrealistic, as classical cryptographic constructions lie well beyond the computational reach of very low-cost RFID tags A new approach is necessary to tackle this problem, so we propose an extremely efficient lightweight mutual-authentication protocol that offers an adequate security level for certain applications and can be implemented even in the most limited low-cost RFID tags, as it only needs around 150 gates.

Advances in Ultralightweight Cryptography for Low-Cost RFID Tags: Gossamer Protocol

The design of ultralightweight authentication protocols that conform to low-cost tag requirements is imperative. This paper analyses the most important proposals (except for those based in hard problems such as the HB [1-3] family) in the area [4-6] and identifies the common weaknesses that have left all of them open to various attacks [7-11]. Finally, we present Gossamer, a new protocol inspired by the recently published SASI scheme [13], that was lately also the subject of a disclosure attack by Hernandez-Castro et al.[14]. Specifically, this new protocol is designed to avoid the problems of the past, and we examine in some deep its security and performance.

RFID systems: a survey on security threats and proposed solutions

Low-cost Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags affixed to consumer items as smart labels are emerging as one of the most pervasive computing technology in history. This can have huge security implications. The present article surveys the most important technical security challenges of RFID systems. We first provide a brief summary of the most relevant standards related to this technology. Next, we present an overview about the state of the art on RFID security, addressing both the functional aspects and the security risks and threats associated to its use. Finally, we analyze the main security solutions proposed until date.

Evolution, Detection and Analysis of Malware for Smart Devices

Smart devices equipped with powerful sensing, computing and networking capabilities have proliferated lately, ranging from popular smartphones and tablets to Internet appliances, smart TVs, and others that will soon appear (e.g., watches, glasses, and clothes). One key feature of such devices is their ability to incorporate third-party apps from a variety of markets. This poses strong security and privacy issues to users and infrastructure operators, particularly through software of malicious (or dubious) nature that can easily get access to the services provided by the device and collect sensory data and personal information. Malware in current smart devices -mostly smartphones and tablets- have rocketed in the last few years, in some cases supported by sophisticated techniques purposely designed to overcome security architectures currently in use by such devices. Even though important advances have been made on malware detection in traditional personal computers during the last decades, adopting and adapting those techniques to smart devices is a challenging problem. For example, power consumption is one major constraint that makes unaffordable to run traditional detection engines on the device, while externalized (i.e., cloud-based) techniques rise many privacy concerns. This article examines the problem of malware in smart devices and recent progress made in detection techniques. We first present a detailed analysis on how malware has evolved over the last years for the most popular platforms. We identify exhibited behaviors, pursued goals, infection and distribution strategies, etc. and provide numerous examples through case studies of the most relevant specimens. We next survey, classify and discuss efforts made on detecting both malware and other suspicious software (grayware), concentrating on the 20 most relevant techniques proposed between 2010 and 2013. Based on the conclusions extracted from this study, we finally provide constructive discussion on open research problems and areas where we believe that more work is needed.

LAMED - A PRNG for EPC Class-1 Generation-2 RFID specification

RFID is a relatively heterogenous radio technology, where it is necessary to put an extra effort on security and privacy-related issues. As early as 2004, some authors suggested the use of a PRNG for increasing security. This was later questioned because many thought a PRNG implementation may go well beyond the very limited computational capabilities of low-cost RFID tags. However, its use has been ratified by EPCGlobal (EPC Class-1 Generation-2) and ISO (ISO/IEC 18000-6C). This motivates our proposal of a new PRNG, named LAMED, which is compliant with the standards and successfully passes several batteries of very demanding randomness tests (ENT, DIEHARD, NIST, and SEXTON). A study of its hardware complexity shows that LAMED can be implemented with slightly less than 1.6 K gates, and that pseudo-random numbers can be generated each 1.8 ms. So we can affirm this is a realist proposal both conforming with the EPC-G1C2 standard, and suitable for low-cost RFID tags.

Anonymous authentication for privacy-preserving IoT target-driven applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) will be formed by smart objects and services interacting autonomously and in real-time. As an application scenario, household smart meters will provide real-time neighborhood information which enables a smart community to cooperatively identify patterns, adapt consumption and improve overall quality of life, making the shared environment more sustainable. There is, in these types of settings, a major need toward securing all communications, placing equal effort on guaranteeing privacy properties (e.g., participant anonymity, unlinkability) as on assuring security properties (e.g., content authenticity). In this article, we present a fully decentralized anonymous authentication protocol aimed at encouraging the implementation of privacy-preserving IoT target-driven applications. The system is set up by an ad-hoc community of decentralized founding nodes. From then on, nodes can interact, being participants of cyber-physical systems, preserving full anonymity. We also present a performance and security analysis of the proposed system.

An Efficient Authentication Protocol for RFID Systems Resistant to Active Attacks

RFID technology is a ubiquitous technology, and seems destined to become more a more ubiquitous. Traditional cryptographic primitives are not supported on low-cost RFID tags since, at most, 4K gates can be devoted to security-related tasks. Despite this, there are a vast number of proposals based on the use of classical hash functions, an assumption that is not realistic (at least at the present time). Furthermore, none of the published authentication protocols are resistant to active attacks. We try to address these two issues in this work by designing a new authentication protocol, secure against passive and active attacks, inspired by Shieh et al.’s protocol for smart-cards, but adapted to RFID systems. The original Shieh et al.’s scheme is considered one of the most secure an efficient protocols in the smart-card field. Because in this protocol tags should support a hash-function on-board, a new lightweight hash function, named Tav-128, is also proposed. A preliminary security analysis is shown, as well as a study on its hardware complexity, which concludes that its implementation is possible with around 2.6K gates.

Evolving High-Speed, Easy-to-Understand Network Intrusion Detection Rules with Genetic Programming

An ever-present problem in intrusion detection technology is how to construct the patterns of (good, bad or anomalous) behaviour upon which an engine have to make decisions regarding the nature of the activity observed in a system. This has traditionally been one of the central areas of research in the field, and most of the solutions proposed so far have relied in one way or another upon some form of data mining---with the exception, of course, of human-constructed patterns. In this paper, we explore the use of Genetic Programming (GP) for such a purpose. Our approach is not new in some aspects, as GP has already been partially explored in the past. Here we show that GP can offer at least two advantages over other classical mechanisms: it can produce very lightweight detection rules (something of extreme importance for high-speed networks or resource-constrained applications) and the simplicity of the patterns generated allows to easily understand the semantics of the underlying attack.

Autonomous decision on intrusion detection with trained BDI agents

In the context of computer security, the first step to respond to an intrusive incident is the detection of such activity in the monitored system. In recent years, research in intrusion detection has evolved to become a multi-discipline task that involves areas such as data mining, decision analysis, agent-based systems or cost-benefit analysis among others. We propose a multiagent IDS that considers decision analysis techniques in order to configure itself optimally according to the conditions faced. This IDS also provides a quantitative measure of the value of the response decision it can autonomously take. Results regarding the well-known 1999 KDD dataset are shown.