Kyusuk Han

Enhanced secure anonymous authentication scheme for roaming service in global mobility networks

Abstract User authentication scheme is an important issue for providing secure roaming service to users of mobile devices. In 2008, Wu, Lee and Tsaur proposed an enhanced anonymous authentication for roaming environment. In this paper, we show weaknesses of Wu–Lee–Tsaur’s schemes such as failing to achieve anonymity and perfect forward secrecy, and disclosing of legitimate user’s password. Therefore, we propose a new enhanced scheme that uses Elliptic Curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH) to overcome these weaknesses and improve performance. We also demonstrate that our scheme not only overcomes these weaknesses but also provides mutual authentication and resistance to a man-in-the-middle attack. Compared with previous schemes that use public key cryptosystem with certificates, our scheme is more efficient. Moreover, our scheme does not use timestamps, so it is not required to synchronize the time.

3G-WLAN interworking: security analysis and new authentication and key agreement based on EAP-AKA

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project(3GPP) standard is developing System Architecture Evolution(SAE)/Long Term Evolution(LTE) architecture for the next generation mobile communication system. The SAE/LTE architecture provides secure service and 3G-WLAN interworking [9]. To provide secure 3G-WLAN interworking in the SAE/LTE architecture, Extensible Authentication Protocol-Authentication and Key Agreement(EAP-AKA) is used. However, EAP-AKA has several vulnerabilities such as disclosure of user identity, man-in-the-middle attack, Sequence Number(SQN) synchronization, and additional bandwidth consumption. Therefore, this paper analyzes threats and attacks in 3G-WLAN interworking and proposes a new authentication and key agreement protocol based on EAPAKA. The proposed protocol combines Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman(ECDH) with symmetric key cryptosystem to overcome these vulnerabilities. Moreover, our protocol provides Perfect Forward Secrecy(PFS) to guarantee stronger security, mutual authentication, and resistance to replay attack. Compared with previous protocols which use public key cryptosystem with certificates, our protocol can reduce computational overhead.

Editorial: A special section on Emerging Platform Technologies

During the last decade, many countries have adopted in recent years roadmap for developing the future infrastructure in emerging platform technology areas such as automobile, big data processing technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, grid computing and ICT (Information and Communication Technology). Platform technologies consist of tools, techniques and instruments that enable entirely novel approaches for scientific investigation across a broad range of disciplines, which have captured a significant fraction of all science interests during the last decade. It leads to emerging needs to seek and identify exceptional ideas for revolutionary new platform technologies (from across the full breadth of science, technology, engineering, and math) that could lead to breakthrough advances in the broadly defined life sciences. The aim of this issue is to promote interdisciplinary research in platform technologies and other applied fields in mathematics, engineering and sciences to investigate specific methodologies and develop technologies that will contribute to the development of the future infrastructure.

Untraceable Mobile Node Authentication in WSN

Mobility of sensor node in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) brings security issues such as re-authentication and tracing the node movement. However, current security researches on WSN are insufficient to support such environments since their designs only considered the static environments. In this paper, we propose the efficient node authentication and key exchange protocol that reduces the overhead in node re-authentication and also provides untraceability of mobile nodes. Compared with previous protocols, our protocol has only a third of communication and computational overhead. We expect our protocol to be the efficient solution that increases the lifetime of sensor network.

Efficient mobile sensor authentication in smart home and WPAN

Currently, it is rapidly increasing convergence services based on various mobile devices with sensors like Smart Home. Specifically the mobility of the sensors in Smart Home merged with wireless sensor networks (WSN) brings security issues such as re-authentication and tracing the node movement. We extend our novel and efficient node authentication and key exchange protocol that support Irregular distribution. Compared with previous protocols, our protocol has only a third of communication and computational overhead. We expect our protocol to be the efficient solution that increases the lifetime of sensor network.

Design and implementation of a wireless sensor network architecture using smart mobile devices

Wireless sensor networks improve the quality of human daily life like ubiquitous city and healthcare services as well as the fundamental monitoring such as environment pollution, tunnel monitoring, earthquake diagnostic, and so on. To increase usability and feasibility of collected sensor data, a wireless sensor network should be required to apply a variety of mobile devices to give the information at anytime and anywhere to users. Thus, we present multi-sensor centric smart sensor network architecture using general mobile devices in order to provide more efficient and valuable sensor network application and services. The proposed system architecture is based on IEEE 802.15.4-2006 standard with smart mobile devices. We also show some scenarios with on-demand request and real time event driven data to show the feasibility of the proposed architecture using five kinds of sensors such as magnetic, photodiode, microphone, motion and vibration. Based on the experiment results, we show that the proposed system has the potential as smart mobile device-based wireless sensor network architecture.

Efficient sensor node authentication in third generation-wireless sensor networks integrated networks

The advent of converged environment merged with wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and mobile networks can have the possibility on enabling us to experience variety of ubiquitous applications based on multi-sensor attached smartphones. However, most of current researches are failed to recognise the fact that there are many drawbacks to break through between the heterogeneous networks such as a WSN and mobile network. In this study, the authors propose the authentication and key agreement protocol that efficiently reduces the overall computational and communication costs in the next generation converged network. The enhanced security procedures are operated through the mobile network in order to maximise the lifetime of the sensor networks and to apply the combined capabilities of both networks. The authors show the presented novel design can show the feasibility to minimise the usage of the sensor networks with the battery-powered sensors in comparison with the existing authentication models, and can be deployed under the standard architectures.

An enhanced lightweight authentication protocol for access control in wireless LANs

In this paper, an enhanced lightweight identity authentication protocol for access control in IEEE 802.11 networks are presented. The proposed protocol is nicely integrated with the current MAC frame structure and takes the most advantage of the redundancy bits inside the MAC frame header to convey the authentication information, as well as the synchronization information in case of synchronization loss happening. A much more efficient and fault-tolerant synchronization algorithm is given at the same time, which significantly improved the performance of the proposed protocol as compared to the previous ones. The proposed protocol is highly effective as evaluated via a thorough mathematical analysis. A quantitative attack detection framework is also established based on the evaluation result. Finally, the proposed protocol is well suited in a wireless constrained environment for its low communication and computation overheads, requiring only several additional bits (less than 8) for transmission and random bit generating operation.

Secure and efficient public key management in next generation mobile networks

Employing public key-based security architecture is inevitable for the advanced security applications in the mobile networks. However, key storage management problems have arisen, because the public key computation is still the large overhead to USIM, and the mobile equipment has potential threats of the key leakage or loss. In order to solve such shortcomings, we improve the key-insulated models and propose “Trust Delegation” model that the overall security computations are operated in ME, while the initial private key still remains in the secure storage in USIM. Our model is resilient against not only key exposure but also key loss. Finally, we show that the overall transactions can be reduced to one-third than current 3GPP Generic Authentication Architecture.

A novel secure key paring protocol for RF4CE ubiquitous smart home systems

The Radio Frequency for Consumer Electronics (RF4CE) is developed to support the rapid increasing demand of bi-directional communication and remote control functionalities in CE market such as TV, home theater . However, current security model in RF4CE standard has potential weakness that transmission of initial key seeds is operated via unencrypted air interface. In this paper, we propose a secure key agreement protocol that uses pre-shared information between consumer devices and manufacturers and controllers receive the information by communication with manufacturers.