Mohammad S. Obaidat

A robust mutual authentication protocol for WSN with multiple base-stations

Abstract Security and Privacy are very crucial for data communication in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In order to provide ample security, recently many user authentication and key agreement (UAKA) protocols with single base-station have been put forward for WSNs. The base-station experienced huge load for such type of protocol, and thus, the quality of the service is dramatically reduced with the increasing number of users. This problem can be eliminated if the load is distributed to multiple base-stations. However, multiple base-stations based UAKA (MBS-UAKA) protocol with for WSN has not yet been proposed. This paper focuses to design a robust and effective MBS-UAKA protocol for WSN, which makes the secure communication as well as authentication. We evaluated all the known security properties of our MBS-UAKA protocol through formal and informal security analysis. Besides, the BAN logic analysis ensures that our MBS-UAKA protocol satisfies the mutual authentication property. Our comparative analysis ensures better performance compared to existing research works.

An anonymous and robust multi-server authentication protocol using multiple registration servers

Summary nThe concept of multi-server authentication includes multiple numbers of application servers. The registration/control server is the central point in such environment to provide smooth services to a limited number of legitimate users. However, this type of environment is inappropriate to handle unlimited users since the number of users may grow, and thus, the response time may be very high. To eliminate these shortcomings, we have modified the existing multi-server authentication architecture and then designed a new scheme by including multiregistration server technique that can provide a smooth environment to support unlimited number of users. The main aspect of our design is to provide a secure authentication environment for multi-server application using password and smartcard so that the participants can securely communicate with each other. The simulation results are obtained by executing our protocol using AVISPA tool. The results provide concrete evidence about the security safety against active and passive attacks. Furthermore, the justification of correctness of the freshness of the session key negotiation and the mutual authentication between the participants has done been evaluated with the BAN logic model. The comprehensive comparative analysis justifies our argument that our protocol has better applicability in multi-server environments compared to other protocols with similar nature.

Fast and Secure Handover into Visited WLAN Networks

Generally, the re-authentication procedure in a visited network causes a large delay during a secure handover that always involves communication with the home network. Most existing solutions are based on pre-authentication between the different domains, which needs to statically build the roaming agreement between each pair of domains, and cannot support dynamic and flexible cooperation for them. In this paper, we propose a fast re-authentication scheme, based on an authentication token mechanism to reduce the secure handover delay. The authentication token is issued by the home authentication server. The proposed protocol eliminates the need for communication between the target and the user’s home networks for credentials verification. Numerical results obtained from a series of simulations show that the proposed scheme enhances handover parameters such as authentication latency and handover blocking probability.

On the placement of controllers in software-Defined-WAN using meta-heuristic approach

Abstract Software Defined Networks (SDN) is a popular modern network technology that decouples the control logic from the underlying hardware devices. The control logic has implemented as a software entity that resides in a server called controller. In a Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SDWAN) with n nodes; deploying k number of controllers (k

Online Signature-Based Biometric Recognition

This chapter covers the online signature-based biometric recognition system, which includes fingerprint scanning, facial geometry, footprint scanning, retina and iris patterns, DNA, and heartbeat scans. It covers the background knowledge of signature verification system along with its classification. A systematic comparison between online and offline signature verification system is also included. Basics of biometric recognition in terms of security, exploring definitions of the various parameters that can be used in the security perspective, are also covered (Obaidat and Boudriga, Security of e-Systems and Computer Networks. Cambridge University Press, 2007; Obaidat and Sadoun, IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybernetics Part B, 27(2):261–269, 1997). An in-depth discussion about the online signature-based authentication methods is also presented. Finally, some case studies have been discussed to demonstrate the concept.

Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Biometric Technologies

This chapter covers the ethical, legal, and social implications of biometric technologies, which include fingerprint scanning, facial geometry, footprint scanning, retina and iris patterns, DNA, and heart beat scanning, among others. The introduction part of the chapter will address the process of how to do the enrollment in biometric technology as well as the matching process. At the end of introduction, different biometric techniques and stacks have been given. The next section describes the legal implications of biometric technology to the society. Social issues and uses of biometric technology in government agencies are included in two distinct sections. Different standards formed by the European government were also summarized. The general perception about the biometric technology has been covered in this chapter. Lastly business ethics, biometric security, and a couple of case studies like megaproject UIDAI of India and the utilization of biometric-based security system for banking systems have been covered. By the end of this chapter, readers will get the information about ethical, legal, and social implications on the biometric technologies along with the detailed knowledge of megaproject UIDAI of India and the utilization of biometric-based security system for banking systems.

Biometric Security and Internet of Things (IoT)

The human-to-machine and human-to-human communications are transforming to machine-to-machine communications by which several decision-making systems can be built. When different Internet-enabled smart devices interact with each other to achieve a goal (application depended), then a network is formed in which different sophisticated technologies will integrate to each other to form Internet of Things (IoT). It encompasses the vast amount of diverse smart devices, which collaborate with each other to achieve different smart applications like smart cities, connected cars, automated agriculture, and so on. Through radio-frequency identification (RFID), wireless, mobile, and sensor technologies make IoT feasible, but it suffers from many challenges like scalability, security, and heterogeneity problems. Out of many challenges, security is one of the primary concerns in IoT. Without proper security and privacy, the business model of IoT will not succeed. This chapter discusses the secure solutions for IoT using biometric features of users as well as end users. The chapter will demonstrate that biometric security is most feasible, reliable, and efficient with respect to other existing security arrangements.

Protecting the Integrity of Elections Using Biometrics

From the past to today, the growth of information technology in the world is huge, and its resolutions are becoming significant in almost all arenas of life. The e-government system is one of the great resolutions of information technology. The implementation of election process by electronic voting (e-voting) becomes more useful with the rapid growth of e-government evolution. An e-voting system provides facility by which the voters can submit their votes over the computer network via the Internet. Thus, the voters can join in elections without going physically to the polling places, which is more efficient and economical. The recent growth in communications and cryptographic techniques facilitates the implementation of e-voting. However, a practical and accurate e-voting scheme is highly required, which can ensure the e-voting requirements in terms of uniqueness, fairness, privacy, uncoercibility, eligibility, accuracy, individual verifiability, robustness, and universal verifiability (Obaidat MS, Boudriga N (2007) Security of e-systems and computer networks. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/New York). However, incorporating biometric features like hand geometry, fingerprint, iris, retina, and handwriting can basically make digital photo ID card for each voter. During the election process, voters can submit their votes by punching their photo ID card into their electronic device like mobile, laptop, and computer (terminal) from remote places. In this chapter, we first describe the requirement of e-voting system and their security issues. Then we discuss some biometric-based e-voting schemes along with all possible attacks which need to be protected during the design of biometric-based e-voting system.

Biometrics Based on Healthcare Sensors

Data inaccuracy hampers the performance of a healthcare system in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, and energy consumption. Runtime secret key generation is highly required during communication between a controller and healthcare sensors in order to protect and maintain accuracy of sensitive data of a human. Runtime secret key generation is possible after getting the physiological and behavioral information from a human. Therefore, the healthcare sensors with different sensing capabilities collect biometrics like heartbeat rate, blood pressure, and iris and generate runtime secret key by extracting features from these biometrics to communicate with the controller. On the other hand, the controller maintains a secure biometric template so that the generated key by a healthcare sensor can be verified. Thus biometric-based communication helps to protect sensitive data as well as helps to authenticate the communicators in real-time environment.

Duality-based branch–bound computational algorithm for sum-of-linear-fractional multi-objective optimization problem

Optimizing the sum-of-fractional functions under the bounded feasible space is a very difficult optimization problem in the research area of nonlinear optimization. All the existing solution methods in the literature are developed to find the solution of single-objective sum-of-fractional optimization problems only. Sum-of-fractional multi-objective optimization problem is not attempted to solve much by the researchers even when the fractional functions are linear. In the present article, a duality-based branch and bound computational algorithm is proposed to find a global efficient (non-dominated) solution for the sum-of-linear-fractional multi-objective optimization (SOLF-MOP) problem. Charnes–Cooper transformation technique is applied to convert the original problem into non-fractional optimization problem, and equivalence is shown between the original SOLF-MOP and non-fractional MOP. After that, weighted sum method is applied to transform MOP into a single-objective problem. The Lagrange weak duality theorem is used to develop the proposed algorithm. This algorithm is programmed in MATLAB (2016b), and three numerical illustrations are done for the systematic implementation. The non-dominance of obtained solutions is shown by comparison with the existing algorithm and by taking some feasible solution points from the feasible space in the neighborhood of obtained global efficient solution. This shows the superiority of the developed method.