Sound methods and effective tools for model-based security engineering with UML

The use of formal methods has long been advocated in the development of secure systems. Yet, methods for deriving design from requirements that guarantee retention of the intended security properties remain largely unrealized on a repeatable and consistent basis. We present the FADES (Formal Analysis and Design approach for Engineering Security) that integrates KAOS (Knowledge Acquisition in autOmated Specifications) with the B specification language to derive security design specifications and further implementation from security requirements. We demonstrate the capability of the approach to handle changes to security requirements by introducing corrective changes to the security requirements of a case study, the spy network system. The objective is to bridge the gap between formal requirements and design for security requirements. Our initial results show promise with FADES in preserving security properties and detecting security vulnerabilities early during requirements. Encouraged by these, we are more quantitatively assessing the FADES capabilities.

Recent world events and geopolitics have brought the vulnerability of critical infrastructure to cyberattacks to the forefront. While there has been considerable attention to attacks on Information Technology (IT) systems, such as data theft and ransomware, the vulnerabilities and dangers posed by industrial control systems (ICS) have received significantly less attention. What is very different is that industrial control systems can be made to do things that could destroy equipment or even harm people. For example, in 2021 the US encountered a cyberattack on a water treatment plant in Florida that could have resulted in serious injuries or even death. These risks are based on the unique physical characteristics of these industrial systems. In this paper, we present a holistic, integrated safety and security analysis, we call Cybersafety, based on the STAMP (System-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes) framework, for one such industrial system—an industrial chiller plant—as an example. In this analysis, we identify vulnerabilities emerging from interactions between technology, operator actions as well as organizational structure, and provide recommendations to mitigate resulting loss scenarios in a systematic manner.

This research paper aims to contribute to the field of biometric attendance systems. Biometric system which uses unique biological traits like fingerprints for identification and authentication, offers several benefits over traditional authentication methods like passwords or ID cards. The benefits of using biometric system can be enhanced security, convenience and high efficiency, reduced risk of fraud, cost-effective in long run, accountability, scalability, multi-factor authentication, etc. In most of the organizations or institutes attendance is taken by the traditional methods like register book but this method takes time then attendance from these registers is uploaded to server for further attendance report of students. To withstand this problem, we have proposed an IoT based multipurpose biometric authentication system. We have developed a portable system that includes fingerprint sensors to recognize the fingerprint of various students and show the details of the students whose fingerprints have been scanned. The data from the fingerprint scanner is sent to the Raspberry PI server using Wi-Fi. We also have also designed a user interface for students and faculty to view and manage the students and their attendance. The attendance report can be exported to excel file any time faculty want the report. The biometric system provides 80% efficiency over the regular attendance methods.

To ensure private message exchange among the group members, it is desirable to construct secure and efficient group key management schemes. Moreover, these schemes are more versatile if they could support dynamic join or leave of group members. In IET Information Security 2014, Vijayakumar et al. have introduced such a group key management scheme with lightweight overheads in both computation and communication. And this scheme has been used as a building block in many cryptographic protocols afterwards. In this paper, the authors demonstrate that Vijayakumar's scheme suffers some potential security weaknesses. First, after participating in the group communications for some sessions, a group member may still be able to obtain the group key after it leaves the group, and this violates the claimed security property of forward secrecy. Second, some colluding group members may derive another group member's long term secret key, and obviously, this has more serious consequences. One of the main reasons for the existence of these attacks is that the security analyses in Vijayakumar's scheme are informal and they cannot cover the dynamic environment. To address this issue, the authors’ suggestion is that heuristic arguments of security are not adequate in the design of cryptographic protocols, but formal security definitions and proofs are required.

Grid security solutions address critical requirements and are constructed from building blocks comprising cryptographic algorithms and protocols. Choosing the most appropriate algorithms and protocols requires an ongoing evaluation of performance and security properties, given continuing advances in system performance, optimizations, security analyses, and cryptographic techniques. Today, the Globus Toolkit's grid security infrastructure (GSI) is a leading provider of security solutions based on the RSA cryptosystem. Recently, cryptosystems based on bilinear pairings have been proposed as an alternative with the promise of increased efficiency and scalability. In this work we evaluate this alternative compared to elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and RSA in terms of their computation and communication overheads for today's grid systems. Our analysis and experiments lead us to conclude that RSA continues to be a good choice for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, our results are intuitively aligned with the high-performance, high-bandwidth, and high-latency nature of grid systems.

Certificate-based public key cryptographic is a novel cryptographic primitive solving the heavy management problem in the conventional public key cryptographic. Verifiable encrypted signature is useful for many cryptographic protocols and often is used as to construct an optimistic fair exchange, it can convince a verifier that a given cipher text is an encryption of signature on a given message. In this paper, we propose an efficient certificate-based verifiable encrypted signature scheme by combining certificate-based public key cryptographic with a verifiable encrypted signature. We first give the formal definition of the certificate-based verifiable encrypted signature and its security goal, then we construct a secure certificate-based verifiable encrypted signature scheme, and gives the security analysis. The analysis shows that our scheme satisfies the security properties including validity, unforgeability, and opacity, and simplifies the certificate management process, solves the escrow problem, and there are fewer pairing operations and the least number of the total operations comparing with the other existing verifiable encrypted signature schemes.

SummaryA wireless body area network (WBAN) consists of low‐power devices that are capable of sensing, processing, and wireless communication. WBANs can be used in many applications such as military, ubiquitous health care, entertainment, and sport. The IEEE Std 802.15.6‐2012 is the latest international standard for WBAN. In this paper, we scrutinize the security structure of the IEEE 802.15.6‐2012 standard and perform a security analysis on the cryptographic protocols in the standard. We show that some protocols have subtle security problems and are vulnerable to different attacks. Such vulnerabilities neutralize the security provisions in the standard specifically for medical applications that deal with sensitive information and security problems can be life‐threatening. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Hash functions, which can extract message digest from input messages as output, play an important role in digital signature and authentication. Meanwhile, Hash functions are essential in many cryptographic protocols and regimes. With the research becoming more and more in depth, a series of Hash functions is proposed, such as MD series and SHA series. At the same time, the security analysis and attacks against Hash functions are carried out. The security of Hash functions is threatened. In this case, how to improve the security of the Hash functions becomes the primary concern. In this paper, an optical Hash function based on the interaction between light and multiple scattering media is proposed. Unlike most of the traditional Hash functions which are based on mathematical transformations or complex logic operations, this method innovatively takes advantage of the natural random scattering effect of multiple scattering media on coherently modulated light, and realizes the “confusion” and “diffusion” of modulated light, which satisfies the core functional requirement of the Hash function: one-way encoding/encryption with strong security. The photoelectric hybrid system designed by this method can effectively simulate the "compression function" in the Hash function. Combined with the Sobel filter with feature extraction function, the input data of arbitrary length can be compressed and encrypted into the output with a fixed length of 256-bit (Hash value). The principle of the proposed optical Hash function can be described as follows. 1) Two 8-bit images with a size of 16×16 pixels are loaded in SLM<sub>1</sub> (amplitude-only spatial modulator) and SLM<sub>2</sub> (phase-only spatial modulator) respectively. 2) The coherent wavefront is modulated by SLM<sub>1</sub> and SLM<sub>2</sub>, and then propagates on multiple scattering media. 3) A speckle pattern is recorded by CCD because of the confusion of multiple scattering media. 4) The features of the speckle pattern, which is extracted by Sobel filter, serve as the input of the next compression function. For the unpredicted and non-duplicated disorder multiple scattering media, it is tremendously difficult to determine the internal state of the multiple scattering media. Therefore, the proposed optical Hash function is considered to have a high security. A series of simulation results shows that the proposed optical Hash function has a good “avalanche effect” and “collision resistance”, and its security performance is comparable to that of the most widely used traditional Hash functions (MD5 and SHA-1).

Traditional biometric systems are designed and configured to operate in predefined circumstances to address the needs of a particular application. The performance of such biometrics systems tend to decrease because when they encounter varying conditions as they are unable to adapt to such variations. Many real-life scenarios require identification systems to recognise uncooperative people in uncontrolled environments. Therefore, there is a real need to design biometric systems that are aware of their context and be able to adapt to changing conditions. The context-awareness and adaptation of a biometric system are based on a set of factors that include: the application (e.g. healthcare system, border control, unlock smart devices), environment (e.g. quiet/noisy, indoor/outdoor), desired and pre-defined requirements (e.g. speed, usability, reliability, accuracy, robustness to high/low quality samples), user of the system (e.g. cooperative or non-cooperative), the chosen modality (e.g. face, speech, gesture signature), and used techniques (e.g. pre-processing to normalise and clean biometrics data, feature extraction and classification). These factors are linked and might affect each other, hence the system has to work adaptively to meet its overall aim based to its operational context. The aim of this research is to develop a multiagent based framework to represent a context-aware adaptive biometric system. This is to improve the decision making process at each processing step of traditional biometric identification systems. Agents will be used to provide the system with intelligence, adaptation, flexibility, automation, and reliability during the identification process. The framework will accommodate at least five agents, one for each of the five main processing steps of a typical biometric system (i.e. data capture, pre-processing, feature extraction, classification and decision). Each agent can contribute differently towards its designated goal to achieve the best possible solution by selecting/ applying the best technique. For example, an agent can be used to assess the quality of the input biometric sample to ensure the important features can be extracted and processed in further steps. Another agent can be used to pre-process the biometric sample if necessary. A third agent is used to select the appropriate set of features followed by another to select a suitable classifier that works well in a given condition.

Cryptography is not sufficient for implementing secure exchange of secrets or authentification. Logical flaws in the protocol design may lead to incorrect behavior even under the idealized assumption of perfect cryptography. Most of protocol verification tools are model-checking tools for bounded number of sessions, bounded number of participants and in many case also a bounded size of messages [11,8,5,10]. In general, they are applied to discover flaws in cryptographic protocols. On the contrary, tools based on induction and theorem proving provide a general proof strategy [9,4], but they are either not automatic with exception of [4] or the termination is not guaranteed.

A biometric system is an amalgamation of algorithms that uses an individual’s unique biological data innate physical features (fingerprints, retina, face, ears, etc.) or behavioural features (signature, voice, keystroke dynamics, etc.) or both to authenticate the individual. This essentially makes a biometric system function as a pattern recognition system that helps an individual in any kind of adversarial environment. Hence, like any conventional authentication system, it is vulnerable to the attacks of malicious adversaries that try to manipulate the data and thus decline the security of the system by compromising its robustness. These possible attacks have not been considered while developing most biometric authentication systems. Our work describes multimodal biometrics, its feature extraction methods, research challenges and focuses on the major security issues in both unimodal and multimodal biometric systems. This paper summarizes some robust multimodal systems, their countermeasures and algorithms that have been devised to tackle these security challenges.KeywordsBiometricsMultimodal biometricsBiometric fusionSecurityAttacksCountermeasuresEncryption

Score normalization applied to adaptive biometric systems

Tian et al. (EPJ Quantum Technol 11(1):35, 2024) proposed three semi-quantum summation protocols that enable resource-limited participants to securely compute the sum of their private inputs with assistance from a semi-honest third party (TP). In these protocols, participants do not need quantum measurement devices to achieve secure computation. Although the protocols have been analyzed against common attacks to demonstrate their robustness, this study identifies two significant issues in Tian et al.’s work: a security loophole and a design flaw. The security loophole permits a malicious participant to steal another participant’s private input without detection, while the design flaw prevents participants from obtaining the correct summation result when the number of participants is odd. To address these issues, this study proposes improved semi-quantum summation protocols under the same assumptions and environment.

We would like to outline our opinions about the usability of biometric authentication systems. We outline the position of biometrics in the current field of computer security in the first section of our paper. The second chapter introduces a more systematic view of the process of biometric authentication — a layer model (of the biometric authentication process). The third section discusses the advantages and disadvantages of biometric authentication systems. We also propose a classification of biometric systems that would allow us to compare the biometrics systems reasonably, along similar lines to Common Criteria [1] or FIPS 140–1/2 [4]. We conclude this paper with some suggestions where we would suggest to use biometric systems and where not.

The need for fool proof authentication procedures away from traditional authentication mechanisms like passwords, security PINS has led to the advent of biometric authentication in information systems. Biometric data extracted from physiological features of a person including but not limited to fingerprints, palm prints, face or retina for purpose of verification & identification is saved as biometric templates. The inception of biometrics in access control systems has not been without its own hitches & like other systems it has its fair share of challenges. Biometric fingerprints being the most mature of all biometric spheres are the most widely adopted biometric authentication systems. Biometric systems effectiveness lies on how secure they are at preventing inadvertent disclosure of biometric templates in an information system’s archive. This however has not been the case as biometric templates have been fraudulently accessed to gain unauthorized access in identification and verification systems. In order to achieve strong and secure biometric systems, biometric systems developers need to build biometric systems that properly secure biometric templates. Several biometric template protection schemes and approaches have been proposed and used to safeguard stored biometric templates. Despite there being various biometric template protection schemes and approaches in existence, none of them has provided the most authentic, reliable, efficient and deterrent means to totally secure biometric fingerprint templates. This research sought to establish status of the current biometric template protection techniques and methods by conducting a survey and analyzing data gathered from a sample of seventy-eight (78) respondents. We will report these results and give our conclusion based on findings of the survey in this paper.