Over the past decade, smartphones have become the point of convergence for many applications and services. There is a growing trend in which traditional smart-card based services like banking, transport and access control are being provisioned through smartphones. Smartphones with Near Field Communication (NFC) capability can emulate a contactless smart card; popular examples of such services include Google Pay and Apple Pay. Similar to contactless smart cards, NFC-based smartphone transactions are susceptible to relay attacks. For contactless smart cards, distance-bounding protocols are proposed to counter such attacks; for NFC-based smartphone transactions, ambient sensors have been proposed as potential countermeasures. In this study, we have empirically evaluated the suitability of ambient sensors as a proximity detection mechanism for contactless transactions. To provide a comprehensive analysis, we also collected relay attack data to ascertain whether ambient sensors are able to thwart such attacks effectively. We initially evaluated 17 sensors before selecting 7 sensors for in-depth analysis based on their effectiveness as potential proximity detection mechanisms within the constraints of a contactless transaction scenario. Each sensor was used to record 1000 legitimate and relay (illegitimate) contactless transactions at four different physical locations. The analysis of these transactions provides an empirical foundation on which to determine whether ambient sensors provide a strong proximity detection mechanism for security-sensitive applications like banking, transport and high-security access control.
@cite_15 used ambient temperature with an elliptic curve-based RFID and or NFC authentication protocol to determine whether two devices were co-located. Using this method, they were successful in establishing a secure channel; the proposal combines the timing channels in RFID, traditionally used in distance bounding protocols, in conjunction with ambient temperature. Their proposal, however, was not implemented and so there is no experimental data provided to evaluate its efficacy.
@cite_15
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Unless specifically designed for its prevention, none of the existing RFID authentication protocols are immune to relay attacks. Relay attacks generally involve the presence of one or more adversaries who transfer unmodified messages between a prover and a verifier. Given that the message content is not modified, it is rather difficult to address relay attacks through cryptographic means. Extant attempts to prevent relay attacks involve measuring signal strength, round-trip distance, and ambient conditions in the vicinity of prover and verifier. While a majority of related authentication protocols are based on measuring the round-trip distance between prover and verifier using several single-bit challenge-response pairs, recent discussions include physical proximity verification using ambient conditions to address relay attacks. We provide an overview of existing literature on addressing relay attacks through ambient condition measurements. We then propose an elliptic curve-based mutual authentication protocol that addresses relay attacks based on (a) the surface temperature of the prover as measured by prover and verifier and (b) measured single-bit round-trip times between prover and verifier. We also evaluate the security properties of the proposed authentication protocol. We propose to establish a secure communication channel among devices based on similar audio patterns. Features from ambient audio are used to generate a shared cryptographic key between devices without exchanging information about the ambient audio itself or the features utilized for the key generation process. We explore a common audio-fingerprinting approach and account for the noise in the derived fingerprints by employing error correcting codes. This fuzzy-cryptography scheme enables the adaptation of a specific value for the tolerated noise among fingerprints based on environmental conditions by altering the parameters of the error correction and the length of the audio samples utilized. In this paper, we experimentally verify the feasibility of the protocol in four different realistic settings and a laboratory experiment. The case studies include an office setting, a scenario where an attacker is capable of reproducing parts of the audio context, a setting near a traffic loaded road, and a crowded canteen environment. We apply statistical tests to show that the entropy of fingerprints based on ambient audio is high. The proposed scheme constitutes a totally unobtrusive but cryptographically strong security mechanism based on contextual information. Abstract The safety of medical data and equipment plays a vital role in today’s world of Medical Internet of Things (MIoT). These IoT devices have many constraints (e.g., memory size, processing capacity, and power consumption) that make it challenging to use cost-effective and energy-efficient security solutions. Recently, researchers have proposed a few Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) based security solutions for MIoT. The use of RFID technology in securing IoT systems is rapidly increasing because it provides secure and lightweight safety mechanisms for these systems. More recently, authors have proposed a lightweight RFID mutual authentication (LRMI) protocol. The authors argue that LRMI meets the necessary security requirements for RFID systems, and the same applies to MIoT applications as well. In this paper, our contribution has two-folds, firstly we analyze the LRMI protocol’s security to demonstrate that it is vulnerable to various attacks such as secret disclosure, reader impersonation, and tag traceability. Also, it is not able to preserve the anonymity of the tag and the reader. Secondly, we propose a new secure and lightweight mutual RFID authentication (SecLAP) protocol, which provides secure communication and preserves privacy in MIoT systems. Our security analysis shows that the SecLAP protocol is robust against de-synchronization, replay, reader tag impersonation, and traceability attacks, and it ensures forward and backward data communication security. We use Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic to validate the security features of SecLAP. Moreover, we compare SecLAP with the state-of-the-art and validate its performance through a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation, which shows that it is lightweight, consumes fewer resources on tags concerning computation functions, and requires less number of flows. The wireless medium contains domain-specific information that can be used to complement and enhance traditional security mechanisms. In this paper we propose ways to exploit the spatial variability of the radio channel response in a rich scattering environment, as is typical of indoor environments. Specifically, we describe a physical-layer authentication algorithm that utilizes channel probing and hypothesis testing to determine whether current and prior communication attempts are made by the same transmit terminal. In this way, legitimate users can be reliably authenticated and false users can be reliably detected. We analyze the ability of a receiver to discriminate between transmitters (users) according to their channel frequency responses. This work is based on a generalized channel response with both spatial and temporal variability, and considers correlations among the time, frequency and spatial domains. Simulation results, using the ray-tracing tool WiSE to generate the time-averaged response, verify the efficacy of the approach under realistic channel conditions, as well as its capability to work under unknown channel variations.