Search Results (20)

The rapid expansion of the Internet has enabled large-scale information sharing while also increasing the risk of sensitive information leakage. Authentication secrets, including passwords and API keys, may be unintentionally exposed in publicly accessible environments such as web pages, network packets, and code-sharing platforms when they are mishandled by developers or operators. Such leakage allows attackers to abuse third-party authentication services and may lead to unauthorized access, fraud, or broader compromise. Therefore, timely and accurate detection of sensitive information in network data is essential for reducing security risks. This paper presents SenScanner, an artificial intelligence-based model for automatically identifying password-related secrets in mixed text. By combining natural language processing and machine learning techniques, SenScanner detects leaked password-related sensitive information across heterogeneous textual contexts. Experimental results on 2000 public data samples show that SenScanner achieves superior precision, recall, and F1-score, demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing false positives and manual review effort. Full article

In user–server authentication environments, persistent server-side verification tables, such as password verifiers, shared authentication records, or per-user secret tables, may become a critical point of failure once leaked. To address this problem in the post-quantum setting, this paper proposes an ML-DSA-specific verification-table-free authenticated key agreement (AKA) scheme based on the NIST-standardized Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm (ML-DSA). The main contribution is a protocol-level use of the signer-recoverable masking vector in ML-DSA as an on-demand reconstruction mechanism for user-related authentication material. This enables the server to reconstruct the required user-related authentication material from its own signature and long-term secret key. This architecture reduces the exposure associated with centralized verification-table leakage, but it should be understood as a storage-relocation tradeoff rather than a storage-free design, because each user must retain the issued signature and the corresponding hash-derived authentication value. By combining the recovered value with identity information through a quantum-resistant one-way hash function, the server can authenticate the user and establish a session key. Its security is analyzed within a Canetti–Krawczyk-style adversarial model and further discussed in the random-oracle setting through a sequence-of-games argument. The analysis supports session-key indistinguishability under the stated freshness and exposure assumptions, while explicitly excluding full forward secrecy under compromise of the server’s long-term ML-DSA secret key. In addition, an operation-level comparison is provided to clarify computational, storage, and communication tradeoffs relative to representative post-quantum AKA schemes. Since the present work does not include implementation-level benchmarking, the performance discussion should be interpreted as analytical rather than empirical validation. The proposed scheme is therefore most suitable for account-login-oriented applications in which reducing centralized verification-table leakage is a primary design objective and where user-side credential storage can be securely managed. Full article

Wireless sensor networks ($WSNs$) are extensively used in $IoT$ applications. Secure access control and data protection are essential. Nonetheless, the wireless environment has an open nature. The limited resources of sensor devices render $WSNs$ susceptible to a variety of security attacks, causing significant difficulties in the design phase of efficient authentication and key agreement ($AKA$) protocols. This study proposes a physically unclonable function ($PUF$)-based lightweight and secure $AKA$ protocol for $WSNs$ based on elliptic curve cryptography ($ECC$). A secure password update scheme is offered, which would allow legitimate users to reset forgotten passwords without re-registration. According to formal security analysis using $BAN$ logic and $ProVerif$, the proposed protocol is secure against common attacks. Moreover, from an entropy perspective, the use of dynamic pseudonyms and fresh session randomness increase an adversary’s uncertainty about user identities, thereby limiting identity-related information leakage. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed protocol achieves lower computational and communication overhead than the existing ones, making it suitable for $WSNs$ with resource constraints. Full article

Secure real-time data interaction between vehicles and transportation infrastructure, such as RSUs (V2R), can achieve intelligent and safe driving, as well as efficient travel services, in Internet of Vehicles (IoV), a secure and efficient V2R authentication protocol, which plays an important role. Recently, scholars have proposed a two-factor V2R authentication protocol for the IoV. However, subsequent research has shown that this protocol is vulnerable to insider and ephemeral secret leakage attacks, and cannot achieve perfect forward secrecy. To address these security flaws, an improved scheme was further proposed. Nevertheless, this paper points out that the improved scheme still has shortcomings: it cannot provide anonymity and perfect forward secrecy, exhibits insufficient session key secrecy, and remains vulnerable to password guessing attacks, RSU capture attacks, and suffers from inappropriate pseudo-identity update mechanisms. Therefore, a novel Physical Unclonable Function-based Lightweight V2R Authentication (PUF-LA) scheme is proposed, which uses Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to achieve perfect forward secrecy, uses PUF to resist devices captured attacks, and achieves two-factor secrecy protection against password guessing attacks. The security performance of PUF-LA is theoretically proved by leveraging the random oracle model. In contrast with relevant authentication schemes, PUF-LA is more secure and has low computation costs. Full article

Wireless Medical Sensor Networks (WMSNs) collect and transmit patients’ physiological data in real time through various sensors, playing an increasingly important role in intelligent healthcare. Authentication protocols in WMSNs ensure that users can securely access real-time data from sensor nodes. Although many researchers have proposed authentication schemes to resist common attacks, insufficient attention has been paid to insider attacks and ephemeral secret leakage (ESL) attacks. Moreover, existing adversary models still have limitations in accurately characterizing an attacker’s capabilities. To address these issues, this paper extends the traditional adversary model to better reflect practical deployment scenarios, assuming a semi-trusted server and allowing adversaries to obtain users’ temporary secrets. Based on this enhanced model, we design an efficient ECC-based authentication and key agreement protocol that ensures the confidentiality of users’ passwords, biometric data, and long-term private keys during the registration phase, thereby mitigating insider threats. The proposed protocol combines anonymous authentication and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) key exchange to satisfy security requirements. Performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol achieves lower computational and communication costs compared with existing schemes. Furthermore, the protocol’s security is formally proven under the Random Oracle (ROR) model and verified using the ProVerif tool, confirming its security and reliability. Therefore, the proposed protocol can be effectively applied to secure data transmission and user authentication in wireless medical sensor networks and other IoT environments. Full article

The CPace protocol (Internet-Draft:draft-irtf-cfrg-cpace-14) is a password-authenticated key exchange optimized for simplicity. In particular, it involves only two messages exchanged in an arbitrary order. CPace combines a simple and elegant design with privacy guarantees obtained via strict mathematical proofs. In this paper, we go further and analyze its resilience against malicious cryptography implementations. While the clever design of CPace immediately eliminates many kleptographic techniques applicable to many other protocols of this kind, we point to the remaining risks related to kleptographic setups. We show that such attacks can break the security and privacy features of CPace. Thereby, we point to the necessity of very careful certification of the devices running CPace, focusing in particular on critical threats related to random number generators. Full article

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), particularly Wi-Fi, serve as the backbone of modern connectivity, supporting billions of devices globally and forming a critical component in Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems. However, the increasing ubiquity of WLANs also presents an expanding attack surface for adversaries—especially Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), which operate with high levels of sophistication, resources, and long-term strategic objectives. This paper provides a holistic security analysis of WLANs under the lens of APT threat models, categorizing APT actors by capability tiers and examining their ability to compromise WLANs through logical attack surfaces. The study identifies and explores three primary attack surfaces: Radio Access Control interfaces, compromised insider nodes, and ISP gateway-level exposures. A series of empirical experiments—ranging from traffic analysis of ISP-controlled routers to offline password attack modeling—evaluate the current resilience of WLANs and highlight specific vulnerabilities such as credential reuse, firmware-based leakage, and protocol downgrade attacks. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates how APT resources significantly accelerate attacks through formal models of computational scaling. It also incorporates threat modeling frameworks, including STRIDE and MITRE ATT&CK, to contextualize risks and map adversary tactics. Based on these insights, this paper offers practical recommendations for enhancing WLAN resilience through improved authentication mechanisms, network segmentation, AI-based anomaly detection, and open firmware adoption. The findings underscore that while current WLAN implementations offer basic protections, they remain highly susceptible to well-resourced adversaries, necessitating a shift toward more robust, context-aware security architectures. Full article

Internet of Things (IoT) user authentication protocols enable secure authentication and session key negotiation between users and IoT devices via an intermediate server, allowing users to access sensor data or control devices remotely. However, the existing IoT user authentication schemes often assume that the servers (registration center and intermediate servers) are fully trusted, overlooking the potential risk of insider attackers. Moreover, most of the existing schemes lack critical security properties, such as resistance to ephemeral secret leakage attacks and offline password guessing attacks, and they are unable to provide perfect forward security. Furthermore, with the rapid growth regarding IoT devices, the servers must manage a large number of users and device connections, making the performance of the authentication scheme heavily reliant on the server’s computational capacity, thereby impacting the system’s scalability and efficiency. The design of security protocols is based on the underlying security model, and the current IoT user authentication models fail to cover crucial threats like insider attacks and ephemeral secret leakage. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new security model, IoT-3eCK, which assumes semi-trusted servers and strengthens the adversary model to better meet the IoT authentication requirements. Based on this model, we design an efficient protocol that ensures user passwords, biometric data, and long-term keys are protected from insider users during registration, mitigating insider attacks. The protocol also integrates dynamic pseudo-identity anonymous authentication and ECC key exchange to satisfy the security properties. The performance analysis shows that, compared to the existing schemes, the new protocol reduces the communication costs by over 23% and the computational overhead by more than 22%, with a particularly significant reduction of over 95% in the computational overhead at the intermediate server. Furthermore, the security of the protocol is rigorously demonstrated using the random oracle model and verified with automated tools, further confirming its security and reliability. Full article

Passwords are the first line of defence against preventing unauthorised access to systems and potential leakage of sensitive data. However, the traditional reliance on username and password combinations is not enough protection and has prompted the implementation of technologies such as two-factor authentication (2FA). While 2FA enhances security by adding a layer of verification, these techniques are not impervious to threats. Even with the implementation of 2FA, the relentless efforts of cybercriminals present formidable obstacles in securing digital spaces. The objective of this work is to implement blockchain technology as a form of 2FA. The findings of this work suggest that blockchain-based 2FA methods could strengthen digital security compared to conventional 2FA methods. Full article

As a hot technology trend, the federated learning (FL) cleverly combines data utilization and privacy protection by processing data locally on the client and only sharing model parameters with the server, embodying an efficient and secure collaborative learning model between clients and aggregated Servers. During the process of uploading parameters in FL models, there is susceptibility to unauthorized access threats, which can result in training data leakage. To ensure data security during transmission, the Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocols are proposed to authenticate legitimate users and safeguard training data. However, existing AKA protocols for client–server (C/S) architecture show security deficiencies, such as lack of user anonymity and susceptibility to password guessing attacks. In this paper, we propose a robust 2FAKA-C/S protocol based on ECC and Hash-chain technology. Our security analysis shows that the proposed protocol ensures the session keys are semantically secure and can effectively resist various attacks. The performance analysis indicates that the proposed protocol achieves a total running time of 62.644 ms and requires only 800 bits of communication overhead, showing superior computational efficiency and lower communication costs compared to existing protocols. In conclusion, the proposed protocol securely protects the training parameters in a federated learning environment and provides a reliable guarantee for data transmission. Full article

The leakage signals, including electromagnetic, energy, time, and temperature, generated during the operation of password devices contain highly correlated key information, which leads to security vulnerabilities. In traditional encryption algorithms, the length of the key greatly affects the upper limit of its security against cracking. Regarding side-channel attacks on long-key algorithms, traditional template attack methods characterize the energy traces using multivariate Gaussian distribution during the template construction phase. The exhaustive key-guessing process is expected to consume a significant amount of time and computational resources. Therefore, to analyze the effectiveness of obtaining key values from the side information of password devices, we propose an innovative attack method based on a divide-and-conquer logical structure, targeting semi-bytes. We construct a collection of key classification submodules with symmetric correlations. By integrating a differential network model for byte-block sets and an end-to-end direct attack method, we form a holistic symmetric decision framework and propose a key classification structure based on deep transfer learning. This structure consists of three main parts: side information data acquisition, analysis of key-value effectiveness, and determination of attack positions. It employs multiple parallel symmetric subnetworks, effectively improving attack efficiency and reducing the key enumeration range. Experimental results show that the optimal attack accuracy of the network model can reach 91%, with an average attack accuracy of 78%. It overcomes overfitting issues under small sample dataset conditions. Full article

With the global expansion of urban infrastructure and development of 5G communication technology, advanced information and communications technology has been applied to power systems and the use of smart grids has increased. Smart grid systems collect energy data using Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, such as data concentrator units (DCUs) and smart meters, to effectively manage energy. Services and functions for energy management are being incorporated into home IoT devices. In this paper, the IoT for energy management in smart cities and smart homes is referred to as the E-IoT. Systems that use the E-IoT can efficiently manage data, but they present many potential security threats, because the E-IoT devices in such homes and enterprises are networked for energy management. Therefore, in this study, to identify vulnerabilities in the E-IoT device systems, digital forensics is applied to the E-IoT device systems. E-IoT devices supplied to Korean power systems were used to build a digital forensic test bed similar to actual E-IoT environments. For digital forensics application, E-IoT data acquisition and analysis methodology was proposed. The proposed methodology consisted of three methods—network packet data analysis, hardware interface analysis, and mobile device paired with E-IoT—which were applied to a DCU, smart meter, smart plug, smart heat controller, smart microwave, and smart monitoring system. On analyzing the user and system data acquired, artifacts such as the device name and energy consumption were derived. User accounts and passwords and energy-usage logs were obtained, indicating the possibility of leakage of personal information and the vulnerabilities of E-IoT devices. Full article

The Internet of Things (IoT) is ubiquitous in our lives. However, the inherent vulnerability of IoT smart devices can lead to the destruction of networks in untrustworthy environments. Therefore, authentication is a necessary tool to ensure the legitimacy of nodes and protect data security. Naturally, the authentication factors always include various sensitive users’ information, such as passwords, ID cards, even biological information, etc. How to prevent privacy leakage has always been a problem faced by the IoT. Zero-knowledge authentication is a crucial cryptographic technology that uses authenticates nodes on the networks without revealing identity or any other data entered by users. However, zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) requires more complex data exchange protocols and more data transmission compared to traditional cryptography technologies. To understand how zero-knowledge authentication works in IoT, we produce a survey on zero-knowledge authentication in privacy-preserving IoT in the paper. First, we overview the IoT architecture and privacy, including security challenges and open question in different IoT layers. Next, we overview zero-knowledge authentication and provide a comprehensive analysis of designing zero-knowledge authentication protocols in various IoT networks. We summarize the advantages of ZKP-based authentication in IoT. Finally, it summarizes the potential problems and future directions of ZKP in IoT. Full article

The frequent incidents of password leakage have increased people’s attention and research on password security. Password guessing is an essential part of password cracking and password security research. The progression of deep learning technology provides a promising way to improve the efficiency of password guessing. However, the mainstream models proposed for password guessing, such as RNN (or other variants, such as LSTM, GRU), GAN and VAE still face some problems, such as the low efficiency and high repetition rate of the generated passwords. In this paper, we propose a password-guessing model based on the temporal convolutional neural network (PassTCN). To further improve the performance of the generated passwords, we propose a novel password probability label-learning method, which reconstructs labels based on the password probability distribution of the training set and deduplicates the training set when training. Experiments on the RockYou dataset showed that, when generating ${10}^8$ passwords, the coverage rate of PassTCN with password probability label learning (PassTCN-PPLL) reached 12.6%, which is 87.2%, 72.6% and 42.9% higher than PassGAN (a password-guessing model based on GAN), VAEPass (a password-guessing model based on VAE) and FLA (a password-guessing model based on LSTM), respectively. The repetition rate of our model is 25.9%, which is 45.1%, 31.7% and 17.4% lower than that of PassGAN, VAEPass and FLA, respectively. The results confirm that our approach not only improves the coverage rate but also reduces the repetition rate. Full article

With the expansion of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), real-time data collected by smart sensors deployed in factories are shared over open channels , which may cause unauthorized access of transmitted messages by adversaries, thus causing the problem of privacy leakage. User authentication is the first line of defense for security protection in the IIoT environment. In this paper, we propose a cloud—assisted authentication scheme based on Chebyshev polynomial encryption, in which only authorized users can access the sensing devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) to obtain real-time data. The scheme uses fuzzy extraction technology to verify biometric characteristics. There are three factors to verify the user’s login request: the smart card, password and the user’s personal biometrics. The commonly adopted formal security analysis, the ROR model, is applied to prove the semantic security of session key, and a detailed informal security analysis is performed to show that the proposed scheme can withstand multiple known attacks. Compared with other related user authentication schemes, the proposed scheme provides several extra functionality features, including offline sensor node registration, updating user passwords and biometrics, adding new sensor node deployment, user anonymity and untraceability. In addition, the cost of computation, communication and security is compared with similar schemes, and results show that our scheme has more security performance while the cost is acceptable. Full article