Message Authentication

An essential function for achieving security in computer networks is reliable authentication of communicating parties and network components. Such authentication typically relies on exchanges of cryptographic messages between the involved parties, which in turn implies that these parties be able to acquire shared seeret keys or certified public keys. Provision of authentication and key distribution functions in the primitive and msmwce-constrained environments of low-function networking mechanisms, portable, or wireless devices presents challenges in terms of resouree usage, system management, ease of use, etBciency, and flexibility that are beyond the capabilities of previous designs such as Kerberos or X.509. This paper presents a family of lightweight authentication and key distribution protocols suitable for use in the low layers of network architectures. All the protocols are built around a common two-way authentication protocol. The paper argues that key distribution may require substantially different approaches in different network environments and shows that the proposed family of protocols offers a flexible palette of compatible solutions addressing many different networking scenarios. The mechanisms are minimal in cryptographic processing and message size, yet they are strong enough to meet the needs of secure key distribution for network entity authentication. Tbe protocols presented have been implemented as part of a comprehensive security subsystem prototype called KryptoKnight, whose software and implementation aspeets are discussed in [16], and which is the basis for the recently announced IBM Network Seeurity Program product. 1. INTROD(JCTION T HE STEADILY growing use of computer networks is fostering increasing concerns about network security. One of the main issues is effective control of access to network components and resources by expanding populations of users, some of which cannot always be trusted to use the network properly. An essential requirement for implementing suitable access controls is a mechanism for reliable authentication of communicating entities and network users. State-of-the-art authentication protocols typically rely on exchanges of cryptographic messages between entities wanting to authenticate one another prior to or during actual communication. Such exchanges in turn demand that the communicating parties be able to acquire cryptographic keys Manuscript

Summary form only given. It is well known that despite all of its advantages the digital revolution also leads to large variety of new risks. One principal issue in this context is the growing dependence of our modern information society from the availability and correct (proved) function of modern communication services. First, I'll give a short overview on threats in communication networks (grids, clouds, etc), protocols and secure personal devices. Then I'll discuss current network security approaches based on anonymous message exchanges within communicating systems. Cryptography was first used to ensure data confidentiality, it has been “democratized” by ensuring the safety of telecommunications services, thereby extending its scope to authentication of a person or device, or a message, non-repudiation, integrity but also the anonymity of transactions. The anonymity is sometimes quite important in the new telecommunication and mobile networks services, much more than just message confidentiality. The talk will focus on some examples and new approaches developed in our research laboratory to deal with anonymity in routing protocols for mobile communicating systems.

For intelligent service robots, it is essential to recognize users in order to provide appropriate services to a correctly authenticated user. However, in robot environments in which users freely move around the robot, it is difficult to force users to cooperate for authentication as in traditional biometric security systems. This paper introduces a user authentication system that is designed to recognize users who are unconscious of a robot or of cameras. In the proposed system, biometrics and semi-biometrics are incorporated to cope with the limited applicability of traditional authentication techniques. Semi-biometrics indicates a set of features useful for discriminating persons, but only in the interested group of persons and in the interested frame of time. As a representative semi-biometric feature, body height and color characteristics of clothes are investigated. In particular, a novel method to measure body height with single camera is proposed. In addition, by incorporating tracking functionality, the system can maintain the user status information continuously, which is useful not only for recognition but also for finding a designated person. 1

Ensuring cryptographic integrity of the route discovery process in on demand ad hoc routing approaches like DSR require the ability to verify that no nodes have been deleted from the path, and no node can be inserted in the path without a valid authentication. We discuss the need for early detection of inconsistencies involving inserted or deleted nodes in route request (RREQ) packets and investigate the challenges associated with catering for this requirement. We propose an efficient strategy to achieve this employing only symmetric cryptographic primitives, which is made possible due to a recently proposed multi-source broadcast encryption scheme. We outline a protocol for secure route discovery in DSR that employs such a security primitive, and provide quantitative estimates (through simulations) of gains that can be achieved by early detection of inconsistent RREQs.

In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to achieve secure, and efficient vehicular communication. In particular, SegCom provides two mechanisms to perform successive authentication of the vehicle with the road-side infrastructure units to expedite authentication for Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication. Furthermore, to enhance the efficiency of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication, SeGCom permits the vehicles to form group, which are also used for performing multi-hop V2V communication without any assistance from a trusted authority. Comparison with other existing schemes in the literature has been performed to show the efficiency and applicability of our scheme.

With the widespread use of the distributed systems comes the need to secure such systems against a wide variety of threats. Recent security mechanisms are grossly inadequate in authenticating the program executions at the clients or servers, as the clients, servers and the executing programs themselves can be compromised after the clients and servers pass the authentication phase. This paper presents a generic framework for authenticating remote executions on a potentially untrusted remote server -essentially validating that what is executed at the server on behalf of the client is actually the intended program. Details of a prototype Linux implementation are also described, along with some optimization techniques for reducing the run-time overhead of the proposed scheme. The performance overhead of our technique varies generally from 7% to 24% for most benchmarks, as seen from the actual remote execution of SPEC benchmarks.

Passwords are the first line of defense for many computerized systems. The quality of these passwords decides the security strength of these systems. Many studies advocate using password entropy as an indicator for password quality where lower entropy suggests a weaker or less secure password. However, a closer examination of this literature shows that password entropy is very loosely defined. In this paper, we first discuss the calculation of password entropy and explain why it is an inadequate indicator of password quality. We then establish a password quality assessment scheme: password quality indicator (PQI). The PQI of a password is a pair ) , ( L D = λ , where D is the Levenshtein's editing distance of the password in relation to a dictionary of words and common mnemonics, and L is the effective password length. Finally, we propose to use PQI to prescribe the characteristics of good quality passwords.

Product authentication is needed to detect counterfeit products and to prevent them from entering the distribution channels of genuine products. Security is a critical property of product authentication systems. In this paper, we study trust and security in RFID-based product authentication systems. We first present a formal definition for product authentication process and then derive the general chain of trust as well as functional and nonfunctional security requirements for product authentication. Most of the scientific literature that covers the topic focuses on cryptographic tag authentication only. This paper, however, provides a broader view including also other known approaches, most notably location-based authentication. To derive the functional security requirements, we employ the concept of misuse cases that extends the use case paradigm well known in the field of requirements engineering. We argue that the level of security of any RFIDbased product authentication application is determined by how it fulfills the derived set of functional and nonfunctional requirements. The security of different RFID-based product authentication approaches is analyzed. To study how RFID supports secure product authentication in practice, we investigate how the current EPC standards conform to the functional security requirements of product authentication and show how the unaddressed requirements could be fulfilled. The benefits of implementing a service that detects the cloned tags in the level of the network's core services are identified.

Service-oriented applications are frequently used in highly dynamic contexts: ser- vice compositions may change dynamically, in particular, because new services are discovered at runtime. Moreover, subtyping has recently been identified as a strong requirement for service dis- covery. Correctness guarantees over service compositions, provided in particular by type systems, are highly desirable in this context. However, while service oriented applications can be built using various technologies and protocols, none of them provides decent support ensuring that well-typed services cannot go wrong. An emitted message, for instance, may be dangling and remain as a ghost message in the network if there is no agent to receive it. In this article, we introduce a formal model for service compositions and define a type system with subtyping that ensures type soundness by combining static and dynamic checks. We also demonstrate how to preserve type soundness in presence of malicious agents and...

In this paper we propose a multifaceted online e-voting system. The proposed system is capable of handling electronic ballots with multiple scopes at the same time, e.g., presidential, municipal, parliamentary, amongst others. The system caters for integrity of an election process in terms of the functional and non-functional requirements. The functional requirements embedded in the design of the proposed system warrant well-secured identification and authentication processes for the voter through the use of combined simple biometrics. The design of the system guarantees that no votes in favor of a given candidate are lost, due to improper tallying of the voting counts, with the proper incorporation of system FLAG's. Transparency of voting follows through in all phases of an election process to assure the voter that his/her vote went in favor of his/her candidate of choice. Besides its main functional properties, the proposed system is designed to cater for several essential nonfunctional requirements. Of utmost importance are the requirements for correctness, robustness, coherence, consistency, and security. To verify the robustness and reliability of the proposed system, intensive computer simulations were run under varying voting environments, viz. voter density, voter inter-arrival times, introduced acts of malice, etc. Results of the simulations show that security and performance of the system are according to expectations. These results provide the proper grounds that would guide the decision maker in customizing the proposed system to fit his particular voting needs.

Nowadays, user authentication is one of the important topics in information security. Strong text-based password schemes could provide with certain degree of security. However, the fact that strong passwords are difficult to memorize often leads their owners to write them down on papers or even save them in a computer file. Graphical authentication has been proposed as a possible alternative solution to text-based authentication, motivated particularly by the fact that humans can remember images better than text. In recent years, many networks, computer systems and Internetbased environments try used graphical authentication technique for their user's authentication. All of graphical passwords have two different aspects which are usability and security. Unfortunately none of these algorithms were being able to cover both of these aspects at the same time. During our research, we could find eleven Recall-Based authentication algorithms which we tried to explain their lacks and attacks. Then in the last section, in order to cover usability and security features at the same time, we try to make three different comparison tables.

Voice over IP (VoIP) is one of the most emerging technologies, with a very relevant market penetration trend. This technology will represent a cost advantage for the business and private networks with greater flexibility, if no new related vulnerabilities are introduced. The problems of security of the VoIP are mainly related to the weaknesses of the combination of the SIP and RTP protocols. In the VoWiFi case, these weaknesses are enhanced by the intrinsic vulnerabilities of the first generation wireless networks (802.11b), or by a bad administration of wireless security systems. After building a VoIP network over Wi-Fi without enforcing security measures for the authentication and the privacy of the data, we will show in this paper several typologies of attack: Eavesdropping and Sniffing of the VoIP calls, Man in the Middle, Denial of Service, Call interruption and Build false calls. All these threats can represent part of a check list for a plug-andplay penetration test schedule, whenever a company deploys a VoIP network infrastructure based on some untested VoIP softphone and Wireless Lan (as an internal hotspot). 3 Eavesdropping and Sniffing of the VoIP calls The eavesdropping of the telephone calls, and their consequent dispatch to the parts involved in the communication is one of the most impressive attacks to the VoIP. It's possible to mount an MITM attack in a wired network via well known techniques, e.g., using an ARP poisoning attack to force the SIP proxy, and the VoIP telephones to lace a communication with a malicious third party and not with one among them [4]. The high relevance of this attack technique has been stated, e.g., by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which, in August 2005, ruled that broadband VoIP must comply with Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) [5].

One of the most important topics in information security today is user authentication. There is a good security when using the text-based strong password schemes but often memorizing the password is so difficult and users writing them down on a piece of paper or saving inside the computer. There is an alternative solution to the text-based authentication which is the GUA (Graphical User Authentication) or simply Graphical Password based on the fact that humans tend to remember images better. This type of interface provides an easy to create and remember passwords for the users. However, one big issue that is plaguing GUA is shoulder surfing attack that can capture the users mouse clicks and image gallery attack that can change the images of the gallery with physical attack. In this paper, we will propose a new algorithm that using watermarking technique as the solution to solving image gallery attacks and using the random character set generation for each image for resistance to shoulder surfing attack to provide better system security. All the information images in registration phase will be process by copy right protection of watermarking where the login page will check this information for security purposes. Here, we will evaluate and analyze six types of the more common graphical password attack methods.

Traditional biometrics recognition system is vulnerable to privacy invasion when the stored biometric template is compromised. This in turn will suffer from permanently loss as biometric template is not replaceable In this paper, we propose a key extraction scheme which locks a secure transformed fingerprint bitstring via a novel dynamic quantization mechanism. During authentication stage, the key is extracted from the secure mixture when a genuine fingerprint is presented. A number of keys can be assigned to different applications and could be revoked if the key was compromised. The proposed method retrieve key reliably from a genuine fingerprint up to 99.5% success rate. We perform several security and experimental analyses and the results suggest that the scheme is feasible in practice.

Passwords are the first line of defense for many computerized systems. The quality of these passwords decides the security strength of these systems. Many studies advocate using password entropy as an indicator for password quality where lower entropy suggests a weaker or less secure password. However, a closer examination of this literature shows that password entropy is very loosely defined. In this paper, we first discuss the calculation of password entropy and explain why it is an inadequate indicator of password quality. We then establish a password quality assessment scheme: password quality indicator (PQI). The PQI of a password is a pair ) , ( L D = λ , where D is the Levenshtein's editing distance of the password in relation to a dictionary of words and common mnemonics, and L is the effective password length. Finally, we propose to use PQI to prescribe the characteristics of good quality passwords.

This paper presents extensions to the classical pointto-point protocol PPP [RFC1661] and IPSEC [RFC 2401] in order to build networks that can do unconditionally secure message relay. Our work addresses the problem of how to integrate quantum key distribution (QKD) in networks such that little effort needs to be put on protocol engine adaption and network topology design. This article demonstrates how to ensure correct routing and secure authentication between adjacent QKD-capable nodes, in particular, it is demonstrated how a person-in-the-middle attack can be countered using universal hash functions.

As a high-speed internet infrastructure is being developed and people are informationized, the financial tasks are also engaged in internet field. However, the existing internet banking system was exposed to the danger of hacking. Recently, the personal information has been leaked by a high-degree method such as Phishing or Pharming beyond snatching a user's ID and Password. Seeing that most of examples which happened in the domestic financial agencies were caused by the appropriation of ID or Password belonging to others, a safe user confirmation system gets much more essential. In this paper, we propose a new Online Banking Authentication system. This authentication system used Mobile OTP with the combination of QR-code which is a variant of the 2D barcode.

This paper presents a case study highlighting the best practices for designing and developing a B2B ecommerce system. We developed a remote order-anddelivery w eb-based system for an auto-parts manufacturing company. The system requirements were determined by interviewing employee stakeholders. An initial scenario of the system was prototyped and refined untill the users and developers were satisfied. A formalized specification of the requirements employing Use-Case Diagrams and based on event flow was developed and coded using XML. This helped keep the documentation simple and clear. Testing was performed at the component level allowing for feedback to previous steps when errors appeared. D igital signatures were employed for implementing security. T he end product enabled a reduction in the processing time of transactions, reduced processing cost, improved accuracy, efficiency, reliability, and security of transmitted data; and our strategy shortened the System Development Life Cycle

As a high-speed internet infrastructure is being developed and people are informationized, the financial tasks are also engaged in internet field. However, the existing internet banking system was exposed to the danger of hacking. Recently, the personal information has been leaked by a high-degree method such as Phishing or Pharming beyond snatching a user's ID and Password. Seeing that most of examples which happened in the domestic financial agencies were caused by the appropriation of ID or Password belonging to others, a safe user confirmation system gets much more essential. In this paper, we propose a new Online Banking Authentication system. This authentication system used Mobile OTP with the combination of QR-code which is a variant of the 2D barcode.

User authentication in computer systems has been a cornerstone of computer security for decades. The concept of a user id and password is a cost effective and efficient method of maintaining a shared secret between a user and a computer system. One of the key elements in the password solution for security is a reliance on human cognitive ability to remember the shared secret. In early computing days with only a few computer systems and a small select group of users, this model proved effective.

... Fasee Ullah, Masood Ahmad, Masood Habib, Jawad Muhammad Department of Computer Sciences City ... One of the early encouraging steps towards sensor network architecture is Polastre et al. ... Aim of this protocol to solve different key issues exchange during communication ...

We introduce the concept of "green cryptography," which adopts the principle of recycling cryptographic design strategies, components, and primitives; in this essay, we'll focus on the AES, and it's underlying block cipher, Rijndael. Cryptographic implementation is met with a mature and minimalist, "do a lot with a little" design paradigm -mature in that it recycles the rigorously cryptanalyzed AES, and its underlying block cipher, Rijndael, and minimalist in that it recycles the AES for both encryption and authentication, via generic composition, where we encrypt then authenticate, separately (e.g., AES-CTR-then-AES-CMAC), or via an integrity-aware confidentiality mode of operation based on generic composition, where encryption then authentication is handled in a single mode (e.g., EAX). The end result is an implementation-centric framework for achieving the strongest notions of confidentiality and integrity, while retaining simplicity within the implementation. In short, recycling-based green cryptography is aimed at sustainable security within scalable implementations. We take a concise look -with an emphasis on symmetric cryptography -at some of the issues that are responsible for why cryptography usually ends up looking bad, in practice, and fails to establish the right threat model, let alone realize it; this is largely due to a lack of cryptographic competence, and the dreaded habit of crammed-in-and-cobbled-together design. To address these issues, we, with the assistance, and comedic relief, of Alice and Bob, give several rules of thumb for sufficient and simplistic cryptographic implementations. Be prepared for a bowl of acronymous porridge, but don't worry; we'll make sure it's as easy to swallow as possible, and it might even up your Scrabble game. So, to the pulpit we go, ready to preach a sermon so desperately in need of being heard, and to which heed should be taken.

Approximate Message Authentication Code (AMAC) is a recently introduced cryptographic primitive with several applications in the areas of cryptography and coding theory. Briefly speaking, AMACs represent a way to provide data authentication that is tolerant to acceptable modifications of the original message. Although constructs had been proposed for this primitive, no security analysis or even modeling had been done. In this paper we propose a rigorous model for the design and security analysis of AMACs and show how to transform any ordinary MAC into an AMAC. Our constructions have short output, leading to efficient storage or communication complexity. AMACs is a useful primitive with several applications of different nature. A major one, that we study in this paper, is that of entity authentication via biometric techniques or passwords over noisy channels. We present a formal model for the design and analysis of biometric entity authentication schemes and show simple and natural constructions of such schemes using any AMAC.

In this paper we present an off-line signature verification and recognition system using the global, directional and grid features of signatures. Support Vector Machine (SVM) was used to verify and classify the signatures and a classification ratio of 0.95 was obtained. As the recognition of signatures represents a multiclass problem SVM's one-against-all method was used. We also compare our methods performance with Artifical Neural Network's (ANN) backpropagation method.

Data integrity assurance and data origin authentication are essential security services in financial transactions, electronic commerce, electronic mail, software distribution, data storage and so on. The broadest definition of authentication within computing systems encompasses ...

Smart grid (SG) communication has recently received significant attentions to facilitate intelligent and distributed electric power transmission systems. However, communication trust and security issues still present practical concerns to the deployment of SG. In this paper, to cope with these challenging concerns, we propose a lightweight message authentication scheme features as a basic yet crucial component for secure SG communication framework. Specifically, in the proposed scheme, the smart meters which are distributed at different hierarchical networks of the SG can first achieve mutual authentication and establish the shared session key with Diffie-Hellman exchange protocol. Then, with the shared session key between smart meters and hash-based authentication code technique, the subsequent messages can be authenticated in a lightweight way. Detailed security analysis shows that the proposed scheme can satisfy the desirable security requirements of SG communications. In addition, extensive simulations have also been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of low latency and few signal message exchanges.

Research in biometric gait recognition has increased. Earlier gait recognition works reported promising results, usually with a small sample size. Recent studies with a larger sample size confirm gait potential as a biometric from which individuals can be identified. Despite much research being carried out in gait recognition, the topic of vulnerability of gait to attacks has not received enough attention. In this paper, an analysis of minimal-effort impersonation attack and the closest person attack on gait biometrics are presented. Unlike most previous gait recognition approaches, where gait is captured using a (video) camera from a distance, in our approach, gait is collected by an accelerometer sensor attached to the hip of subjects. Hip acceleration in three orthogonal directions (up-down, forward-backward, and sideways) is utilized for recognition. We have collected 760 gait sequences from 100 subjects. The experiments consisted of two parts. In the first part, subjects walked in their normal walking style, and using the averaged cycle method, an EER of about 13% was obtained. In the second part, subjects were trying to walk as someone else. Analysis based on FAR errors indicates that a minimal-effort impersonation attack on gait biometric does not necessarily improve the chances of an impostor being accepted. However, attackers with knowledge of their closest person in the database can be a serious threat to the authentication system.

This paper presents a new proposed message digest algorithm 0). Many of its characteristics (applications domain, performance and implementation structure) are similar to those of MDCfamily of hash functions. The proposed algorithm takes as input a message of arbitrary length and produces as output a 128/160-bit fugerprint or message digest. New features of the proposed algorithm include the heavy use of data-dependent rotations, and the inclusion of integer multiplication as an additional primitive operation. These proposed features are expected to provide high security level with enhancement in throughput. The proposed algorithm is intended for digital signature applications, where a large fde must be compressed in a secure manner before being signed (encrypted) with a private secret key under a public-key cryptosystem. The proposed algorithm is designed to be quite fast on 32-bit machines. In addition, it does not require any large substitution tables, so that the algorithm can be coded quite compactly. We describe the general characteristics, architecture and implementation, and give a complete specifcation for MD-160/128. Several test vectors are used for inspecting the validity of the proposed algorithm. Also, we compare the software performance of several MDCbased algorithms, which is of independent interest. Simulation results show that the throughput of the proposed MD-128 is about 76.4 Mbitlsec while in RIPEMD-128 is about 69.8 Mbitlsec.

In this paper, an image authentication technique by embedding digital "watermarks" into images is proposed. Watermarking is a technique for labeling digital pictures by hiding secret information into the images. Sophisticated watermark embedding is a potential method to discourage unauthorized copying or attest the origin of the images. In our approach, we embed the watermarks with visually recognizable patterns into the images by selectively modifying the middle-frequency parts of the image. Several variations of the proposed method will be addressed. The experimental results show that the proposed technique successfully survives image processing operations, image cropping, and the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) lossy compression.

Java TM security technology originally focused on creating a safe environment in which to run potentially untrusted code downloaded from the public network. With the latest release of the Java TM Platform (the Java TM 2 Software Development Kit, v 1.2), fine-grained access controls can be placed upon critical resources with regard to the identity of the running applets and applications, which are distinguished by where the code came from and who signed it. However, the Java platform still lacks the means to enforce access controls based on the identity of the user who runs the code. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of the Java TM Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS), a framework and programming interface that augments the Java TM platform with both user-based authentication and access control capabilities.

It is with great pride and pleasure that I welcome you to the IEEE Southeastcon 2013 conference and exposition. On behalf of our hardworking committee people, local and from Region 3, we hope you enjoy yourself and that our conference meets or exceeds all of your expectations.

With the ever increasing amount and variety of data to be stored and transmitted in various mediums, the specification of security which has to be established at various levels of medium access and the accompanying issues of authentication and authorization has become a critical factor. Various steganographic, watermarking and data-embedding algorithms have usually manipulated the actual data in order to either hide any coveted information or to provide some level of access control over the medium. The mediums are usually images, video, audio etc., wherein specific portions or the overall space is usually 'corrupted' with 'significant' data. This paper is an attempt to bring out the significance of the steganographic techniques that are employed in information processing algorithms for data security. It deals with the problem of data security, focusing mainly on images, and tries to state the various properties and characteristics that the steganographic algorithms should possess. The paper also highlights the technique of masking used in the conventional steganographic LSB algorithms and in its variants.

WS-Security describes enhancements to SOAP messaging to provide quality of protection through message integrity, message confidentiality, and single message authentication. These mechanisms can be used to accommodate a wide variety of security models and encryption technologies.

The term "cloud computing" has emerged as a major ICT trend and has been acknowledged by respected industry survey organizations as a key technology and market development theme for the industry and ICT users in 2010. However, one of the major challenges that faces the cloud computing concept and its global acceptance is how to secure and protect the data and processes that are the property of the user. The security of the cloud computing environment is a new research area requiring further development by both the academic and industrial research communities. Today, there are many diverse and uncoordinated efforts underway to address security issues in cloud computing and, especially, the identity management issues. This paper introduces an architecture for a new approach to necessary "mutual protection" in the cloud computing environment, based upon a concept of mutual trust and the specification of definable profiles in vector matrix form. The architecture aims to achieve better, more generic and flexible authentication, authorization and control, based on a concept of mutuality, within that cloud computing environment.

Passwords are the first line of defense for many computerized systems. The quality of these passwords decides the security strength of these systems. Many studies advocate using password entropy as an indicator for password quality where lower entropy suggests a weaker or less secure password. However, a closer examination of this literature shows that password entropy is very loosely defined. In this paper, we first discuss the calculation of password entropy and explain why it is an inadequate indicator of password quality. We then establish a password quality assessment scheme: password quality indicator (PQI). The PQI of a password is a pair ) , ( L D = λ , where D is the Levenshtein's editing distance of the password in relation to a dictionary of words and common mnemonics, and L is the effective password length. Finally, we propose to use PQI to prescribe the characteristics of good quality passwords.

Wireless access points bring great convenience to the enterprise network, and also bring a large collection of vulnerabilities into the enterprise environment. Wireless users pose new difficulties in authentication and confidentiality that can intentionally or inadvertently pose a threat to their wired colleagues. A comprehensive network vulnerability analysis must address wireless environment threats and vulnerabilities, including identification of unauthorized Wireless Access Points and incorrectly configured clients. This paper discusses the issues associated with vulnerability assessment in a wireless network and a recommended approach to integrating wireless devices into vulnerability scanning methodologies.

In this paper, security issues in on-demand Grid and cluster computing are analyzed, a corresponding threat model is presented and the challenges with respect to authentication, authorization, delegation and single sign-on, secure communication, auditing, safety, and confidentiality are discussed. Three different levels of on-demand computing are identified, based on the number of resource providers, solution producers and users, and the trust relationships between them. It is argued that the threats associated with the first two levels can be handled by employing operating system virtualization technologies based on Xen, whereas the threats of the third level require the use of hardware security modules proposed in the context of the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA). The presented security mechanisms increase the resilience of the service hosting environment against both malicious attacks and erroneous code. Thus, our proposal paves the way for large scale hosting of Grid or web services in commercial scenarios.

In this paper, we propose an IPSec implementation on Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA 1 . We move the key management and negotiation into software function calls that run on the PowerPC processor core. On the data path, reconfigurable hardware logic implements time-critical functions for AES encryption and HMAC authentication. In our approach, the fast hardware processing is quasi-independent of the software processing. In traditional hardware systems, it is often the case that fast hardware modules wait for slow softwares to feed input data and retrieve output data. This causes the hardware component to stay in idle and suffer low utilization. Our contribution in this paper is to separate the IPSec data path from the control path, where the hardware has a full control of data processing and invokes the control software only when necessary. We illustrate the use of the IPSec implementation on a reconfigurable network device to secure the control and configuration channel. 0-7695-2312

WenJie Wang is a postdoctoral fellow at the DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, and an associate professor at Donghua University in China. Her research interests include identity theft, identity management, risk management, and security and privacy. Wang has a PhD in control theory and control engineering from China Textile University. Contact her at [email protected]. Yufei Yuan holds the Wayne C. Fox Chair in Business Innovation and is a professor of information systems at the DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Canada. His research interests include identity theft, mobile commerce, security and privacy, and Web-based negotiation support systems. Yuan has a PhD in computer information systems from the University of Michigan. Contact him at [email protected]. Norm Archer is a Professor Emeritus in the Management Science and Information Systems Area at the DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, and a special advisor to the McMaster eBusiness Center. His research interests are in topics that relate to e-business, including identity theft, business-tobusiness implementations, wireless e-health, knowledge management, and the human-computer interface. Contact him at [email protected].

In this paper we define and rationalize a policy for propagation of authentication trust across realm boundaries. This policy helps limit global security exposures that ensue whenever an authentication service is compromised. It is based on a hierarchical model of inter-realm authentication, and can be supported by both public-key and secret-key systems. As an example, we present a simple protocol which selects inter-realm authentication paths that satis~the policy. The protocol is part of a design which provides application transparency for inter-realm, authentication-path selection and acceptance as the default mode of opera lion. The design can be integrated with the security services of existing systems; e.g., of the Open Software Foundation's Distributed Coinputing Environment (DCE). DCE implementation issues are also discussed.

Getting users to abandon text-based passwords has been a rather difficult task. Several alternatives to textual passwords have been proposed including authentication based on images. Research shows that graphical authentication mechanisms have some advantages, but they lack the necessary qualities to move them from isolated to mass market environments. This paper builds on current research and previous papers and presents the second iteration of ImagePass, a novel graphical authentication mechanism that follows usable security guidelines. Based on ambitious usability tests this approach has been demonstrated as a feasible authentication alternative for desktop and mobile environments.