As a result of the inherent weaknesses of the wireless medium, ad hoc networks are susceptible to a broad variety of threats and assaults. As a direct consequence of this, intrusion detection, as well as security, privacy, and authentication in ad-hoc networks, have developed into a primary focus of current study. This body of research aims to identify the dangers posed by a variety of assaults that are often seen in wireless ad-hoc networks and provide strategies to counteract those dangers. The Black hole assault, Wormhole attack, Selective Forwarding attack, Sybil attack, and Denial-of-Service attack are the specific topics covered in this thesis. In this paper, we describe a trust-based safe routing protocol with the goal of mitigating the interference of black hole nodes in the course of routing in mobile ad-hoc networks. The overall performance of the network is negatively impacted when there are black hole nodes in the route that routing takes. As a result, we have developed a routing protocol that reduces the likelihood that packets would be lost as a result of black hole nodes. This routing system has been subjected to experimental testing in order to guarantee that the most secure path will be selected for the delivery of packets between a source and a destination. The invasion of wormholes into a wireless network results in the segmentation of the network as well as a disorder in the routing. As a result, we provide an effective approach for locating wormholes by using ordinal multi-dimensional scaling and round trip duration in wireless ad hoc networks with either sparse or dense topologies. Wormholes that are linked by both short route and long path wormhole linkages may be found using the approach that was given. In order to guarantee that this ad hoc network does not include any wormholes that go unnoticed, this method is subjected to experimental testing. In order to fight against selective forwarding attacks in wireless ad-hoc networks, we have developed three different techniques. The first method is an incentive-based algorithm that makes use of a reward-punishment system to drive cooperation among three nodes for the purpose of vi forwarding messages in crowded ad-hoc networks. A unique adversarial model has been developed by our team, and inside it, three distinct types of nodes and the activities they participate in are specified. We have shown that the suggested strategy that is based on incentives prohibits nodes from adopting an individualistic behaviour, which ensures collaboration in the process of packet forwarding. To guarantee that intermediate nodes in resource-constrained ad-hoc networks accurately convey packets, the second approach proposes a game theoretic model that uses non-cooperative game theory. This model is based on the idea that game theory may be used. This game reaches a condition of desired equilibrium, which assures that cooperation in multi-hop communication is physically possible, and it is this state that is discovered. In the third algorithm, we present a detection approach that locates malicious nodes in multihop hierarchical ad-hoc networks by employing binary search and control packets. We have shown that the cluster head is capable of accurately identifying the malicious node by analysing the sequences of packets that are dropped along the path leading from a source node to the cluster head. A lightweight symmetric encryption technique that uses Binary Playfair is presented here as a means of safeguarding the transport of data. We demonstrate via experimentation that the suggested encryption method is efficient with regard to the amount of energy used, the amount of time required for encryption, and the memory overhead. This lightweight encryption technique is used in clustered wireless ad-hoc networks to reduce the likelihood of a sybil attack occurring in such networks
Authored by Chethana C, Piyush Pareek, Victor de Albuquerque, Ashish Khanna, Deepak Gupta
In most PUF-based authentication schemes, a central server is usually engaged to verify the response of the device’s PUF to challenge bit-streams. However, the server availability may be intermittent in practice. To tackle such an issue, this paper proposes a new protocol for supporting distributed authentication while avoiding vulnerability to information leakage where CRPs could be retrieved from hacked devices and collectively used to model the PUF. The main idea is to provision for scrambling the challenge bit-stream in a way that is dependent on the verifier. The scrambling pattern varies per authentication round for each device and independently across devices. In essence, the scrambling function becomes node- and packetspecific and the response received by two verifiers of one device for the same challenge bit-stream could vary. Thus, neither the scrambling function can be reverted, nor the PUF can be modeled even by a collusive set of malicious nodes. The validation results using data of an FPGA-based implementation demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in thwarting PUF modeling attacks by collusive actors. We also discuss the approach resiliency against impersonation, Sybil, and reverse engineering attacks.
Authored by Mohammad Ebrahimabadi, Mohamed Younis, Wassila Lalouani, Naghmeh Karimi
Security and Controls with Data privacy in Internet of Things (IoT) devices is not only a present and future technology that is projected to connect a multitude of devices, but it is also a critical survival factor for IoT to thrive. As the quantity of communications increases, massive amounts of data are expected to be generated, posing a threat to both physical device and data security. In the Internet of Things architecture, small and low-powered devices are widespread. Due to their complexity, traditional encryption methods and algorithms are computationally expensive, requiring numerous rounds to encrypt and decode, squandering the limited energy available on devices. A simpler cryptographic method, on the other hand, may compromise the intended confidentiality and integrity. This study examines two lightweight encryption algorithms for Android devices: AES and RSA. On the other hand, the traditional AES approach generates preset encryption keys that the sender and receiver share. As a result, the key may be obtained quickly. In this paper, we present an improved AES approach for generating dynamic keys.
Authored by RV Chandrashekhar, J Visumathi, PeterSoosai Anandaraj
KYC or Know Your Customer is the procedure to verify the individuality of its consumers & evaluating the possible dangers of illegitimate trade relations. A few problems with the existing KYC manual process are that it is less secure, time-consuming and expensive. With the advent of Blockchain technology, its structures such as consistency, security, and geographical diversity make them an ideal solution to such problems. Although marketing solutions such as KYC-chain.co, K-Y-C. The legal right to enable blockchain-based KYC authentication provides a way for documents to be verified by a trusted network participant. This project uses an ETHereum based Optimised KYC Block-chain system with uniform A-E-S encryption and compression built on the LZ method. The system publicly verifies a distributed encryption, is protected by cryptography, operates by pressing the algorithm and is all well-designed blockchain features. The suggested scheme is a novel explanation based on Distributed Ledger Technology or Blockchain technology that would cut KYC authentication process expenses of organisations & decrease the regular schedule for completion of the procedure whilst becoming easier for clients. The largest difference in the system in traditional methods is the full authentication procedure is performed in just no time for every client, regardless of the number of institutions you desire to be linked to. Furthermore, since DLT is employed, validation findings may be securely distributed to consumers, enhancing transparency. Based on this method, a Proof of Concept (POC) is produced with Ethereum's API, websites as endpoints and the android app as the front office, recognising the viability and efficacy of this technique. Ultimately, this strategy enhances consumer satisfaction, lowers budget overrun & promotes transparency in the customer transport network.
Authored by Bhavya Dhiman, Rubin S
In recent times, Network-on-Chip (NoC) has become state of the art for communication in Multiprocessor System-on-Chip due to the existing scalability issues in this area. However, these systems are exposed to security threats such as extraction of secret information. Therefore, the need for secure communication arises in such environments. In this work, we present a communication protocol based on authenticated encryption with recovery mechanisms to establish secure end-to-end communication between the NoC nodes. In addition, a selected key agreement approach required for secure communication is implemented. The security functionality is located in the network adapter of each processing element. If data is tampered with or deleted during transmission, recovery mechanisms ensure that the corrupted data is retransmitted by the network adapter without the need of interference from the processing element. We simulated and implemented the complete system with SystemC TLM using the NoC simulation platform PANACA. Our results show that we can keep a high rate of correctly transmitted information even when attackers infiltrated the NoC system.
Authored by Julian Haase, Sebastian Jaster, Elke Franz, Diana Göhringer
As a new industry integrated by computing, communication, networking, electronics, and automation technology, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has been widely concerned and highly valued at home and abroad. With the rapid growth of the number of intelligent connected vehicles, the data security risks of the IoV have become increasingly prominent, and various attacks on data security emerge in an endless stream. This paper firstly introduces the latest progress on the data security policies, regulations, standards, technical routes in major countries and regions, and international standardization organizations. Secondly, the characteristics of the IoV data are comprehensively analyzed in terms of quantity, standard, timeliness, type, and cross-border transmission. Based on the characteristics, this paper elaborates the security risks such as privacy data disclosure, inadequate access control, lack of identity authentication, transmission design defects, cross-border flow security risks, excessive collection and abuse, source identification, and blame determination. And finally, we put forward the measures and suggestions for the security development of IoV data in China.
Authored by Jun Sun, Dong Liu, Yang Liu, Chuang Li, Yumeng Ma
As the COVID-19 pandemic scattered businesses and their workforces into new scales of remote work, vital security concerns arose surrounding remote access. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) also plays a growing role in the ability of companies to support remote workforces. As more enterprises embrace concepts of zero trust in their network security posture, access control policy management problems become a more significant concern as it relates to BYOD security enforcement. This BYOD security policy must enable work from home, but enterprises have a vested interest in maintaining the security of their assets. Therefore, the BYOD security policy must strike a balance between access, security, and privacy, given the personal device use. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities of enabling zero trust in BYOD use cases. We present a BYOD policy specification to enable the zero trust access control known as BYOZ. Accompanying this policy specification, we have designed a network architecture to support enterprise zero trust BYOD use cases through the novel incorporation of continuous authentication & authorization enforcement. We evaluate our architecture through a demo implementation of BYOZ and demonstrate how it can meet the needs of existing enterprise networks using BYOD.
Authored by John Anderson, Qiqing Huang, Long Cheng, Hongxin Hu
As the voucher for identity, digital certificates and the public key infrastructure (PKI) system have always played a vital role to provide the authentication services. In recent years, with the increase in attacks on traditional centralized PKIs and the extensive deployment of blockchains, researchers have tried to establish blockchain-based secure decentralized PKIs and have made significant progress. Although blockchain enhances security, it brings new problems in scalability due to the inherent limitations of blockchain’s data structure and consensus mechanism, which become much severe for the massive access in the era of 5G and B5G. In this paper, we propose ScalaCert to mitigate the scalability problems of blockchain-based PKIs by utilizing redactable blockchain for "on-cert" revocation. Specifically, we utilize the redactable blockchain to record revocation information directly on the original certificate ("on-cert") and remove additional data structures such as CRL, significantly reducing storage overhead. Moreover, the combination of redactable and consortium blockchains brings a new kind of attack called deception of versions (DoV) attack. To defend against it, we design a random-block-node-check (RBNC) based freshness check mechanism. Security and performance analyses show that ScalaCert has sufficient security and effectively solves the scalability problem of the blockchain-based PKI system.
Authored by Xinyi Luo, Zhuo Xu, Kaiping Xue, Qiantong Jiang, Ruidong Li, David Wei
This paper presents a MATLAB Graphical User Interface (GUI) based tool that determines the performance evaluation metrics of the physically unclonable functions (PUFs). The PUFs are hardware security primitives which can be utilized in several hardware security applications like integrated circuits protection, device authentication, secret key generation, and hardware obfuscation. Like any other technology approach, PUFs evaluation requires testing different performance metrics, each of which can be determined by at least one mathematical equation. The proposed tool (PUFs Tool) reads the PUF instances’ output and then computes and generates the values of the main PUFs’ performance metrics: uniqueness, reliability, uniformity, and bit-aliasing. In addition, it generates a bar code for each PUF instance considered in the evaluation process. The PUFs Tool is designed and developed using the app designer of MATLAB software 2021b.
Authored by Husam Kareem, Khaleel Almousa, Dmitriy Dunaev
The vehicle-to-grid (V2G) network has a clear advantage in terms of economic benefits, and it has grabbed the interest of powergrid and electric vehicle (EV) consumers. Many V2G techniques, at present, for example, use bilinear pairing to execute the authentication scheme, which results in significant computational costs. Furthermore, in the existing V2G techniques, the system master key is issued independently by the third parties, it is vulnerable to leaking if the third party is compromised by an attacker. This paper presents an efficient and secure anonymous authentication scheme for V2G networks to overcome this issue we use a lightweight authentication system for electric vehicles and smart grids. In the proposed technique, the keys are generated by the trusted authority after the successful registration of EVs in the trusted authority and the dispatching center. The suggested scheme not only enhances the verification performance of V2G networks and also protects against inbuilt hackers.
Authored by Mounika Boni, Tharakeswari Ch, Swathi Alamanda, Bhaskara Arasada, Azees Maria
Aiming at the prevention of information security risk in protection and control of smart substation, a multi-level security defense method of substation based on data aggregation and convolution neural network (CNN) is proposed. Firstly, the intelligent electronic device(IED) uses "digital certificate + digital signature" for the first level of identity authentication, and uses UKey identification code for the second level of physical identity authentication; Secondly, the device group of the monitoring layer judges whether the data report is tampered during transmission according to the registration stage and its own ID information, and the device group aggregates the data using the credential information; Finally, the convolution decomposition technology and depth separable technology are combined, and the time factor is introduced to control the degree of data fusion and the number of input channels of the network, so that the network model can learn the original data and fused data at the same time. Simulation results show that the proposed method can effectively save communication overhead, ensure the reliable transmission of messages under normal and abnormal operation, and effectively improve the security defense ability of smart substation.
Authored by Dong Liu, Yingwei Zhu, Haoliang Du, Lixiang Ruan
FPGA bitstream protection schemes are often the first line of defense for secure hardware designs. In general, breaking the bitstream encryption would enable attackers to subvert the confidentiality and infringe on the IP. Or breaking the authenticity enables manipulating the design, e.g., inserting hardware Trojans. Since FPGAs see widespread use in our interconnected world, such attacks can lead to severe damages, including physical harm. Recently we [1] presented a surprising attack — Starbleed — on Xilinx 7-Series FPGAs, tricking an FPGA into acting as a decryption oracle. For their UltraScale(+) series, Xilinx independently upgraded the security features to AES-GCM, RSA signatures, and a periodic GHASH-based checksum to validate the bitstream during decryption. Hence, UltraScale(+) devices were considered not affected by Starbleed-like attacks [2], [1].We identified novel security weaknesses in Xilinx UltraScale(+) FPGAs if configured outside recommended settings. In particular, we present four attacks in this situation: two attacks on the AES encryption and novel GHASH-based checksum and two authentication downgrade attacks. As a major contribution, we show that the Starbleed attack is still possible within the UltraScale(+) series by developing an attack against the GHASH-based checksum. After describing and analyzing the attacks, we list the subtle configuration changes which can lead to security vulnerabilities and secure configurations not affected by our attacks. As Xilinx only recommends configurations not affected by our attacks, users should be largely secure. However, it is not unlikely that users employ settings outside the recommendations, given the rather large number of configuration options and the fact that Security Misconfiguration is among the leading top 10 OWASP security issues. We note that these security weaknesses shown in this paper had been unknown before.
Authored by Maik Ender, Gregor Leander, Amir Moradi, Christof Paar
Automatic Identification System (AIS) plays a leading role in maritime navigation, traffic control, local and global maritime situational awareness. Today, the reliable and secure AIS operation is threatened by probable cyber attacks such as imitation of ghost vessels, false distress or security messages, or fake virtual aids-to-navigation. We propose a method for ensuring the authentication and integrity of AIS messages based on the use of the Message Authentication Code scheme and digital watermarking (WM) technology to organize an additional tag transmission channel. The method provides full compatibility with the existing AIS functionality.
Authored by Oleksandr Shyshkin
Integration of technology with power grid emerged Smart grid. The advancement of power grid into smart grid faces some security issues like message mod-ification attacks, message injection attacks etc. If these issues are correctly not addressed, then the performance of the smart grid is degraded. Smart grid has bidirectional communication among the smart grid entities. The flow of user energy consumption information between all smart grid entities may lead the user privacy violation. Smart grids have various components but service providers and smart meters are the main components. Smart meters have sensing and communication functionality, while service providers have control and communication functionality. There are many privacy preservation schemes proposed that ensure the cus-tomer's privacy in the smart grid. To preserve the customer's data privacy and communication, authentication and key agreement schemes are required between the smart meter and the service provider. This paper proposes an efficient key agreement protocol to handle several security challenges in smart grid. The proposed protocol is tested against the various security attributes necessary for a key establishment protocol and found safe. Further the performance of the proposed work is compared with several others existing work for smart grid application and it has been observed that the proposed protocol performs significantly better than the existing protocols available in the literature.
Authored by Sachin Choudhary, Abhimanyu Kumar, Krishan Kumar
5G network slicing plays a key role in the smart grid business. The existing authentication schemes for 5G slicing in smart grids require high computing costs, so they are time-consuming and do not fully consider the security of authentication. Aiming at the application scenario of 5G smart grid, this paper proposes an identity-based lightweight secondary authentication scheme. Compared with other well-known methods, in the protocol interaction of this paper, both the user Ui and the grid server can authenticate each other's identities, thereby preventing illegal users from pretending to be identities. The grid user Ui and the grid server can complete the authentication process without resorting to complex bilinear mapping calculations, so the computational overhead is small. The grid user and grid server can complete the authentication process without transmitting the original identification. Therefore, this scheme has the feature of anonymous authentication. In this solution, the authentication process does not require infrastructure such as PKI, so the deployment is simple. Experimental results show that the protocol is feasible in practical applications
Authored by Yue Yu, Jiming Yao, Wei Wang, Lanxin Qiu, Yangzhou Xu
Security is of vital importance in wireless industrial communication systems. When spoofing attacking has occurred, leading to economic losses or even safety accidents. So as to address the concern, existing approaches mainly rely on traditional cryptographic algorithms. However, these methods cannot meet the needs of short delay and lightweight. In this paper, we propose a CSI-based PHY-layer security authentication scheme to detect spoofing detection. The main idea takes advantage of the uncorrelated nature of wireless channels to the identification of spoofing nodes in the physical layer. We demonstrate a MIMO-OFDM based spoofing detection prototype in industrial environments. Firstly, utilizing Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRPs) to establish MIMO-OFDM communication systems is presented. Secondly, our proposed security scheme of CSI-based PHY-layer authentication is demonstrated. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach has been verified via attack experiments.
Authored by Songlin Chen, Sijing Wang, Xingchen Xu, Long Jiao, Hong Wen
Software vulnerabilities threaten the security of computer system, and recently more and more loopholes have been discovered and disclosed. For the detected vulnerabilities, the relevant personnel will analyze the vulnerability characteristics, and combine the vulnerability scoring system to determine their severity level, so as to determine which vulnerabilities need to be dealt with first. In recent years, some characteristic description-based methods have been used to predict the severity level of vulnerability. However, the traditional text processing methods only grasp the superficial meaning of the text and ignore the important contextual information in the text. Therefore, this paper proposes an innovative method, called BERT-CNN, which combines the specific task layer of Bert with CNN to capture important contextual information in the text. First, we use Bert to process the vulnerability description and other information, including Access Gained, Attack Origin and Authentication Required, to generate the feature vectors. Then these feature vectors of vulnerabilities and their severity levels are input into a CNN network, and the parameters of the CNN are gotten. Next, the fine-tuned Bert and the trained CNN are used to predict the severity level of a vulnerability. The results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method with 91.31% on F1-score.
Authored by Xuming Ni, Jianxin Zheng, Yu Guo, Xu Jin, Ling Li
To restrict unauthorized access to the data of the website. Most of the web-based systems nowadays require users to verify themselves before accessing the website is authentic information. In terms of security, it is very important to take different security measures for the protection of the authentic data of the website. However, most of the authentication systems which are used on the web today have several security flaws. This document is based on the security of the previous schemes. Compared to the previous approaches, this “spoofed proof stateless session model” method offers superior security assurance in a scenario in which an attacker has unauthorized access to the data of the website. The various protocol models are being developed and implemented on the web to analyze the performance. The aim was to secure the authentic database backups of the website and prevent them from SQL injection attacks by using the read-only properties for the database. This limits potential harm and provides users with reasonable security safeguards when an attacker has an unauthorized read-only access to the website's authentic database. This scheme provides robustness to the disclosure of authentic databases. Proven experimental results show the overheads due to the modified authentication method and the insecure model.
Authored by Fozia Sultana, Qasim Arain, Perman Soothar, Imran Jokhio, Asma Zubedi
The Activity and Event Network (AEN) graph is a new framework that allows modeling and detecting intrusions by capturing ongoing security-relevant activity and events occurring at a given organization using a large time-varying graph model. The graph is generated by processing various network security logs, such as network packets, system logs, and intrusion detection alerts. In this paper, we show how known attack methods can be captured generically using attack fingerprints based on the AEN graph. The fingerprints are constructed by identifying attack idiosyncrasies under the form of subgraphs that represent indicators of compromise (IOes), and then encoded using Property Graph Query Language (PGQL) queries. Among the many attack types, three main categories are implemented as a proof of concept in this paper: scanning, denial of service (DoS), and authentication breaches; each category contains its common variations. The experimental evaluation of the fingerprints was carried using a combination of intrusion detection datasets and yielded very encouraging results.
Authored by Chenyang Nie, Paulo Quinan, Issa Traore, Isaac Woungang
Security in the communication systems rely mainly on a trusted Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Certificate Authorities (CAs). Besides the lack of automation, the complexity and the cost of assigning a signed certificate to a device, several allegations against CAs have been discovered, which has created trust issues in adopting this standard model for secure systems. The automation of the servers certificate assignment was achieved by the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) method, but without confirming the trust of assigned certificate. This paper presents a complete tested and implemented solution to solve the trust of the Certificates provided to the servers by using the blockchain platform for certificate validation. The Blockchain network provides an immutable data store, holding the public keys of all domain names, while resolving the trust concerns by applying an automated Blockchain-based Domain Control Validation (B-DCV) for the server and client server verification. The evaluation was performed on the Ethereum Rinkeby testnet adopting the Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus algorithm which is an improved version of Proof of Stake (Po \$S\$) applied on Ethereum 2.0 providing superior performance compared to Ethereum 1.0.
Authored by David Khoury, Patrick Balian, Elie Kfoury
Data or information are being transferred at an enormous pace and hence protecting and securing this transmission of data are very important and have been very challenging. Cryptography and Steganography are the most broadly used techniques for safeguarding data by encryption of data and hiding the existence of data. A multi-layered secure transmission can be achieved by combining Cryptography with Steganography and by adding message authentication ensuring the confidentiality of the message. Different approach towards Steganography implementation is proposed using rotations and flips to prevent detection of encoded messages. Compression of multimedia files is set up for increasing the speed of encoding and consuming less storage space. The HMAC (Hash-based Authentication Code) algorithm is chosen for message authentication and integrity. The performance of the proposed Steganography methods is concluded using Histogram comparative analysis. Simulations have been performed to back the reliability of the proposed method.
Authored by Aditya Kotkar, Shreyas Khadapkar, Aniket Gupta, Smita Jangale
In the present innovation, for the trading of information, the internet is the most well-known and significant medium. With the progression of the web and data innovation, computerized media has become perhaps the most famous and notable data transfer tools. This advanced information incorporates text, pictures, sound, video etc moved over the public organization. The majority of these advanced media appear as pictures and are a significant part in different applications, for example, chat, talk, news, website, web-based business, email, and digital books. The content is still facing various challenges in which including the issues of protection of copyright, modification, authentication. Cryptography, steganography, embedding techniques is widely used to secure the digital data. In this present the hybrid model of LSB steganography and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cryptography techniques to enhanced the security of the digital image and text that is undeniably challenging to break by the unapproved person. The security level of the secret information is estimated in the term of MSE and PSNR for better hiding required the low MSE and high PSNR values.
Authored by Manish Kumar, Aman Soni, Ajay Shekhawat, Akash Rawat
We propose TaintLock, a lightweight dynamic scan data authentication and encryption scheme that performs per-pattern authentication and encryption using taint and signature bits embedded within the test pattern. To prevent IP theft, we pair TaintLock with truly random logic locking (TRLL) to ensure resilience against both Oracle-guided and Oracle-free attacks, including scan deobfuscation attacks. TaintLock uses a substitution-permutation (SP) network to cryptographically authenticate each test pattern using embedded taint and signature bits. It further uses cryptographically generated keys to encrypt scan data for unauthenticated users dynamically. We show that it offers a low overhead, non-intrusive secure scan solution without impacting test coverage or test time while preventing IP theft.
Authored by Jonti Talukdar, Arjun Chaudhuri, Krishnendu Chakrabarty
With the advent of technology and owing to mankind’s reliance on technology, it is of utmost importance to safeguard people’s data and their identity. Biometrics have for long played an important role in providing that layer of security ranging from small scale uses such as house locks to enterprises using them for confidentiality purposes. In this paper we will provide an insight into behavioral biometrics that rely on identifying and measuring human characteristics or behavior. We review different types of behavioral parameters such as keystroke dynamics, gait, footstep pressure signals and more.
Authored by Mahipal Choudhry, Vaibhav Jetli, Siddhant Mathur, Yash Saini
In many scenarios, Internet connectivity may not be available. In such situations, device-to-device (D2D) communication may be utilized to establish a peer-to-peer (P2P) network among mobile users in the vicinity. However, this raises a fundamental question as is how to ensure secure communication in such an infrastructure-less network. In this paper, we present an approach that enables connectivity between mobile devices in the vicinity and supports secure communication between users in Internet-isolated locations. Specifically, the proposed solution uses Wi-Fi Aware for establishing a P2P network and the mTLS (mutual Transport Layer Security) protocol to provide mutually authenticated and encrypted message transfer. Besides, a novel decentralized peer authentication (DPA) scheme compatible with Wi-Fi Aware and TLS is proposed, which enables peers to verify other peers to join the network. A proof-of-concept instant messaging application has been developed to test the proposed DPA scheme and to evaluate the performance of the proposed overall approach. Experimental results, which validate the proposed solution, are presented with findings and limitations discussed.
Authored by Kirsten Skaug, Elise Smebye, Besmir Tola, Yuming Jiang