Security and Privacy in Mobile Information and Communication Systems

This paper presents an attractive solution to integrate multiple services in the context of sports associations. The mobile solution is tailored to youngsters and makes use of a contactless RFID chip embedded in a bracelet. It realizes a reasonable trade-off between multiple (often conflicting) requirements, namely low-cost and low-power, security, privacy and flexibility to allow for easily adding new services.

We present a system that enables secure user authentication by leveraging a portable USB-based trusted device. The heart of our system runs a protocol which guarantees trusted behavior at multiple layers; from the hardware device itself, to the software executing on the hardware, and finally to the application hosted in the remote server. This combination assures end-to-end trust and makes our system resilient to physical attacks (e.g. to the device and wire tapping) as well as logical attacks (e.g. main-in-the-middle attack). Our system utilizes web-based proxy communication using standard HTML tags and JavaScript to coordinate communication amongst different components. This enables our system not having to install any extra drivers typically required for supporting communication in most existing technologies.

XtreemOS-MD SSO is a modular, pluggable, Single Sign-On (SSO) architecture. It has been conceived for easy integration of mobile devices into the Grid as part of XtreemOS project, but it may be reused by any other project. It offers semi-transparent integration with applications and makes easier the migration from enterprise servers to cloud computing infrastructures.

XtreemOS-MD SSO is inspired in Linux Key Retention Service (LKRS) with some enhancements and may interact with it, but it’s designed to run completely in user space, not requiring any special kernel support.

This paper illustrates and scans the limits of the use of anonymous credentials (e.g. Idemix) on smart phones to preserve the user’s privacy. A prototypical application with strong privacy requirements, ePoll, will be presented in detail. To ease the implementation of such applications, a specialized identity management framework has been developed. A first prototype of the ePoll application was built for workstations. Later it was ported to a smart phone to evaluate the performance of anonymous credential protocols in this setting.

Law enforcement tracking applications are usually required to be passive such that the target is not aware of the tracking process. This passivity requirement can severely affect the accuracy of the tracking process especially in cluttered and densely populated areas. However, short range emissions from mobile devices such as phones and accessories can be used to improve the accuracy of these passive tracking applications. In this paper, we adopt an agent-based clandestine tracking approach where a set of dynamically recruited tracking agents observe single or multiple targets and report to single or multiple trackers. We also describe a few supporting mechanisms and algorithms for security and fault-tolerance.

Location-Based Services are emerging fast and the problems with privacy are growing with them. While a platform for Location-Based Services can provide the user with high-quality Location-Based Service browsing and powerful mechanisms to reduce the amount of location data transmitted such a platform is dangerous as it has to manage the location data of the users and the actual service usage. This aggregation of private data is a risk in itself. With this paper we want to show that it is possible to implement most Location-Based Services without such a platform and propose a mechanism enabling fine- grained control of privacy for a Location-Based Service user. We make use of strong cryptographic techniques to enable a real trust relation between individuals and a weaker trust relation between an individual and a company.

A home registration scheme is typically used for a mobile node to inform its home agent about the mobile node’s current location when it is away from its home link. The Mobile IPv6 protocol protects a home registration scheme against outsider attacks, but it fails to protect from attacks by legitimate mobile nodes behaving maliciously. A malicious mobile node could pretend to own a third-party’s address and luring its home agent to flood that victim with useless packets. This paper attempts to address this weakness by proposing a novel secure home registration scheme to support location authentication of mobile nodes to their home agents in Mobile IPv6 networks. The proposed scheme makes use of a combination of two ideas. Firstly, the care-of addresses are formed using a symmetric key cryptographic address generation technique that prevents the stealing of other nodes’ addresses. Secondly, concurrent care-of addresses reachability tests are used to verify mobile nodes’ reachability at the claimed care-of-addresses. In addition, this paper proposes the idea of segmenting the IPv6 address space into three parts: home addresses, care-of addresses, and stationary addresses to differentiate between nodes based on their IPv6 address. Segmenting IPv6 address space could reduce the number of targets that are vulnerable to flooding attacks launched by malicious MNs. To investigate the efficiency and efficacy of the proposed scheme, the performance, in terms of home registration delay, is investigated using simulation (built with the OPNET^TM Modeler version 14.5).

The security concern in wireless sensor networks is driven by the need for increased assurance regarding the system. In this light, research on protecting the network from threats originating from the hostile outside has been ongoing. Additionally, many real world applications of sensor networks move away from the monolithic application model – node capabilities need to be shared among different applications of different actors. This view introduces additional security requirements. This paper addresses controlled usage of resources, a primary security requirement in case of sensor sharing. A distributed reference monitor is proposed as the enforcement mechanism. The monitor is policy-driven which enables lightweight run-time control of the resource accesses. Resource constraints as well as current programming and operational models are respected through use of a selective injection strategy based on code rewriting during pre-deployment. Code rewriting is controlled by aspect-oriented constructs. The approach is validated by a research prototype.

The paper presents an innovative way of providing cryptographic authentication credentials to mobile network elements. The proposed approach offers a practical solution to the problem of initial trust establishment between the newly installed hosts in the field and the existing network. It allows for true zero-touch secure start-up of the network elements.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are deployed in numerous mission critical applications in which the network needs to remain active for as long as possible while delivering quality information to a base station. However, WSNs suffer from a wide range of attacks due to their limited processing and energy capabilities. Their resiliency, however, depends on fast recovery from such attacks being achieved. In recent work, the authors developed and implemented clustering, reprogramming and authentication protocols involved in recovering stationary WSNs with low resources. In this paper, we determine the additional resources required in implementing these protocols in a mobile WSN.

We present recovery protocols on TinyOS motes for a low-resourced, mobile deployment. We describe the issues we encountered in the implementation. We present times, RAM and ROM needed to run the recovery protocols and compare these with the stationary case, demonstrating that the additional cost of reprogramming in a mobile WSN is less than 25% of that in a stationary WSN and the additional cost of re-clustering in a mobile WSN is less than 9% of that in a stationary WSN. Authentication has an insignificant cost increase.

We present an analysis of the iKee.B (duh) Apple iPhone bot client, captured on November 25, 2009. The bot client was released throughout several countries in Europe, with the initial purpose of coordinating its infected iPhones via a Lithuanian botnet server. This report details the logic and function of iKee’s scripts, its configuration files, and its two binary executables, which we have reverse engineered to an approximation of their C source code implementation. The iKee bot is one of the latest offerings in smartphone malware, in this case targeting jailbroken iPhones. While its implementation is simple in comparison to the latest generation of PC-based malware, its implications demonstrate the potential extension of crimeware to this valuable new frontier of handheld consumer devices.

Mobile phones and wireless technology and its constant evolution have, in the last years, revolutionized the way in which we communicate and work. However, one of the main barriers encounter in the use of these technologies is data security. Trojan horses are dangerous software to attack phones, PDAs and Smartphones. New versions are created everyday to attack the functionality, theft the stored information and propagate themselves. In this paper, we present a new real-time method to detect Trojan horses in mobile devices. We study the events in the device to detect programs which can be suspected to be Trojan horses. By doing so, we can detect not only the known Trojan horses with more accuracy, but also detect new trojans. Practical experiences on different devices have been carried out and results show the effectiveness of the method.

This paper describes the experiments which have been conducted to determine the optimal implementation concept for AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) data encryption in a ZigBee network [1,2]. Two concepts have been considered. The first one is a AES128-CBC hardware co-processor embedded on a Spartan 3A FPGA. The second configuration implements the same cryptographic algorithm on the processor which controls the ZigBee nodes. The ZigBee modules in the network contain an 8-bit microcontroller which takes care of the ZigBee protocol stack –and the encryption calculations in the second case. Both approaches are examined and compared. In this paper we show that –in general– a software implementation is feasible in a ZigBee network, though a low-power hardware cryptographic co-processor could prove to be useful in some cases.