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1. Two-factor Password-authenticated Key Exchange with End-to-end Security

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3446807  

   Jarecki, Stanislaw; Jubur, Mohammed; Krawczyk, Hugo; Saxena, Nitesh; Shirvanian, Maliheh (August 2021, ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security)

   null (Ed.)

   We present a secure two-factor authentication (TFA) scheme based on the user’s possession of a password and a crypto-capable device. Security is “end-to-end” in the sense that the attacker can attack all parts of the system, including all communication links and any subset of parties (servers, devices, client terminals), can learn users’ passwords, and perform active and passive attacks, online and offline. In all cases the scheme provides the highest attainable security bounds given the set of compromised components. Our solution builds a TFA scheme using any Device-enhanced Password-authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE), defined by Jarecki et al., and any Short Authenticated String (SAS) Message Authentication, defined by Vaudenay. We show an efficient instantiation of this modular construction, which utilizes any password-based client-server authentication method, with or without reliance on public-key infrastructure. The security of the proposed scheme is proven in a formal model that we formulate as an extension of the traditional PAKE model. We also report on a prototype implementation of our schemes, including TLS-based and PKI-free variants, as well as several instantiations of the SAS mechanism, all demonstrating the practicality of our approach. Finally, we present a usability study evaluating the viability of our protocol contrasted with the traditional PIN-based TFA approach in terms of efficiency, potential for errors, user experience, and security perception of the underlying manual process. 1 

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2. A User Study of Keystroke Dynamics as Second Factor in Web MFA

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3577923.3583642  

   Wahab, Ahmed Anu; Hou, Daqing; Schuckers, Stephanie (April 2023, CODASPY '23: Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy)

   As account compromises and malicious online attacks are on the rise, multi-factor authentication (MFA) has been adopted to defend against these attacks. OTP and mobile push notification are just two examples of the popularly adopted MFA factors. Although MFA improve security, they also add additional steps or hardware to the authentication process, thus increasing the authentication time and introducing friction. On the other hand, keystroke dynamics-based authentication is believed to be a promising MFA for increasing security while reducing friction. While there have been several studies on the usability of other MFA factors, the usability of keystroke dynamics has not been studied. To this end, we have built a web authentication system with the standard features of signup, login and account recovery, and integrated keystroke dynamics as an additional factor. We then conducted a user study on the system where 20 participants completed tasks related to signup, login and account recovery. We have also evaluated a new approach for completing the user enrollment process, which reduces friction by naturally employing other alternative MFA factors (OTP in our study) when keystroke dynamics is not ready for use. Our study shows that while maintaining strong security (0% FPR), adding keystroke dynamics reduces authentication friction by avoiding 66.3% of OTP at login and 85.8% of OTP at account recovery, which in turn reduces the authentication time by 63.3% and 78.9% for login and account recovery respectively. Through an exit survey, all participants have rated the integration of keystroke dynamics with OTP to be more preferable to the conventional OTP-only authentication. 

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3. Integrating Security in Resource-Constrained Cyber-Physical Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3380866  

   Lesi, Vuk; Jovanov, Ilija; Pajic, Miroslav (May 2020, ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Defense mechanisms against network-level attacks are commonly based on the use of cryptographic techniques, such as lengthy message authentication codes (MAC) that provide data integrity guarantees. However, such mechanisms require significant resources (both computational and network bandwidth), which prevents their continuous use in resource-constrained cyber-physical systems (CPS). Recently, it was shown how physical properties of controlled systems can be exploited to relax these stringent requirements for systems where sensor measurements and actuator commands are transmitted over a potentially compromised network; specifically, that merely intermittent use of data authentication (i.e., at occasional time points during system execution), can still provide strong Quality-of-Control (QoC) guarantees even in the presence of false-data injection attacks, such as Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks. Consequently, in this work, we focus on integrating security into existing resource-constrained CPS, in order to protect against MitM attacks on a system where a set of control tasks communicates over a real-time network with system sensors and actuators. We introduce a design-time methodology that incorporates requirements for QoC in the presence of attacks into end-to-end timing constraints for real-time control transactions, which include data acquisition and authentication, real-time network messages, and control tasks. This allows us to formulate a mixed integer linear programming-based method for direct synthesis of schedulable tasks and message parameters (i.e., deadlines and offsets) that do not violate timing requirements for the already deployed controllers, while adding a sufficient level of protection against network-based attacks; specifically, the synthesis method also provides suitable intermittent authentication policies that ensure the desired QoC levels under attack. To additionally reduce the security-related bandwidth overhead, we propose the use of cumulative message authentication at time instances when the integrity of messages from subsets of sensors should be ensured. Furthermore, we introduce a method for the opportunistic use of the remaining resources to further improve the overall QoC guarantees while ensuring system (i.e., task and message) schedulability. Finally, we demonstrate applicability and scalability of our methodology on synthetic automotive systems as well as a real-world automotive case-study. 

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4. A Quantum Good Authentication Protocol

   Wang, Shuangbao Paul (May 2025, CSIAC journal)

   This article presents a novel network protocol that incorporates a quantum photonic channel for symmetric key distribution, a Dilithium signature to replace factor-based public key cryptography for enhanced authentication, security, and privacy. The protocol uses strong hash functions to hash original messages and verify heightened data integrity at the destination. This Quantum good authentication protocol (QGP) provides high-level security provided by the theory of quantum mechanics. QGP also has the advantage of quantum-resistant data protection that prevents current digital computer and future quantum computer attacks. QGP transforms the transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP) by adding a quantum layer at the bottom of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model (layer 0) and modifying the top layer (layer 7) with Dilithium signatures, thus improving the security of the original OSI model. In addition, QGP incorporates strong encryption, hardware-based quantum channels, post-quantum signatures, and secure hash algorithms over a platform of decryptors, switches, routers, and network controllers to form a testbed of the next-generation, secure quantum internet. The experiments presented here show that QGP provides secure authentication and improved security and privacy and can be adopted as a new protocol for the next-generation quantum internet. 

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5. Rider Posture-Based Continuous Authentication with Few-Shot Learning for Mobility Scooters (Student Abstract)

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v38i21.30509  

   Shah, Devan; Huang, Ruoqi; Chen, Tingting; Jadliwala, Murtuza (March 2024, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Current practice of mobility scooter user authentication using physical keys and traditional password-based one-time security mechanisms cannot meet the needs of many mobility scooter riders, especially senior citizens having issues in recalling memory. Now seamless authentication approaches are needed to provide ongoing protection for mobility scooters against takeovers and unauthorized access. Existing continuous authentication techniques do not work well in a mobility scooter setting due to issues such as user comfort, deployment cost and enrollment time, among others. In that direction, our contributions in this research effort are two-fold: (i) we propose a novel system that incorporates advances in few-shot learning, hierarchical processing, and contextual embedding to establish continuous authentication for mobility scooter riders using only posture data. This security system, trained on data collected from real mobility scooter riders, demonstrates quick enrollment and easy deployability, while successfully serving as an unobtrusive first layer of security. (ii) we provide to the research community the largest publicly available repository of mobility scooter riders' body key-points data to enable further research in this direction. 

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