Biometric data can be used as input for PKI key pair generation. The concept of not saving the private key is very appealing, but the implementation of such a system shouldn't be rushed because it might prove less secure then current PKI infrastructure. One biometric characteristic can be easily spoofed, so it was believed that multi-modal biometrics would offer more security, because spoofing two or more biometrics would be very hard. This notion, of increased security of multi-modal biometric systems, was disproved for authentication and matching, studies showing that not only multi-modal biometric systems are not more secure, but they introduce additional vulnerabilities. This paper is a study on the implications of spoofing biometric data for retrieving the derived key. We demonstrate that spoofed biometrics can yield the same key, which in turn will lead an attacker to obtain the private key. A practical implementation is proposed using fingerprint and iris as biometrics and the fuzzy extractor for biometric key extraction. Our experiments show what happens when the biometric data is spoofed for both uni-modal systems and multi-modal. In case of multi-modal system tests were performed when spoofing one biometric or both. We provide detailed analysis of every scenario in regard to successful tests and overall key entropy. Our paper defines a biometric PKI scenario and an in depth security analysis for it. The analysis can be viewed as a blueprint for implementations of future similar systems, because it highlights the main security vulnerabilities for bioPKI. The analysis is not constrained to the biometric part of the system, but covers CA security, sensor security, communication interception, RSA encryption vulnerabilities regarding key entropy, and much more.
Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a core component of the Internet-of-Things. In certain cases the communication between the tag and the reader needs to be confidential. Some passive RFID tags have very limited computational power and can therefore not implement standard cryptographic mechanisms. This has led to several proposals where data sent by the RFID tag is 'hidden' by noisy signals generated by the RFID reader. The RFID reader can remove the noise but third-party adversaries cannot, thereby ensuring a confidential backward-channel for tag data without the need for cryptography. Although this is a promising research direction there are also some practical limitations on the effectiveness of such schemes. This paper shows that at least one recent scheme is vulnerable to data recovery despite varying the reader's transmission power if there is a slight difference in the phase of the reader's blocking signal and the tag's data. We experimentally verify our attack and conclude that our eavesdropping and data recovery approach is effective and realistic. Finally we test three possible mitigation methods and show that two of the three approaches can provide protection against our attack while having little impact on the bit error rate of the reader in decoding the tag data.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.