Techniques to Enhance Security of an Authentication Protocol

Brandon Barker, Michael Smith, Liljana Babinkostova, Marion Scheepers

Research output: Contribution to conferencePresentation

Abstract

Secure cryptosystems and hash functions are fundamental to continued personal and economic success in the emerging Digital Information Age. Accelerating technological innovation continues to increase the challenge of assuring the integrity, authenticity, and confidentiality of user data and intellectual property. The SmartDongle™ is a flash drive produced by MicroWorks and is meant to secure data and assure authorized use of software. In this project, we investigate the security of certain cryptographic techniques used in the current implementation of the SmartDongle™’s authentication protocol. In particular, we analyze how the use of hash functions developed using a Merkle-Damgård construction in conjunction with a simplified version of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and the Data Encryption Standard (DES) can affect the SmartDongle™'s security. Our study involves extensive computational experimentation and analyses that produced a range of conjectures about the security of the SmartDongle™.

Original languageAmerican English
StatePublished - 12 Jul 2015

EGS Disciplines

  • Information Security

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Techniques to Enhance Security of an Authentication Protocol'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this