Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)

Abstract: Fake products are items that are marketed and sold as genuine, high-quality products but are counterfeit or low-quality knockoffs. These products are often designed to closely mimic the appearance and branding of the genuine product to deceive consumers into thinking they are purchasing the real thing. Fake products can range from clothing and accessories to electronics and other goods and can be found in a variety of settings, including online marketplaces and brick-and-mortar stores. Blockchain technology can be used to help detect fake products in a few different ways. One of the most common ways is through the use of smart contracts, which are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller being directly written into lines of code. This allows for a high level of transparency and traceability in supply chain transactions, making it easier to identify and prevent the sale of fake products and the use of unique product identifiers, such as serial numbers or QR codes, that are recorded on the blockchain. This allows consumers to easily verify the authenticity of a product by scanning the code and checking it against the information recorded on the blockchain. In this study, we will use smart contracts to detect fake products and will evaluate based on Gas cost and ethers used for each implementation.

Abstract: Attacks against industrial control systems (ICSs) often exploit the insufficiency of authentication mechanisms. Verifying whether the received messages are intact and issued by legitimate sources can prevent malicious data/command injection by illegitimate or compromised devices. However, the key challenge is to introduce message authentication for various ICS communication models, including multicast or broadcast, with a messaging rate that can be as high as thousands of messages per second, within very stringent latency constraints. For example, certain commands for protection in smart grids must be delivered within 2 milliseconds, ruling out public-key cryptography. This paper proposes two lightweight message authentication schemes, named CMA and its multicast variant CMMA, that perform precomputation and caching to authenticate future messages. With minimal precomputation and communication overhead, C(M)MA eliminates all cryptographic operations for the source after the message is given, and all expensive cryptographic operations for the destinations after the message is received. C(M)MA considers the urgency profile (or likelihood) of a set of future messages for even faster verification of the most time-critical (or likely) messages. We demonstrate the feasibility of C(M)MA in an ICS setting based on a substation automation system in smart grids.