Mutual authentication of Cinderella and a shoe

Once upon a time, in a faraway kingdom, not subject to EC eIDAS regulations, there lived a young girl named Cinderella. Her mother had passed away, leaving her alone with her selfish stepmother that had two daughters of her own. We will skip how cruel they were to Cinderella and that part when prince invites every girl in the kingdom (scalability issue?) to a grand ball at the palace.

Fairy godmother helped Cinderella to acquire false identity, together with onboarding of untrusted objects, such as a carriage, a wonderful dress and delicate glass shoes. They were untrusted objects since a piece of malware with delayed execution (triggered at midnight) turned them into pumpkin, made them disappear, and did other sorts of nasty things.

In the log file of a grand ball, it was recorder that the prince was charmed by her beauty, that they danced together, that she fled from the palace, but also that one of her glass shoes slipped off her foot.

Now comes an interesting part: the prince was determined to find the owner of the glass shoe by using physically unclonable function (PUF) of that glass object, supposing that it could fit only the foot of mysterious girl. ?Other girls’ feet, including her stepsisters, simply couldn't squeeze in (unique biometric feature?).

But wait…what if the glass shoe was swapped by someone, changed for another glass shoe that fits to her ugly stepsister foot? This is why the authentication of objects and things is so important!!! Do not trust, verify…and do so as often as you can.

Protecting the identity of objects is one of the objectives of European research project ARCADIAN-IoT. Recently project published a press release informing that it has developed robust cybersecurity features to safeguard objects (otherwise known as “things”) and internet of things (IoT) ecosystems. In the project, solution called IoT-uSelf was developed by Atos and includes creation, issuing and verifying credentials for “things”. The framework developed in ARCADIA-IoT contain tools that allow any individuals, including prince charming, not only to identify and authenticate objects but also to easily monitor the security of any device or “thing”. ?More details can be found at https://www.arcadian-iot.eu/

We all know that Cinderella was reunited with the prince, and they lived happily ever after, but it was “once upon a time”. These days they would probably rely on tools and technologies like those from ARCADIAN-IoT, in keeping with the spirit of the times.