Improvement of MASC Secure Tunnel Protocol for Monitoring Transport Containers

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the necessity of utilizing smart container is becoming a significant to strengthen the container security and increase the efficiency of container transport for international cargo. Lauf and Sauff proposed MASC-ST protocol for securely transmitting sensitive information gathered from sensors equipped in the container to a trusted third party that controls access to this information. However, we show that the protocol has some weaknesses, which are able to cause serious problems for container transport if this protocol is directly adopted in real fields, and also present an improvement to overcome the weaknesses while preserving the merits of their scheme.