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Summary: Privacy and security present significant challenges in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In order to enhance security, the sensor network is equipped with high throughput. While the importance of both source node (SN) and base station (BS) location privacy and security is acknowledged, recent research has predominantly focused on location privacy. Addressing this gap, the geometric zigzag bidirectional tree effectively tackles privacy and security threats at both the SN and BS locations. Future iterations of WSN are anticipated to integrate additional functionalities to meet diverse requirements in real‐world applications. The absence of robust security constraints leads to an unpredictable sensor network setup. This article aims to reduce energy consumption (EC) while simultaneously enhancing network security and connectivity. To address security challenges in WSN, we propose an optimized meta‐heuristic clustering‐based privacy key‐agreement routing technique. In the suggested system, a gateway‐based network is constructed to devise a key arrangement protocol that promotes privacy during communication. The proposed routing strategy involves forming clusters of sensor nodes (Sn), facilitating the efficient selection of cluster heads (CHs) that prioritize nodes with the least modification. This effectively addresses the EC problem. A comprehensive performance evaluation is conducted, considering improvements in energy efficiency, packet delivery ratio (PDR), throughput, end‐to‐end delay (E2 delay), and EC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Rapid development of wireless networks brings about many security problems in portable communication systems (PCSs), which can provide mobile users with an opportunity to enjoy global roaming services. In this regard, designing a secure user authentication scheme, especially for recognizing legal roaming users, is indeed a challenging task. It is noticed that there is no delegation‐based protocol for PCSs, which can guarantee anonymity, untraceability, perfect forward secrecy, and resistance of denial‐of‐service (DoS) attack. Therefore, in this article, we put forward a novel delegation‐based anonymous and untraceable authentication protocol, which can guarantee to resolve all the abovementioned security issues and hence offer a solution for secure communications for PCSs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Internet of Things (IoT) specifies a transparent and coherent integration of assorted and composite nodes. Unification of these nodes with large resources and servers has brought advancement in technology for industrial and government services. The industrial IoT (IIoT), with smart nodes, enhance the development and manufacturing of industrial process, which is on demand now. However, the security concern is substantial, and it is required to control to perform prosperous assimilation of IIoT. Authentication of these smart nodes and establishing mutual trust among them is essential to keep vulnerabilities and potential risks out. Hence, this paper presents an efficient lightweight secure authentication protocol from the perspective of human‐centered IIoT. This proposed scheme assumes a registration center which simply generates public and secret information for a node when it initially joins the network. Once registration is done, the registration center is not needed anymore, and advanced processes like mutual authentication, secure key exchange, and communications are independently done by nodes involved. Furthermore, we show that this scheme can reduce exponential computations and computational overhead and resolves various possible attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Internet of Things (IoT) is a newly emerged paradigm where multiple embedded devices, known as things, are connected via the Internet to collect, share, and analyze data from the environment. In order to overcome the limited storage and processing capacity constraint of IoT devices, it is now possible to integrate them with cloud servers as large resource pools. Such integration, though bringing applicability of IoT in many domains, raises concerns regarding the authentication of these devices while establishing secure communications to cloud servers. Recently, Kumari et al proposed an authentication scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for IoT and cloud servers and claimed that it satisfies all security requirements and is secure against various attacks. In this paper, we first prove that the scheme of Kumari et al is susceptible to various attacks, including the replay attack and stolen‐verifier attack. We then propose a lightweight authentication protocol for secure communication of IoT embedded devices and cloud servers. The proposed scheme is proved to provide essential security requirements such as mutual authentication, device anonymity, and perfect forward secrecy and is robust against security attacks. We also formally verify the security of the proposed protocol using BAN logic and also the Scyther tool. We also evaluate the computation and communication costs of the proposed scheme and demonstrate that the proposed scheme incurs minimum computation and communication overhead, compared to related schemes, making it suitable for IoT environments with low processing and storage capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 5th Generation Networks (5g), the Internet of Things (IoT), and Edge Computing are essential infrastructure enablers for a range of new business and technology developments, often termed Industry 4.0, that cover areas like autonomous vehicles, smart city grids, e-health, automated factories, mobile content streaming, and data analytics. SOCIAL NETWORKING, MOBILE EDGE COMPUTING, AND AI APPLICATIONS Smart and connected communities is an emerging field of IoT, and it has potential applications to improve human life. In mobile edge computing, service migration can reduce not only the access latency but also the network costs for users. [Extracted from the article]

Summary: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play an influential role in the advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) because the infrastructure of WSNs consists of lots of sensors, which can be used to collect online data by the users or service providers; however, in the process of collecting the data, the users and service providers have to communicate with the sensors through an unprotected channel, so the confidentiality and integrity of the transmitted messages might be threatened by an adversary. Consequently, several authentication protocols have been proposed to provide a secure authentication process for IoT‐based WSNs. In this paper, we analyze Ghani et al.'s protocol and demonstrate that their protocol is vulnerable to user impersonation attack, malicious gateway attack, and traceability attack. Furthermore, it suffers from some design weaknesses. To fix these drawbacks, we propose a new hash‐based authentication protocol for IoT‐based WSNs. We analyze our protocol with both formal and informal methods to show that our protocol is secure against various known attacks such as sensor and user trace, sensor capture, off‐line password guessing, and replay attacks. Finally, we evaluate our protocol in terms of security features and communication and computation costs. The results show that not only the proposed protocol is more secure than other existing protocols but also reduces 60% of the execution time of the user authentication process in comparison with Ghani et al.'s protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Designing an efficient, short, and secure authentication algorithm for resource‐constrained sensor nodes of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a challenging task. Authentication in WSNs is mainly performed by the digital signature algorithm. In this paper, we propose an efficient, short, and secure pairing computation‐free ID‐based authentication algorithm (signature scheme) ESS‐IBAA for WSNs which completely follows the rule of identity‐based cryptosystem. Identity‐based schemes, unlike traditional public‐key infrastructure (PKI)‐based schemes, remove the need for public‐key certificates for public‐key validation. It also removes extra costs associated with the public‐key certificate and traffic management. Further, due to the requirement of low power and fast authentication, bilinear pairing computation‐free identity‐based signature schemes are applicable in WSNs. Keeping this in mind, ESS‐IBAA scheme is proposed, which is pairing computation free and uses a general cryptographic hash function in the place of a costly map‐to‐point hash function. The proposed scheme ESS‐IBAA is secure against existential forgery on adaptive chosen message and ID attack in the random oracle model under the hardness of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP). Moreover, comparative performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme ESS‐IBAA is much more efficient in both communication cost and computation cost from the existing related schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Due to fast development of wireless technology, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used in many applications such environmental monitoring, health monitoring, and area monitoring. To protect WSNs from various security threats, many user authentication protocols have been proposed. Recently, Gope and Hwang have discussed an authentication protocol for WSNs. Here, we show that their scheme is not resistant to stolen verifier, user impersonation, smart card loss, and insider attacks. Also, it does not maintain secrecy of session key and anonymity of sensor node. Then we devise an efficient user authentication protocol using physically unclonable function (PUF) for WSNs to overcome the limitations of their scheme. We present our protocol's informal security analysis to show that is resistant to various known attacks. Formal security verification and analysis of the proposed protocol are done using ProVerif tool and widely accepted Real‐Or‐Random (ROR) model, respectively. In the performance analysis, we show that our protocol offers more security features than the others related schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Vehicular cloud computing (VCC) is an emerging research area of cloud and vehicular networking. It equips vehicles with networking and sensing capacities for vehicle‐to‐vehicle or vehicle‐to‐infrastructure communication with available roadside infrastructure. It is significantly utilized in traffic management and road safety using cloud applications. To obtain impressive networking in vehicular communication, there is a need of hybrid technological approach in the form of VCC utilizing vehicular resources, cloud infrastructure, and Internet of Things (IoT) environment. VCC presents smart vehicular communication structure and maintains autonomous traffic, improved vehicle control, and enhanced system security. Security and privacy has appeared to be a major concern in VCC because of involvement of unknown vehicles and infrastructure via public network. In this article, we propose a biometric and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)‐assisted authentication framework for VCC. The presented framework obtains most of security features and attributes for secure communication in the presence of active and passive attackers. Further, we provide formal security model and its proof, which is based on random oracle model. We compare the performance of our protocol with similar frameworks in the same environment. Our analysis indicates that the presented framework is secure and efficient in terms of communication and computation overheads. As a result, the presented protocol can be utilized in VCC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), there are many critical applications (for example, healthcare, vehicle tracking, and battlefield), where the online streaming data generated from different sensor nodes need to be analyzed with respect to quick control decisions. However, as the data generated by these sensor nodes usually flow through open channel, so there are higher chances of various types of attacks either on the nodes or on to the data captured by these nodes. In this paper, we aim to design a new elliptic curve cryptography–based user authenticated key agreement protocol in a hierarchical WSN so that a legal user can only access the streaming data from generated from different sensor nodes. The proposed scheme is based upon 3‐factor authentication, as it applies smart card, password, and personal biometrics of a user (for ticket generation). The proposed scheme maintains low computation cost for resource‐constrained sensor nodes, as it uses efficient 1‐way cryptographic hash function and bitwise exclusive‐OR operations for secure key establishment between different sensor nodes. The security analysis using the broadly accepted Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham logic, formal security verification using the popular simulation tool (automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications), and informal security show that the proposed scheme is resilient against several well‐known attacks needed for a user authentication scheme in WSNs. The comparison of security and functionality requirements, communication and computation costs of the proposed scheme, and other related existing user authentication schemes shows the superior performance of the proposed scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, with the advancement of wireless technologies, global mobility networks offer roaming services for mobile users. Since in global mobility networks the communication channel is public, adversaries can launch different security attacks to breach the security and privacy of data and mobile users. Hence, an authentication and key agreement scheme can be used to provide secure roaming services. It is well known that the conventional authentication schemes are not suitable for global mobility networks, because the authentication server of each network has the credentials of its registered users and thus cannot verify the authenticity of the other mobile users. Hence, for providing secure roaming services, another type of authentication called roaming authentication is required. Hitherto, a large number of authentication protocols have been proposed for global mobility networks. However, most of them have been proved to be insecure against various attacks. This paper proposes a secure and efficient authentication and key agreement scheme for global mobility networks. The proposed scheme is based on the elliptic curve cryptosystem. The correctness of the proposed scheme is verified using Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic. In addition, the security of the proposed scheme is proved using ProVerif. Detailed analyses demonstrate that the proposed scheme not only withstands various security attacks but also improves the efficiency by reducing the computational costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiserver authentication complies with the up-to-date requirements of Internet services and latest applications. The multiserver architecture enables the expedient authentication of subscribers on an insecure channel for the delivery of services. The users rely on a single registration of a trusted third party for the procurement of services from various servers. Recently, Chen and Lee, Moon et al, and Wang et al presented multiserver key agreement schemes that are found to be vulnerable to many attacks according to our analysis. The Chen and Lee scheme was found susceptible to impersonation attack, trace attack, stolen smart card attack exposing session key, key-compromise impersonation attack, and inefficient password modification. The Moon et al is susceptible to stolen card attack leading to further attacks, ie, identity guessing, key-compromise impersonation attack, user impersonation attack, and session keys disclosure, while Wang et al is also found to be prone to trace attack, session-specific temporary information attack, key-compromise information attack, and privileged insider attack leading to session key disclosure and user impersonation attacks. We propose an improved protocol countering the indicated weaknesses of these schemes in an equivalent cost. Our scheme demonstrates automated and security analysis on the basis of Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic and also presents the performance evaluation for related schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key agreement protocol is an important cryptographic primitive, which allows 2 parties to establish a secure session in an open network environment. A various of key agreement protocols were proposed. Nowadays, there still exists some other security flaws waiting to be solved. Owing to reduce the computational and communication costs and improve the security, chaotic map has been studied in-depth and treated as a good solution. Recently, Liu et al proposed a chaos-based 2-party key agreement protocol and demonstrated that it can defend denial-of-service attack and replay attack. We found, however, it cannot resist off-line password-guessing attack, and it also has some other security flaws. In this paper, we propose an improved chaos-based 2-party key agreement protocol. The results prove that the protocol can solve the threats of off-line password-guessing attack and other security flaws in the security proof section. What is more, performance analysis shows that the computational cost of the improved protocol is lower than Liu et al protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2015, Lee proposed time stamp-based and nonce-based password authenticated key agreement protocols based on the Chebyshev chaotic map to enhance the security of relevant schemes. However, in this paper, we demonstrate that Lee's protocols are vulnerable to user impersonation and stolen verifier attacks. To overcome these security problems, we thus provide an improved version using a smart card. Security analysis and comparisons show that the proposed protocol is more secure and maintains better performance. Furthermore, we perform a formal verification of the proposed protocol using the widely accepted AVISPA tool for error detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To provide mutual authentication and communication confidentiality between mobile clients and servers, numerous identity-based authenticated key agreement (ID-AKA) protocols were proposed to authenticate each other while constructing a common session key. In most of the existing ID-AKA protocols, ephemeral secrets (random values) are involved in the computations of the common session key between mobile client and server. Thus, these ID-AKA protocols might become vulnerable because of the ephemeral-secret-leakage (ESL) attacks in the sense that if the involved ephemeral secrets are compromised, an adversary could compute session keys and reveal the private keys of participants in an AKA protocol. Very recently, 2 ID-AKA protocols were proposed to withstand the ESL attacks. One of them is suitable for single server environment and requires no pairing operations on the mobile client side. The other one fits multi-server environments, but requires 2 expensive pairing operations. In this article, we present a strongly secure ID-AKA protocol resisting ESL attacks under mobile multi-server environments. By performance analysis and comparisons, we demonstrate that our protocol requires the lowest communication overhead, does not require any pairing operations, and is well suitable for mobile devices with limited computing capability. For security analysis, our protocol is provably secure under the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two-factor user authentication scheme allows a user to use a smart card and a password to achieve mutual authentication and establish a session key between a server and a user. In 2012, Chen et al. showed that the scheme of Sood et al. does not achieve mutual authentication and is vulnerable to off-line password guessing and smart card stolen attacks. They also found that another scheme proposed by Song is vulnerable to similar off-line password guessing and smart card stolen attacks. They further proposed an improved scheme. In this paper, we first show that the improved scheme of Chen et al. still suffers from off-line password guessing and smart card stolen attacks, does not support perfect forward secrecy, and lacks the fairness of session key establishment. We then propose a new security-enhanced scheme and show its security and authentication using the formal verification tool ProVerif, which is based on applied pi calculus. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authenticated key agreement protocols play an important role for network-connected servers to authenticate remote users in Internet environment. In recent years, several authenticated key agreement protocols for single-server environment have been developed based on chaotic maps. In modern societies, people usually have to access multiple websites or enterprise servers to accomplish their daily personal matters or duties on work; therefore, how to increase user's convenience by offering multi-server authentication protocol becomes a practical research topic. In this study, a novel chaotic map-based anonymous multi-server authenticated key agreement protocol using smart card is proposed. In this protocol, a legal user can access multiple servers using only a single secret key obtained from a trusted third party, known as the registration center. Security analysis shows this protocol is secure against well-known attacks. In addition, protocol efficiency analysis is conducted by comparing the proposed protocol with two recently proposed schemes in terms of computational cost during one authentication session. We have shown that the proposed protocol is twice faster than the one proposed by Khan and He while preserving the same security properties as their protocol has. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tripartite key agreement protocols enable three users to share a common and secure secret key by exchanging some information in a public channel. In this paper, we introduce the first attribute-based tripartite key agreement protocol, which is a kind of identity-based tripartite key agreement protocols, which the identities consist of descriptive attributes. Also, we propose an extended security model for these protocols and prove the security of our protocol in the random oracle model.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An authenticated group key agreement protocol allows participants to agree on a group key that will be subsequently used to provide secure group communication over an insecure network. In this paper, we give a security analysis on a pairing-free identity-based authenticated group key agreement because of Islam et al. We show that the protocol of Islam et al. cannot satisfy the minimal security requirements of the key agreement protocols. We propose an efficient pairing-free identity-based authenticated group key agreement for imbalanced mobile network. The proposed protocol can be implemented easily for practical application in mobile networks as it is free from bilinear. Under the difficulty of the InvCDH and CDH we demonstrate that the proposed protocol provides perfect forward secrecy, implicit key authentication and the dynamic functionality. As compared with the group key agreement protocols for imbalanced mobile network, the proposed protocol provides stronger security properties and high efficiency. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY Next generation network is a convergence of networks such as 2G/3G, WLAN as well as the recently implemented Long Term Evolution networks. Future mobile devices will switch between these different networks to maintain the connectivity with end servers. However, to support these heterogeneous environments, there is a need to consider a new design of the network infrastructure, where currently closed systems such as 3G will have to operate in an open environment. Security is a key issue in this open environment; after authenticating the mobile terminal to access the network, there is a requirement for service-level mechanisms to protect the session between the mobile terminal and the remote service provider. Furthermore, because mobile terminals switch between networks of different characteristics in terms of coverage, quality of service and security, there is a need for reassessing the security of the same session over the different networks to comply with the changes at the network level due to the mobility. Therefore, this paper introduces a service-level authentication and key agreement protocol to secure the session between the mobile terminal and the end server. The proposed protocol considers user mobilities in a heterogeneous environment and reassesses the session's security level in case of handover. The proposed protocol has been verified using formal methods approach based on the well-established Casper/FDR compilers. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY Recently, Chang et al. proposed an authentication and key agreement protocol for satellite communications, and they claimed that their scheme could withstand various attacks. However, in this paper, we will show that their scheme is vulnerable to the denial of service attack and the impersonation attack. Moreover, we also point out that the adversary could compute the session key through the intercepted message. The analysis shows the scheme of Chang et al. is not secure for practical applications. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY A fault-tolerant group key agreement is an essential infrastructure for Internet communication among all involved participants; it can establish a secure session key no matter how many malicious participants exit simultaneously in an effort to disrupt the key agreement process. Recently, Zhao et al. proposed an efficient fault-tolerant group key agreement protocol named efficient group key agreement that can resist denial-of-service attacks, reply attacks, man-in-middle attacks, and common modulus attacks; it can also preserve forward secrecy with lower computational cost than previous protocols. We show that it is still vulnerable to active attacks by malicious participants and modify the corresponding security weakness adaptively. Furthermore, we propose an efficient fault-tolerant group key agreement based on a binary tree structure and enhance it to a dynamic setting where participants can leave or join the group arbitrarily according to their preferences with instant session key refreshment. Additionally, our session key refreshment is based on secure key updating to protect forward/backward confidentiality and is resistant to active/passive attacks. The performance analysis shows that our proposed protocol has lower computational cost and little additional communication cost exploiting dynamic setting. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To circumvent using of multiple single servers, the theory of multiserver communication exists and numerous authentication protocols put forward for providing secure communication. Very recently, Amin-Biswas proposes bilinear pairing-based multiserver scheme by describing some security pitfalls of Hsieh-Leu protocol and claims that it is secured against related security threats. However, this paper claims that Amin-Biswas protocol is still susceptible to off-line identity and password guessing attack, user untraceability attack, and server masquerading attack. The cryptographic protocol should be attacks-free for real-time application. To achieve attacks-free security, we put forward smart card-based multiserver authentication protocol by using the concept of bilinear pairing operation. The formal method strand space model has been used to prove the correctness of the proposed scheme. Additionally, rigorous security analysis ensures pliability of common security threats. The performance and security features of our scheme are also compared with that of the similar existing schemes. The comparison results show that our protocol achieves more security features with less complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]