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Reflection attacks are one of the most intimidating threats organizations face. A reflection attack is a special type of distributed denial-of-service attack that amplifies the amount of malicious traffic by using reflectors and hides the identity of the attacker. Reflection attacks are known to be one of the most common causes of service disruption in large networks. Large networks perform extensive logging of NetFlow data, and parsing this data is an advocated basis for identifying network attacks. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of NetFlow data containing 1.7 billion NetFlow records and identified reflection attacks on the network time protocol (NTP) and NetBIOS servers. We set up three regression models including the Ridge, Elastic Net and LASSO. To the best of our knowledge, there is no work that studied different regression models to understand patterns of reflection attacks in a large network. In this paper, we (a) propose an approach for identifying correlations of reflection attacks, and (b) evaluate the three regression models on real NetFlow data. Our results show that (a) reflection attacks on the NTP servers are not correlated, (b) reflection attacks on the NetBIOS servers are not correlated, (c) the traffic generated by those reflection attacks did not overwhelm the NTP and NetBIOS servers, and (d) the dwell times of reflection attacks on the NTP and NetBIOS servers are too small for predicting reflection attacks on these servers. Our work on reflection attacks identification highlights recommendations that could facilitate better handling of reflection attacks in large networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of reliable and real-time communication technology is an absolute necessity for the advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Messaging protocols such as MQTT, AMQP, and HTTP are frequently used for communication with resource-constrained IoT devices. However, choosing a suitable and effective messaging protocol presents a daunting challenge for organizations, as it depends on the specific characteristics and messaging requirements of the IoT system. Therefore, it is crucial to have a comprehensive understanding of three established messaging protocols, such as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), and the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), to appropriately apply them in practical projects. In this paper, information technology solutions are provided for a chain of solar farms to improve harvest productivity, facilitate warning notifications, and enable remote control. Subsequently, a detailed comparative analysis is performed, considering various interconnected criteria, to gain valuable insight into the strengths and limitations of these protocols. The results show that MQTT and AMQP play a role in enhancing overall efficiency and speed within the framework of our suggested photovoltaic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we focus on real-time anomaly detection using the gated graph neural network (GGNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) algorithms for the most commonly used network protocols of HTTP and TELNET. In a network, the flow of the various protocols is determined by their respective roles. Each protocol consists of options with individual tasks, and protocols are processed based on these tasks. Therefore, when analyzing flow, a unique repetitive pattern emerges according to the flow and mission. Accordingly, when an anomaly signal is involved, the pattern shows different characteristics from the existing pattern. This study identifies the flow of input and output values based on the correlation between the options defined at each port, whereby the correlation is analyzed, and the detection accuracy of the anomaly signal is determined using the GGNN and LSTM algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate an accuracy of 99.36% for GGNN and 89.46% for LSTM in detecting network anomalies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federated learning (FL) enables participants to collaboratively train machine and deep learning models while safeguarding data privacy. However, the FL paradigm still has drawbacks that affect its trustworthiness, as malicious participants could launch adversarial attacks against the training process. Previous research has examined the robustness of horizontal FL scenarios under various attacks. However, there is a lack of research evaluating the robustness of decentralized vertical FL and comparing it with horizontal FL architectures affected by adversarial attacks. Therefore, this study proposes three decentralized FL architectures: HoriChain, VertiChain, and VertiComb. These architectures feature different neural networks and training protocols suitable for horizontal and vertical scenarios. Subsequently, a decentralized, privacy-preserving, and federated use case with non-IID data to classify handwritten digits is deployed to assess the performance of the three architectures. Finally, a series of experiments computes and compares the robustness of the proposed architectures when they are affected by different data poisoning methods, including image watermarks and gradient poisoning adversarial attacks. The experiments demonstrate that while specific configurations of both attacks can undermine the classification performance of the architectures, HoriChain is the most robust one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicular Internet of Things (VIoT) refers to integrating Internet of Things (IoT) technology into the transportation sector, specifically vehicles. It aims to enhance transportation safety, efficiency, and sustainability by using connected devices and real-time data exchange between vehicles, road infrastructure, and transportation management systems. RFID can provide valuable insights into the functioning and performance of vehicles, enabling the development of intelligent transportation systems and contributing to the growth of the VIoT. To secure essential driving data tag location, data privacy, and road safety are the primary concerns in the VIoT system. An attacker can perform a variety of attacks on the tag and compromise its privacy through the wireless channel between it and the reader. To ensure secure communication for the various application of the VIoT system, An RFID-based protocol is proposed, which is referred to as UPSRVNet (Ultralightweight, Privacy preserved, and Secure RFID-based authentication protocol for VIoT Networks). The proposed protocol guarantees secure authentication in VIoT networks using ultralightweight, privacy-preserving RFID tags by substituting bit formation and right-shift rotation for high-computing operations like hash functions and encryption/decryption algorithms. It also reduces RFID tags' storage and communication overhead and aims to secure the driver's location, personal information, and resistance from known attacks. As per the experiment result, the proposed UPSRVNet protocol showed a significant reduction in communication overhead between tag and reader, that is 50%, and the storage cost on the tag is also reduced by 33.33% compared to existing protocols. Due to this, the certification and authentication processes may be performed quickly. The protocol ensured the security requirements by informal analysis using the Scyther tool. A comprehensive analysis of the proposed protocol reveals its substantial advantages over the existing protocol concerning computation complexity, communication efficacy, and storage expenditure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of small office and home office routers has brought convenience, but it also caused many security issues due to vulnerabilities. Black-box fuzzing through network protocols to discover vulnerabilities becomes a viable option. The main drawbacks of state-of-the-art black-box fuzzers can be summarized as follows. First, the feedback process neglects to discover the missing fields in the raw message. Secondly, the guidance of the raw message content in the mutation process is aimless. Finally, the randomized validity of the test case structure can cause most fuzzing tests to end up with an invalid response of the tested device. To address these challenges, we propose a novel black-box fuzzing framework called MSLFuzzer. MSLFuzzer infers the raw message structure according to the response from a tested device and generates a message segment list. Furthermore, MSLFuzzer performs semantic, sequence, and stability analyses on each message segment to enhance the complementation of missing fields in the raw message and guide the mutation process. We construct a dataset of 35 real-world vulnerabilities and evaluate MSLFuzzer. The evaluation results show that MSLFuzzer can find more vulnerabilities and elicit more types of responses from fuzzing targets. Additionally, MSLFuzzer successfully discovered 10 previously unknown vulnerabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world's first five-agent network, also called Wuxing network in ancient China, had been fully established in the second century BC. Surprisingly, the key to cracking the operation of Wuxing network is the golden ratio, the world's most astonishing number originating from ancient Greece. Wuxing network is composed of five agents located on the vertices of a pentagon such that adjacent agents cooperate with each other, while spaced-apart agents oppose each other. Although it was proposed more than 2000 years ago, it is still an unparalleled network operation protocol. This article reveals the role of the golden ratio in the balance and stability of Wuxing network, and demonstrates how to detect the golden ratio experimentally in Wuxing electronic circuits and in Wuxing formation flight of drones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, network energy assesses the capacity of a node to convey messages to others. In most cases, network energy is created when two nodes interact with one another. If a node is part of the same network as the node it is connecting with, then it will be able to make an inter-network energy connection with the node it is meeting. In the case that this does not take place, there will be an accumulation of energy within the part of the network that is facing the node. A node with higher inter-network energy is considered suitable for forwarding. The energy optimisation is achieved using efficient identification of source and destination pairs. This work has considered two scenarios, i.e. lossless transmission and lossy transmission, for our experiments and evaluated the detection probability. The performance of the proposed PPM is evaluated in terms of delivery ratio, overhead and hops count performance measures. When the buffer size is set to 100 MB, PPM delivers 59% of messages with message overhead of 750 and it has a hop count of 2, which is comparable to the state-of-the-art methods. With lengthy lifetimes of IOT networks, PPM is capable of giving higher performance while maintaining the privacy of network. The detection probability for the lossy observations model is applied to a 10-node, 20-node, 30-node and 40-node IoT network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many previous studies showed that some nodes should be in a sleeping state while the traffic is high. These nodes can wake up periodically to transmit data while they have data to transmit. The system throughput will be increased while each node can change between wake-up and sleeping states periodically. If a node can estimate the active rate and wake up at the optimal time, the collision probability decreases. This study proposes a Q-learning-based distributed queuing medium access control (QL-based DQMAC) protocol for Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. In the proposed QL-based DQMAC, we derive the optimal number of contention IoT nodes. Each node calculates the active rate by itself through the Q-learning algorithm. Then, each node determines whether it will be active or in sleeping mode in the next contention period according to the active rate. Finding the optimal IoT nodes in each contention period decreases the probability of collision. The energy consumption due to the contention and delay for MAC contention is reduced owing to the lower number of contentions. Protocol comparison with other DQMAC protocols shows that the proposed QL-based DQMAC protocol achieves higher performance in IoT networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 802.11ah standard is a new energy-efficient, wireless networking protocol which allows thousands of indoor and outdoor devices to be connected to the same access point. The Centralized Authentication Control (CAC) method, described in the standard, enables up to 8000 stations to be authenticated and associated with the same access point. A baseline implementation of the CAC method has been reported; however, it suffers from a few limitations. In this paper, an efficient methodology is proposed to minimize the CAC method's association time. The proposed methodology allows the association of a large number of stations by predicting the size of the network followed by selecting the best step size that will enable fast association between the access point and the stations of the network. The methodology consists of three stages. The first stage provides a baseline implementation of the 802.11ah standard, while the second stage eliminates the effect of too large or too small step sizes. The third stage finds the optimal step size and step repeat for each network size and predicts network size based on queue size. The performance of the proposed methodology is evaluated and compared in terms of total association time, number of total trials and percentage of ineffective trials. The methodology outperforms the baseline implementation by achieving a 30% reduction in the total association time, 30% reduction in the total number of trials and 45% reduction in the total number of ineffective trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network function virtualization provides programmable in-network middlewares by leveraging virtualization technologies and commodity hardware and has gained popularity among all mainstream network device manufacturers. Yet it is challenging to apply coverage-guided fuzzing, one of the state-of-the-art vulnerability discovery approaches, to those virtualized network devices, due to inevitable integrity protection adopted by those devices. In this paper, we propose a coverage-guided fuzzing framework NDFuzz for virtualized network devices with a novel integrity protection bypassing method, which is able to distinguish processes of virtualized network devices from hypervisors with a carefully designed non-intrusive page global directory inference technique. We implement NDFuzz atop of two black-box fuzzers and evaluate NDFuzz with three representative network protocols, SNMP , DHCP and NTP , on nine popular virtualized network devices. NDFuzz obtains an average 36% coverage improvement in comparison with its black-box counterparts. NDFuzz discovers 2 0-Day vulnerabilities and 1 1-Day vulnerability with coverage guidance while the black-box fuzzer can find only one of them. All discovered vulnerabilities are confirmed by corresponding vendors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blockchain technology with its inherent security features revolutionizes the field of distributed networks and has become one of the significant areas of research. To preserve the security features and to maintain its global state, consensus mechanisms are very essential and are performed by a set of peers in the underlying network called miners. Therefore, the miners need to be a trusted entity and their trustworthiness plays a vital role in preserving the security of the asset ledger. To ensure trusted nodes perform the consensus process, fuzzy-based trust models are robust and effective. Therefore, fuzzy inference system-based trusted consensus mechanism (FISTCON) is proposed as an effective security solution resulting in a fast and secure consensus process. The proposed scheme works in two phases. In phase 1, a fuzzy-based trust model that includes transaction history and trust feedback (F-THTF trust model) to identify trusted miners for consensus is proposed. In phase 2, a fuzzy-based effective practical byzantine fault tolerance (F-EpBFT) consensus protocol with an optimized broadcasting mechanism to decrease the communication overhead is proposed. The proposed work is implemented in the Hyperledger fabric framework, and the outcomes are thoroughly analyzed to prove the efficiency of the proposed scheme in a variety of scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing specifically on sensing devices with restricted resources, heterogeneous internet of things (HIoT) is an attractive scenario for IoT networks. Nonetheless, the very nature of wireless channels in these networks has given rise to a series of security challenges, which need to be considered while developing authentication protocols. Here, we scrutinized Yu and Park's, Kumari et al.'s, and Ostad-sharif et al.'s protocols and illustrated their weaknesses against key compromise attacks, insider attacks, and violation of anonymity. Furthermore, for heterogeneous IoT contexts, a lightweight and secure authentication and key agreement protocol for heterogeneous IoT environments is presented. Concerning the restricted resources of sensing devices, an attempt is made to provide an efficient HIoT-based authentication protocol to enhance network security and performance. The gateway as a trusted authority with the maximum workload and sensing devices with the highest restrictions on resources are considered in the suggested protocol. As a result, the user bears the brunt of the workload in the individual session. The Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic is used to validate the proposed protocol, and the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool is utilized to demonstrate resilience to existing active attacks. Simulation findings and performance assessment revealed that our protocol improved communication overheads by up to 110%, computation overheads by up to 83%, and sensing device maximum storage capacity by up to 51%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is to analyze the bottleneck problems of NoC in many more applications like multi-processor communication, computer architectures, and network interface processors. This paper aims to research the advantages and disadvantages of low congestion protocols on highway environments like multiple master multiple slave interconnections. A long-term evolution and effective on-chip connectivity solution for secured, congestion aware and low power architecture is emerged for Network-on-Chip (NoC) for MCSoC. Applications running simultaneously on a different chip are often exchanged dynamically on the chip network. Of-course, in general on chip communication, resources mean that applications may interact with shared resources to influence each other's time characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a protocol for entanglement generation in the quantum internet that allows a repeater node to use n-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) projective measurements that can fuse n successfully entangled links, i.e., two-qubit entangled Bell pairs shared across n network edges, incident at that node. Implementing n-fusion, for n ≥ 3, is in principle not much harder than 2-fusions (Bell-basis measurements) in solid-state qubit memories. If we allow even 3-fusions at the nodes, we find—by developing a connection to a modified version of the site-bond percolation problem—that despite lossy (hence probabilistic) link-level entanglement generation, and probabilistic success of the fusion measurements at nodes, one can generate entanglement between end parties Alice and Bob at a rate that stays constant as the distance between them increases. We prove that this powerful network property is not possible to attain with any quantum networking protocol built with Bell measurements and multiplexing alone. We also design a two-party quantum key distribution protocol that converts the entangled states shared between two nodes into a shared secret, at a key generation rate that is independent of the distance between the two parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of independent spanning trees (ISTs) has scientific applications in fault-tolerant requirement in network protocols and secure message distributions. Most of the designs of ISTs are for those interconnection networks with vertex symmetric property, implying that one can find ISTs rooted on a designated vertex, and, by the vertex symmetry property of the given network, hence have solved the ISTs problem on any arbitrary vertex. The existence of asymmetry makes the ISTs problem even harder than its symmetric counterpart. In this paper, we propose two linear time algorithms that solved ISTs rooted at an arbitrary vertex of WK-recursive networks and WK-recursive pyramids separately. The performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated both, analytically and experimentally, in terms of tree heights and average distances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few technologies have been mired in hype more than blockchain, which is the underlying peer-to-peer network protocol for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Given the technology's emphasis on purported "immutable ledgers" and trust-less sharing models, there has been a great deal of interest in applying blockchain to democratic reforms. From localized decision-making to national-scale voting systems, blockchain has spurred a surge of interest in how democracy might "get a software update". While significant research exists on socio-technological imaginaries (perceptions) and potential applications (experiments) within the Global North, few studies have looked at more dynamic contexts, particularly Central Asia. In light of the violence surrounding elections in October 2020 and previous revolutions against the country's central government, the status of democracy in Kyrgyzstan is, at best, fragile and, at worst, non-existent. This article explores alternative futures scenarios for localized, blockchain-driven governance futures in Kyrgyzstan and concludes with a proposal for deeper investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantum network protocols offer new functionalities such as enhanced security to communication and computational systems. Despite the rapid progress in quantum hardware, it has not yet reached a level of maturity that enables execution of many quantum protocols in practical settings. To develop quantum protocols in real world, it is necessary to examine their performance considering the imperfections in their practical implementation using simulation platforms. In this paper, we consider several quantum protocols that enable promising functionalities and services in near-future quantum networks. The protocols are chosen from both areas of quantum communication and quantum computation as follows: quantum money, W-state based anonymous transmission, verifiable blind quantum computation, and quantum digital signature. We use NetSquid simulation platform to evaluate the effect of various sources of noise on the performance of these protocols, considering different figures of merit. We find that to enable quantum money protocol, the decoherence time constant of the quantum memory must be at least three times the storage time of qubits. Furthermore, our simulation results for the w-state based anonymous transmission protocol show that to achieve an average fidelity above 0.8 in this protocol, the storage time of sender's and receiver's particles in the quantum memory must be less than half of the decoherence time constant of the quantum memory. We have also investigated the effect of gate imperfections on the performance of verifiable blind quantum computation. We find that with our chosen parameters, if the depolarizing probability of quantum gates is equal to or greater than 0.05, the security of the protocol cannot be guaranteed. Lastly, our simulation results for quantum digital signature protocol show that channel loss has a significant effect on the probability of repudiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solid-state microwave systems offer strong interactions for fast quantum logic and sensing but photons at telecom wavelength are the ideal choice for high-density low-loss quantum interconnects. A general-purpose interface that can make use of single photon effects requires < 1 input noise quanta, which has remained elusive due to either low efficiency or pump induced heating. Here we demonstrate coherent electro-optic modulation on nanosecond-timescales with only 0.1 6 − 0.01 + 0.02 microwave input noise photons with a total bidirectional transduction efficiency of 8.7% (or up to 15% with 0.4 1 − 0.02 + 0.02 ), as required for near-term heralded quantum network protocols. The use of short and high-power optical pump pulses also enables near-unity cooperativity of the electro-optic interaction leading to an internal pure conversion efficiency of up to 99.5%. Together with the low mode occupancy this provides evidence for electro-optic laser cooling and vacuum amplification as predicted a decade ago. Faithful conversion of quantum states between electrical circuits and light requires adding less than one input noise photon during conversion. Here, the authors demonstrate this based on coherent electro-optic upconversion with a transduction efficiency of 15%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical requirement in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) is its ability to automatically discover existing services as well as their locations. Several solutions have been proposed in various communication domains which could be classified into two categories: (1) directory based, and (2) directory-less. The former is efficient but suffers from the amount of control messages being exchanged to maintain all directories in an agile environment. However, the latter approach attempts to reduce the amount of control messages to update directories, by simply sending broadcast messages to discover services; which is also a non-desirable approach in MANETs. This research work builds on top of our prior work (Nazeeruddin et al. in IFIP/IEEE international conference on management of multimedia networks and services, Springer, Berlin, 2006)) where we introduced a new efficient protocol for service discovery in MANETs (MSLD); a lightweight, robust, scalable, and flexible protocol which supports node heterogeneity and dynamically adapts to network changes while not flooding the network with extra protocol messages—a major challenge in today's network environments, such as Internet of Things (IoT). Extensive simulations study was conducted on MSLD to: (1) initially evaluate its performance in terms of latency, service availability, and overhead messages, then (2) compare its performance to Dir-Based, Dir-less, and PDP protocols under various network conditions. For most performance metrics, simulation results show that MSLD outperforms Dir-Based, Dir-less, and PDP by either matching or achieving high service availability, low service discovery latency, and considerably less communication overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fuzzing test is able to discover various vulnerabilities and has more chances to hit the zero-day targets. And ICS(Industrial control system) is currently facing huge security threats and requires security standards, like ISO 62443, to ensure the quality of the device. However, some industrial proprietary communication protocols can be customized and have complicated structures, the fuzzing system cannot quickly generate test data that adapt to various protocols. It also struggles to define the mutation field without having prior knowledge of the protocols. Therefore, we propose a fuzzing system named ICPFuzzer that uses LSTM(Long short-term memory) to learn the features of a protocol and generates mutated test data automatically. We also use the responses of testing and adjust the weight strategies to further test the device under testing (DUT) to find more data that cause unusual connection status. We verified the effectiveness of the approach by comparing with the open-source and commercial fuzzers. Furthermore, in a real case, we experimented with the DLMS/COSEM for a smart meter and found that the test data can cause a unusual response. In summary, ICPFuzzer is a black-box fuzzing system that can automatically execute the testing process and reveal vulnerabilities that interrupt and crash industrial control communication. Not only improves the quality of ICS but also improves safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things (IoT) plays a prominent role in health-care of patients, which assist the physicians and patients through the assistance in effective decision-making and additionally, in the medical field, IoT plays a significant role in real-time monitoring of the patients. Even though the data provided by the IoT devices ensure the effective decision-making, the data is susceptible to the network attacks. Thus, the paper proposes an authentication protocol for enabling the secure data transmission in IoT based on three functions, such as encryption function, hashing function, and adaptive XOR function. The proposed authentication protocol is named as, Adaptive XOR, hashing and Encryption Key Exchange (AXHE) protocol, which is the combination of the functions, such as encryption function, hashing function, and adaptive XOR function. The protocol ensures the security in the communication through two successive phases, such as registration and authentication of the user, where the user name, password, public keys, private keys, and security factor are employed. The authentication is progressed as seven levels and whenever the security factor matches, the user is authenticated and the communication continues. The analysis of the proposed AXHE is performed using 50 and 100 nodes in the presence of DOS and black hole attacks, which acquires the detection rate, throughput, and detection delay of 0.3859, 0.32, and 6.535 s, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine-checked proofs of security are important to increase the rigour of provable security. In this work we present a formalised theory of two fundamental two party cryptographic primitives: Σ -protocols and Commitment Schemes. Σ -protocols allow a prover to convince a verifier that they possess some knowledge without leaking information about the knowledge. Commitment schemes allow a committer to commit to a message and keep it secret until revealing it at a later time. We use CryptHOL (Lochbihler in Archive of formal proofs, 2017) to formalise both primitives and prove secure multiple examples namely; the Schnorr, Chaum-Pedersen and Okamoto Σ -protocols as well as a construction that allows for compound (AND and OR) Σ -protocols and the Pedersen and Rivest commitment schemes. A highlight of the work is a formalisation of the construction of commitment schemes from Σ -protocols (Damgard in Lecture notes, 2002). We formalise this proof at an abstract level using the modularity available in Isabelle/HOL and CryptHOL. This way, the proofs of the instantiations come for free. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quantum secure multiparty computation is one of the important properties of secure quantum communication. In this paper, we propose a quantum secure multiparty summation (QSMS) protocol based on (t, n) threshold approach, which can be used in many complex quantum operations. To make this protocol secure and realistic, we combine both the classical and quantum phenomena. The existing protocols have some security and efficiency issues because they use (n, n) threshold approach, where all the honest players need to perform the quantum multiparty summation protocol. We however use a (t, n) threshold approach, where only t honest players need to compute the quantum summation protocol. Compared to other protocols our proposed protocol is more cost-effective, realistic, and secure. We also simulate it using the IBM corporation's online quantum computer, or quantum experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classical or traditional steganography aims at hiding a secret in cover media such as text, image, audio, video or even in network protocols. Recent research has improved this approach called distributed steganography by fragmenting the secret message and embedding each secret piece into a distinct cover media. The major interest of this approach is to make the secret message detection extremely difficult. However, these file modifications leave fingerprints which can reveal a secret channel to an attacker. Our contribution is a new steganography paradigm transparent to any attacker and resistant to the detection and the secret extraction. Two properties contribute to achieve these goals: the files do not undergo any modification while the distribution of the secret in the multi-cloud storage environment allows us to hide the existence of the covert channel between the communicating parties. Information's are usually hidden inside the cover media. In this work, the covert media is a pointer to information. Therefore the file carries the information without being modified and the only way to access it is to have the key. Experiments show interesting comparison results with remarkable security contributions. The work can be seen as a new open direction for further research in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless body sensor network (WBSN) provides a sophisticated monitoring environment without disturbing the daily subject activity. The WBSN increases the mobility of the subject without being restricted inside the hospital environment. However, resources like limited power and transceiver capability limit the movement of the subject. Providing an energy-efficient scheme will provide extended network lifetime and limits the frequency of recharging the battery. This subject condition modelled as a Markov model with normal and abnormal states. The transition from the normal state to abnormal state is predicted through Markov process. The sensor nodes monitoring the subject status remade to sleep state during the reasonable condition, and during the abnormal state, all the nodes awakened. This sleep–wake methodology with priority queuing model is studied in this paper and implemented in MATLAB. The priority queuing model provides a novel solution for time-critical applications. The proposed TCEM-PQM provides reduced time delay when compared to PQM routing protocol. The time delay reduced for critical applications and the policy suits monitoring environment and healthcare applications. The proposed model is simulated with Markov model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new region-based energy-conscious sink movement (RESM) is presented to enhance the lifetime of the heterogeneous wireless sensor network using stable election protocol. The movement is based on the total energy of the individual regions of the entire sensing field. The sink always moves to the centre of the lowest nonzero energy region, which is the main contribution of this work. Based on the residual energy of the regions, RESM enhances the network lifetime. Simulation results prove that this approach prolongs the network lifetime as compared to other sink movement methods such as continuous movement in the periphery and the centre as well as other existing algorithms such as LEACH, SEP, and MSE. The lifetime improvement over LEACH, SEP, and MSE is 22%, 5%, and 3%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

APTEEN is a typical routing protocol for wireless sensor networks, but when clustering, cluster heads are randomly selected, which makes it easy to select nodes with low residual energy as cluster heads, thus forming network holes. At the same time, in multi hop transmission, the cluster head near the sink node is overloaded due to forwarding a large amount of data. Aiming at these problems, this paper introduces PSO algorithm and proposes ADCH-EPE-APTEEN routing protocol. In order to make the particle swarm optimization algorithm more suitable for routing protocol, this paper first proposes DCA-PSO based on particle swarm optimization algorithm. DCA-PSO uses the classification adaptive change inertia weight for different states of particles in the optimization process. At the same time, dynamic learning factor is used to improve the influence of particle experience and other particle experience on convergence speed and to improve the optimization accuracy and speed of the algorithm. Secondly, when APTEEN routing protocol is networked, the cluster head is selected by DCA-PSO, in which the residual energy of nodes, the location of nodes, and the energy distribution around nodes are fully taken into consideration. Thirdly, considering the distance between nodes and the sink node, the residual energy and the energy distribution around nodes, a front area is set up in the cluster located in the upper half and the assistant cluster head is selected in the front area through the DCA-PSO algorithm. The simulation results show that the DCA-PSO algorithm can significantly improve the search speed and precision compared with the PSO algorithm. Compared with APTEEN routing protocol, the ADCH-EPE-APTEEN routing protocol can reduce the network energy consumption rate and extend network lifetime by 173%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the next-generation heterogeneous wireless networks, designing authentication protocols that meet the demand of mobile users/applications is a challenge. This paper proposes authentication and re-authentication protocols for 4G wireless networks, in particular, LTE-Advanced (LTE-A), WLAN, and WiMAX-Advanced (WiMAX-A) interworking architecture. The proposed protocols are applicable to 5G networks. With the consideration of the existing standard authentication protocols, a new set of authentication and re-authentication protocols has been reinvented to provide fast and secure handovers (HO) in the current 4G and the next 5G networks. The proposed authentication protocols can be invoked when the users perform a vertical HO (between different networks) for the first time, whereas the re-authentication protocols can be invoked when the users perform a horizontal HO (within the same network domain). These protocols provide an efficient method to protect user identity and reduce the burden on the authentication server (AS) during the sequential handovers. The results of the analytical model show that the proposed protocols achieve better performance than standard and other protocols. The reduction of handover cost, handover delay, and energy consumption in the proposed protocols reaches up to 22%, 44%, and 17%, respectively. In addition, the verification tools show that the proposed protocols are secure, dependable, and prevent all types of authentication and secrecy attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the complexity of industrial control systems and the diversity of protocols in networks, it is difficult to build intrusion detection models based on network characteristics and physical modeling. In order to build a better flow model without additional knowledge, we propose an intrusion detection method based on the content of network packets. The construction of the model is based on the idea of ZOE method. The similarity between flows is calculated through the sequential coverage algorithm, the normal flow model is established by multi-layered clustering algorithm, and the Count-Mean-Min Sketch is used to store and count the flow model. By comparing the unknown flow with the constructed normal flow model, we achieve the intrusion detection of industrial control system (ICS). The overall experimental results on 4 ICS datasets show that the improved method can effectively improve the detection rate and reduce the false-positive rate. The detection rate reached 96.7% on average, and the false-positive rate reached 0.7% on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software Defined Networks (SDN) has been attracting researchers, scientist, and technology experts from both academia and industry to enhance the current ICT stakes and networking paradigm. The beauty of SDN is the division of Control and Data planes and make it easy for the engineers to modify the networking protocols without visiting onsite devices. Similarly, smart cities concept has been coined recently, where a plethora of smart devices will be connected and providing tons of services to the citizens, officials, and governmental departments. The Internet of Things (IoT) plays a vital role in guaranteeing such services. Few efforts have been made to merge SDN and IoT with the sole purpose of efficient Data retrieval and achieve remotely configurable networks. In this paper, we explicitly define the Internet of Software Defined Things architecture and bring it to Smart Cities as a use-case. Our 3-tier architecture consists of Data Collection, Data Management, and Application levels that are further connected via two intermediate levels working on SDN principles. Followed by the potentials of SDN and IoT for Smart Cities, we evaluated our proposed architecture using Spark and GraphX with Hadoop Ecosystem and the results shows that efficient transfer of Data over SDN for real-time processing is achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-stabilization in distributed systems is a technique to guarantee convergence to a set of legitimate states without external intervention when a transient fault or bad initialization occurs. Recently, there has been a surge of efforts in designing techniques for automated synthesis of self-stabilizing algorithms that are correct by construction. Most of these techniques, however, are not parameterized, meaning that they can only synthesize a solution for a fixed and predetermined number of processes. In this paper, we report a breakthrough in parameterized synthesis of self-stabilizing algorithms in symmetric networks, including ring, line, mesh, and torus. First, we develop cutoffs that guarantee (1) closure in legitimate states, and (2) deadlock-freedom outside the legitimate states. We also develop a sufficient condition for convergence in self-stabilizing systems. Since some of our cutoffs grow with the size of the local state space of processes, scalability of the synthesis procedure is still a problem. We address this problem by introducing a novel SMT-based technique for counterexample-guided synthesis of self-stabilizing algorithms in symmetric networks. We have fully implemented our technique and successfully synthesized solutions to maximal matching, three coloring, and maximal independent set problems for ring and line topologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Model generation is a problem complementary to theorem proving and is important for fault analysis and debugging of formal specifications of security protocols, programs and terminological definitions, for example. This paper discusses several ways of enhancing the paradigm of bottom-up model generation, with the two main contributions being a new range-restriction transformation and generalized blocking techniques. The range-restriction transformation refines existing transformations to range-restricted clauses by carefully limiting the creation of domain terms. The blocking techniques are based on simple transformations of the input set together with standard equality reasoning and redundancy elimination techniques, and allow for finding small, finite models. All possible combinations of the introduced techniques and a classical range-restriction technique were tested on the clausal problems of the TPTP Version 6.0.0 with an implementation based on the SPASS theorem prover using a hyperresolution-like refinement. Unrestricted domain blocking gave best results for satisfiable problems, showing that it is an indispensable technique for bottom-up model generation methods, that yields good results in combination with both new and classical range-restricting transformations. Limiting the creation of terms during the inference process by using the new range-restricting transformation has paid off, especially when using it together with a shifting transformation. The experimental results also show that classical range restriction with unrestricted blocking provides a useful complementary method. Overall, the results show bottom-up model generation methods are good for disproving theorems and generating models for satisfiable problems, but less efficient for unsatisfiable problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nodes in original S-MAC protocol just can visit the channel in the scheduling and listening stage. The working schema may result in data latency and high conflict. To solve those above problems, we split scheduling duty into multiple micro-duties. By using different micro-dispersed contention channel, the sensor nodes reduce the collision probability of the data. Aiming at detecting the fixed duty cycle in S-MAC protocol, on the basis of the micro-duty and buffer queue length, this paper presents an adaptive duty cycle and back-off algorithm. While using different back-off algorithm with different duty cycles, sensor node Fast-Binary Exponential Backoff and Conflict-Avoid-Binary exponential Backoff algorithm separated are applied to reduce data latency further reduce the conflict probability. Combining both of the improvements, we propose a modified S-MAC protocol. Comparing the performance of S-MAC protocol and Division-Multiple Access-Media Access Control (MDA-SMAC) protocol on the NS-2 simulation platform, the results show that MDA-SMAC protocol performs better in terms of energy consumption, latency, and effective throughput than S-MAC protocol [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial bee colony or ABC is an interesting meta-heuristic algorithm designed to solve various continuous optimization problems. However, it cannot be directly applied to solve discrete problems such as clustering of sensor nodes in the wireless sensor networks (WSNs). For this purpose, in this paper, we present a chaotic discrete version of the ABC algorithm, denoted as chaotic discrete ABC (CDABC). By using the CDABC algorithm, we propose a novel clustering protocol that can be used to organize WSNs into multiple levels of clusters to reduce their energy consumption. The main objective of this protocol is to improve WSN's lifetime by selecting appropriate nodes as cluster heads in each clustering level and reducing the energy costs of the inter-cluster and intra-cluster communications. Extensive simulations results validate the effectiveness of the proposed CDABC-based multi-level clustering protocol in improving the network lifetime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has revolutionized the field of smart applications. In order to improve the performance of WSNs, refinement of clustering and routing protocols can make a vast difference. Existing classical and evolutionary optimization technique-based protocols have high computational complexity since clustering and routing problems are solved separately. Moreover, these protocols suffer from hot-spot problem due to uneven formation of clusters. In this paper, we propose a multi-level clustering protocol (MLCP) for energy-efficient data gathering in large-scale WSNs. Additionally, a hierarchical clustering architecture is designed in MLCP to jointly solve the problems of clustering and routing. Further, for the purpose of cluster head selection, a hybrid dragonfly algorithm-based particle swarm optimization technique is proposed which combines the exploration and exploitation capabilities of dragonfly algorithm and particle swarm optimization, respectively. MLCP considers intra-cluster distance, node degree and inter-cluster distance for the formation of scalable, load-balanced and energy-efficient clusters. To demonstrate the full potential of MLCP, network simulations have been carried out in diverse network conditions. MLCP has shown up to 90% increase in the network lifetime and an improvement of 19.36% in conservation of energy in comparison with the competent protocols. The comparison of obtained results with state-of-the-art clustering protocols clearly establishes the superiority of MLCP in achieving load-balanced, scalable and energy-efficient clustering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a retrial queueing model for random access protocols arising in local area networks such as carrier sense multiple access networks. In our model, one channel is shared among multiple nodes. Each node accesses the channel according to a Poison process and the holding time of the channel is exponentially distributed. Blocked users join the orbit and retry to access again after an exponentially distributed time depending on the number of retrials so far. As the model under study is not amenable for exact analysis, we focus on its performance in the light traffic regime. In particular, we describe a fast algorithm for calculating the terms in the Maclaurin series expansion of various performance measures, the arrival rate being the independent parameter of the expansion. We illustrate our approach by various numerical examples and verify the accuracy of the light traffic approximation by means of simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a user-private information retrieval (UPIR) scheme, a set of users collaborate to retrieve files from a database without revealing to observers which participant in the scheme requested the file. To achieve privacy, users retrieve files from the database in response to anonymous requests posted to message spaces; assuming that each message space can be accessed by a subset of the participants in the scheme. Privacy with respect to the database is easily achieved, but privacy with respect to coalitions of other users within the scheme is sensitive to the choice of incidence structure determining which users can access each message space. Earlier schemes were based on pairwise balanced designs and symmetric designs, and involved at most one step of message passing to retrieve a file. We propose a new class of UPIR schemes based on generalised quadrangles (GQs), which need up to two steps of message passing in each file retrieval. We introduce a new message passing protocol in which messages are encrypted. Even using this protocol, previously proposed schemes are compromised by finite coalitions of users. We construct a family of GQ-UPIR schemes which maintain privacy with high probability even when O(n1/2-ϵ) users collude, where n is the total number of users in the scheme. We also show that a UPIR scheme based on any family of generalised quadrangles is secure against coalitions of O(n1/4-ϵ) users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coherence protocol presented in this work, denoted MOSAIC, introduces a new approach to face the challenges of complex multilevel cache hierarchies in future many-core systems. The essential aspect of the proposal is to eliminate the condition of inclusiveness through the different levels of the memory hierarchy while maintaining the complexity of the protocol limited. Cost reduction decisions taken to reduce this complexity may introduce artificial inefficiencies in the on-chip cache hierarchy, especially when the number of cores and private cache size is large. Our approach trades area and complexity for on-chip bandwidth, employing an integrated broadcast mechanism in a directory structure. In energy terms, the protocol scales like a conventional directory coherence protocol, but relaxes the shared information inclusiveness. This allows the performance implications of directory size and associativity reduction to be overcome. As it is even simpler than a conventional directory, the results of our evaluation show that the approach is quite insensitive, in terms of performance and energy expenditure, to the size and associativity of the directory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of vehicles (IoV) is a branch of the internet of things (IoT) which is used for communication among vehicles. As vehicular nodes are considered always in motion, hence it causes the frequent changes in the topology. These changes cause major issues in IoV like scalability, dynamic topology changes, and shortest path for routing. Clustering is among one of the solutions for such type of issues. In this paper, the stability of IoV topology in a dynamic environment is focused. The proposed metaheuristic dragonfly-based clustering algorithm CAVDO is used for cluster-based packet route optimization to make stable topology, and mobility aware dynamic transmission range algorithm (MA-DTR) is used with CAVDO for transmission range adaptation on the basis of traffic density. The proposed CAVDO with MA-DTR is compared with the progressive baseline techniques ant colony optimization (ACO) and comprehensive learning particle swarm optimization (CLPSO). Numerous experiments were performed keeping in view the transmission dynamics for stable topology. CAVDO performed better in many cases providing minimum number of clusters according to current channel condition. Considerable important parameters involved in clustering process are: number of un-clustered nodes as a re-clustering criterion, clustering time, re-clustering delay, dynamic transmission range, direction, and speed. According to these parameters, results indicate that CAVDO outperformed ACO-based clustering and CLPSO in various network settings. Additionally, to improve the network availability and to incorporate the functionalities of next-generation network infrastructure, 5G-enabled architecture is also utilized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An industrial control system combined with IT is not a special thing; however, cyber security in this field does not mature. Therefore, vulnerability analysis techniques for protocols used in this field are clearly needed. In this paper, we propose a novel test case generation technique for a fuzzing test that can be used for various industrial control system protocols. The proposed fuzzing test is designed for generating a cross-field fuzzing test case because of field dependencies, a characteristic of industrial control system protocols. Additionally, we focus on multilayer testing because the weaknesses of lower layer protocols are inherited by upper layer protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Progression of the internet technologies has led to the emergence of internet of things (IoT). One of the familiar deployment of IoT is through radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. In recent times, RFID based systems are one of the most widely spread applications for tagging and keep tracking purposes in IoT deployment. This is due to their powerful features compared to their counterparts of similar techniques such as barcodes. In contrast, radio-frequency identification systems suffer from various attacks and security threats. The wireless channel used for communication is responsible for the majority of these vulnerabilities. In this paper, we propose a new radio-frequency identification authentication protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) to eliminate these vulnerabilities. In addition, we use elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key agreement protocol to generate a temporary shared key used to encrypt the later transmitted messages. Our protocol achieves a set of security properties likes mutual authentication, anonymity, confidentiality, forward security, location privacy, resistance of man-in-the-middle attack, resistance of replay attack and resistance of impersonation attack. We implement our proposed protocol in real RFID system using Omnikey smartcard reader (Omnikey 5421) and NXP Java smartcards (J3A040). Implementation results shows that our proposed protocol outperform in term of time complexity as compared to other similar protocols and requires less number of operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Thing (IoT) provides a wide range of services for human convenience by linking the connectivity from different platform devices. The IoT service holds an unlimited potentials, because the knowledge extracted from the big data can be applied to a huge variety service areas such as smart homes, smart buildings and transportations as well. There are lots of IoT service platforms developed by several companies. Except some platforms, most of them have been only focused on the connectivity. As a result, they have some limits for supporting an intelligent service. For the reason, we design the intelligent IoT common service platform architecture and implement the basic operations in this paper. We also develop the IoT Broker for providing the connectivity as well. We hereby verify the usefulness of the proposed service platform by implementing the IoT service on the platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Runtime validation of wireless protocol implementations cannot always employ direct instrumentation of the device under test (DUT). The DUT may not implement the required instrumentation, or the instrumentation may alter the DUT’s behavior when enabled. Wireless sniffers can monitor the DUT’s behavior without instrumentation, but they introduce new validation challenges. Losses caused by wireless propagation prevent sniffers from perfectly reconstructing the actual DUT packet trace. As a result, accurate validation requires distinguishing between specification deviations that represent implementation errors and those caused by sniffer uncertainty. We present a new approach enabling sniffer-based validation of wireless protocol implementations. Beginning with the original protocol monitor state machine, we automatically and completely encode sniffer uncertainty by selectively adding non-deterministic transitions. We characterize the NP-completeness of the resulting decision problem and provide an exhaustive algorithm for searching over all mutated traces. We also present practical protocol-oblivious heuristics for searching over the most likely mutated traces. We have implemented our framework and show that it can accurately identify implementation errors in the face of uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the extended versions of selected papers from the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Runtime Verification (RV 2016) held in Madrid, Spain, in September 2016. Runtime verification encompasses all aspects of monitoring and analysis of hardware, software, and system executions in general. Runtime verification techniques are lightweight dynamic techniques to assess and enforce correctness, reliability, and robustness during system execution. These techniques are significantly more powerful and versatile than conventional testing, and more practical than exhaustive formal verification (at the price of incomplete coverage). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology enables unique identification and tracking of the tag attached to an object. Widespread usage of RFID technologies in supply chain management (SCM) has drawn attention for developing security protocols to protect data stored in the tag. In SCM objects move from one place/department to another, the same RFID readers are not used throughout the supply chain. So, current reader delegates its access right to the new reader. When an object is moved inside the organization, delegation takes place between the readers. Many of the existing delegation protocols use trusted third party (TTP), which is practically difficult to incorporate or requires a keyed hash function/symmetric key encryption to be executed in the RFID tag, whereas tags are computationally intensive. Our work aims to simplify the delegation process by removing the usage of a TTP as well as eliminating reader-to-reader communication which avoids fixing the reader sequence in advance. Also, it preserves the security and privacy requirements for cloud-based applications. The proposed protocol withstands many attacks like tracing attack, tag impersonation attack, reader impersonation attack, and privacy attack. The proposed protocol not only resists the above-mentioned attacks but also achieves mutual authentication, anonymity property, and forward/backward secrecy. The proposed protocol is analyzed formally using GNY logic, which ensures that the protocol achieves mutual authentication. Performance analysis is carried out and it shows that our protocol is relatively better than the existing related schemes with respect to tag computation and communication cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An opportunistic network is a wireless ad hoc network that has frequently intermittent connectivity due to nodes’ mobility. These spare, unpredictable networks aim to solve the prolonged delay paths by a store-carry-forward scheme. It is difficult to determine the appropriate nodes to forward the messages since there are few opportunistic contacts. The nodes might decide based on the obtained data of the network as a guide to reach a destination. The aforementioned technique is not helpful in case the rate of change in the network topology is higher than the rate of data gathering due to usage restrictions and uncertain available information/knowledge of the future contacts. In this paper, to cope with the challenges imposed by the un-deterministic environment, a risk assessment strategy is considered to evaluate the short and long-term impact of each decision to find the optimal node/paths. This routing scheme can take advantage of the unanticipated connection to make the routing more flexible in short time and with less buffer usage. Our proposed risk assessment algorithms that are based on MALP are mixed with the knowledge about buffer management and network capacity. The prioritized messages to be disseminated as well as better decision to take a risk are the main contributions of this paper. Moreover, the self-adaptive threshold, distributed PID controller, is considered to tackle different threshold levels for each node individually. Numerical results prove that the proposed method drastically increases the delivery ratio and also minimizes the risk of exceeding resource consumption and packet loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is used in many applications such as access control, transport, ticketing and contactless payment. The full-fledged High Frequency (HF) tags are the most popular RFID tags for these applications that require relatively high cost security operations. However, these HF tags are threatened by many passive attacks such as eavesdropping, desynchronization and ElectroMagnetic (EM) Side Channel Attacks (SCA). In this article, we propose the implementation and the validation of a full-fledged HF tag architecture using an enhanced mutual authentication protocol. This is achieved using a FPGA platform. Security analysis against Electromagnetic Attack (EMA) and desynchronization attacks on the original protocol are presented. Then enhancements at the protocol level are proposed to overcome these attacks. The implementation of these security enhancements shows a low overhead (+22 LUTs) compared to previous existing security hardware solutions (+598 LUTs). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present a secure and efficient transaction protocol that provides the anonymity and can detect the double spending. The proposed payment system is based on the ElGamal encryption scheme, the ElGamal signature scheme and the ElGamal blind signature protocol. We show that our transaction protocol is secure and efficient. We give the definitions of unlinkability and unforgeability of our security model and we prove that the proposed transaction protocol is unforgeable and satisfies the unlinkability property. We show that the proposed system is more efficient, in terms of the computation and communication cost, than the compared payment systems (Eslami et al. in Electron Commer Res Appl 10:59-66, 2011; Chen et al. in Electron Commer Res Appl 10:279-287, 2011; Liu et al. in Proceedings of second European PKI workshop: research and applications. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 3545, pp 206-214, 2005 and Chen et al. in Electron Commer Res Appl 10:673-682, 2011) for a customer who withdraws and spends an e-coin and for the merchant who verifies an electronic coin. Also, the proposed e-cash system is useful for the electronic transactions when the connection between the bank and the merchant is not available during the payment protocol. This means a less bandwidth of the payment protocol and then increases the speed of the electronic transaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an electronic payment system based on authenticated key exchange protocol. In this scheme, an effective owner tracing mechanism is introduced to identify a malicious customer. Moreover, every participant can mutually authenticate each other. The security of the scheme is mainly based on the hardness assumption of computational Diffie-Hellman and discrete logarithm problems. Furthermore, the security of our scheme is simulated in the automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications tool and proved that the scheme is secure against replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]