Search

Security and efficiency are crucial considerations for Long Term Evolution for Railway (LTE-R) which bears real-time transmission of train control information for future high-speed railway. In this article, we first analyze the vulnerabilities of LTE-R access authentication protocol, and then propose a proxy signature based authentication scheme to enhance the security of LTE-R without sacrificing efficiency. The proposed scheme consists of three main security mechanisms: a novel Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem based Certificateless Proxy Signature (ECC-CLPS) designed for authentication security, a hash-based puzzle introduced to defend against denial of service (DoS) attack and a key pre-gxeneration mechanism used to improve the efficiency of fast handover authentication. The security analysis and performance simulation show that our scheme has advantages over existing LTE-based authentication schemes in terms of security, functionality, computation and communication costs. Moreover, the authentication requirements for security and efficiency in different LTE-R communication scenarios are fully considered, which makes our scheme more suitable for the access authentication in the future LTE-R based high-speed railway.

Internet of Things (IoT) enables terminal devices connecting with the internet and provides various intelligent applications by analyzing devices data. As a typical IoT technique, edge computing provides a three-tier architecture to reduce communications and improve efficiency. Specifically, edge nodes are responsible for collecting and aggregating device data, and then send processed results to the cloud for subsequent analysis. However, the data aggregation function will compromise the privacy of device data. In this paper, we proposed an efficient privacy-preserving multi-dimensional data aggregation scheme for IoT, called PMDA. The scheme uses the Chinese remainder theorem to design a homomorphic encryption method that encryptes a multiple-dimensional small integer vector into one ciphertext and keeps linear homomorphic properties per dimension. Combining with the signature mechanism and the batch verification method, the scheme guarantees non-repudiation of device data and enhance verification efficiency at edge nodes. Through theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve correctness, privacy, authentication, and integrity. After performance evaluation, we demonstrate that our scheme is superior to other schemes in terms of computation and communication costs. In particular, as the message dimension increases, our scheme computation costs almost a tenth of others at the 80-bits security level.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a framework of various services and smart technologies that mutually communicate information between mobile devices and users or just between devices with the help of Internet connectivity. The dramatic progression of IoT helps numerous network applications and communication technologies to introduce state-of-the-art communication models for enabling interaction among mobile server, clients, and various other smart entities. Now-a-days, online mobile services have gained huge attention by providing ample convenience to the distant users. However, it is necessary to secure the information, being exchanged among mobile clients and server. Therefore, a large number of authentication protocols have been presented but majority of them are unsuitable to fulfill novel security requirements and standards. Moreover, they are incompatible for the IoT environment due to higher computation and communication complexity. Consequently, there is a dire need of developing an adequate, reliable, and cost-effective authentication protocol. In this article, we introduce a novel identity-based key agreement protocol using the puncturable pseudorandom functions for mobile clients in the IoT environment. The proposed PSK-MC protocol enables two mobile clients to accomplish mutual authentication via server. The proposed protocol is evaluated formally and informally to determine its security strength. The formal security analysis is presented using the widely used random oracle model. Moreover, all the cryptographic operations used at mobile client side are executed on a mobile device, while the operations used at the server side are implemented on a desktop machine to get the experimental results to determine computation cost. The performance analysis reveals the fact that our protocol is comparatively better than related protocols by exhibiting least communication and computation overhead.

As an emerging technology, cloud-based Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) can significantly improve the efficiency of transportation systems by alleviating traffic congestion and optimizing resource management. However, since the information transmitted in VANET is distributed in an open-access environment, security and privacy are now becoming vital concerns, especially when attackers own more and more resources. Recently, many tamper-proof devices (TPD)-based authentication schemes have been proposed to tackle the above-mentioned challenges, while most of them are dependent on ideal TPDs with very strong security assumptions. Moreover, when the aggregate signature verification fails, these schemes can do nothing but discard the aggregate signature completely, which makes them impractical in VANET. To address the above concerns, we propose a more realistic TPD-based authentication scheme with privacy-preserving features for cloud-based VANET. Specifically, the off-line self-updating method is utilized to update the data in TPD periodically to resist side-channel attacks. Furthermore, an efficient fine-grained error location algorithm is designed to quickly detect all invalid signatures within a problematic aggregate signature scenario. Our performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing ones in terms of security, computation delay and communication overhead, thus more suitable in practical cloud-based VANET environment.

The continuous innovation and progression in hardware, software and communication technologies helped the expansion and accelerated growth in Internet of Things based drone networks (IoD), for the devices, applications and people to communicate and share data. IoD can enhance comfort in many applications including, daily life, commercial, and military/rescue operations in smart cities. However, this growth in infrastructure smartness is also subject to new security threats and the countermeasures require new customized solutions for IoD. Many schemes to secure IoD environments are proposed recently; however, some of those were proved as insecure and some degrades the efficiency. In this article, using elliptic curve cryptography, we proposed a new authentication scheme to secure the communication between a user and a drone flying in some specific flying zone. The security of the proposed scheme is solicited using formal Random oracle method along with a brief discussion on security aspects provided by proposed scheme. Finally, the comparisons with some related and latest schemes is illustrated.

Recent technological evolution in the Internet of Things (IoT) age supports better solutions to magnify the management of the power quality and reliability concerns, and imposes the measures of a smart grid. In smart grid environment, a smart meter needs to securely access the services from a service provider via insecure channel. However, since the communication is via public channel, it imposes various security threats by an adversary. To deal with this, in this article we design a new anonymous signature-based authenticated key exchange scheme for IoT-enabled smart grid environment, called AAS-IoTSG. The dynamic smart meter addition phase is also permissible in AAS-IoTSG after initial deployment. The security of AAS-IoTSG has been tested rigorously using formal security analysis under the real-or-random (ROR) model which is one of the broadly-accepted standard random oracle models, formal security verification under the broadly-used automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) tool and also using informal security analysis. Finally, an exhaustive comparative study unveils that AAS-IoTSG supports better security and functionality features and requires less communication and computation overheads as compared to the existing state-of-art authentication mechanisms in smart grid systems.

The radical progress in web services has drained more attraction towards escalating the security of several applications that serve and interact with the Internet users. In order to get authenticated from servers, the users must disclose their secret information to the server such as password and username so that they can access distinct applications on the Web. Due to distinct security attacks, such secret credentials should be discouraged from being revealed. Moreover, it is vibrant to secure the systems from known attacks. In contrast to all known security attacks, the insider attack is considered devastating because the privileged insiders of a system can violate the secret credentials, which may lead towards irrecoverable damage to both the system and the user. Therefore, to ensure the security of the system from insider attacks, different protocols have been proposed. Very recently, Rajamanickam et al. “Insider attack protection: Lightweight password-based authentication techniques using ECC,” presented novel authentication scheme for insider attack protection. They claimed that their protocol not only prevents insider attack but it is also immune to several known security attacks. This comment discloses the non-trivial weaknesses in the authentication phase between client and server. We have identified that the adversary can successfully impersonate the entities communicating with each other through this protocol. Moreover, their protocol fails to offer forward and backward secrecy. Consequently, we suggest possible solution for attack resilience.

In wireless sensor network (WSN), the secure communication and exchange of confidential information between nodes is a challenging task. To eliminate the security flaws WSN adopts authenticated cryptography mechanisms. The authenticated key agreement protocol guarantees the reality of the users and negotiates the shared session key. In the past years, the two-way authentication scheme has been proved as a better approach for secure and energy efficient communication over Bin and Balls Authentication scheme, Timed Efficient Stream Loss-Tolerant Authentication scheme and so on. However, the recently established identity based protocols are associated with the flaws like inadequate security, high computation cost and latency in communication to a larger extent. The issues related to cost is raised because of the pairing and mapping functionalities in the state-of-the-art techniques. This paper proposes a pairing-free identity based two-party authenticated key agreement protocol based on hexadecimal extended ASCII Elliptic Curve Cryptography. The proposed scheme is developed in an adequate manner with the increased security strength and reduced cost. The security of this protocol is tightened by the extended ASCII code representation of the identity of the user. The performance of this protocol is compared with the Bin and Balls Authentication scheme, Loss-Tolerant Authentication scheme and recently proposed Ramachandran and Shanmugam scheme that show our scheme outperforms these three authentication schemes.

Constraint Application Protocol (CoAP), an application layer based protocol, is a compressed version of HTTP protocol that is used for communication between lightweight resource constraint devices in Internet of Things (IoT) network. The CoAP protocol is generally associated with connectionless User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and works based on Representational State Transfer architecture. The CoAP is associated with Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocol for establishing a secure session using the existing algorithms like Lightweight Establishment of Secure Session for communication between various IoT devices and remote server. However, several limitations regarding the key management, session establishment and multi-cast message communication within the DTLS layer are present in CoAP. Hence, development of an efficient protocol for secure session establishment of CoAP is required for IoT communication. Thus, to overcome the existing limitations related to key management and multicast security in CoAP, we have proposed an efficient and secure communication scheme to establish secure session key between IoT devices and remote server using lightweight elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The proposed ECC-based CoAP is referred to as ECC-CoAP that provides a CoAP implementation for authentication in IoT network. A number of well-known cryptographic attacks are analyzed for validating the security strength of the ECC-CoAP and found that all these attacks are well defended. The performance analysis of the ECC-CoAP shows that our scheme is lightweight and secure.

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables all objects to connect to the Internet and exchange data via different emerging technologies, which makes the intelligent identification and management a reality. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), as a crucial basis of IoT, have been applied in many fields like smart health care and smart transportation. With the development of WSNs, data security has attracted more and more attention, and user authentication is a popular mechanism to ensure the information security of WSNs. Recently, many authentication mechanisms for wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) have been proposed, but most of the protocols cannot achieve the features of local password change and forward secrecy while resisting stolen smart card attack. To enhance the security based on previous work, an ECC-based secure three-factor authentication protocol with forward secrecy for WMSN is proposed in this paper. It utilizes a fuzzy commitment scheme to handle the biometric information. Meanwhile, fuzzy verifier and honey_list techniques are used to solve the contradiction of local password verification and mobile device lost attack. The security of our protocol is evaluated by provable security, Proverif tool, and information analysis. Besides, the comparisons with the relevant protocols are given, and the results indicate that our protocol is robust and secure for WMSN systems.

In the advanced technological world, vehicular communications are used in numerous business and safety applications for smart traffic management. With the help of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, users can transfer substantial information directly to the reachable vehicles. Generally, the movement of vehicles on the highway is faster than crossroads, thus, to communicate securely and efficiently, a robust vehicular communication system is required. Therefore, a number of message dissemination protocols have been designed by the researchers, but distinct interests (i.e, storage cost, high communication overhead, more execution time, and security threats) are sought in these systems, which lead toward unreliability for on-the-fly communication. Very recently, Limbasiya-Das ( Ieee System Journal , pp 1937–9234, 10.1109/JSYST.2019.2932807) introduced a hash-based secure and efficient V2V data dissemination protocol to transfer significant information at the receiver end. Limbasiya-Das claimed the security of their protocol against numerous security attacks. However, in this comment, we highlight the loopholes of Limbasiya-Das protocol and show that their protocol is vulnerable to impersonation attack. Moreover, it has irrelevant usage of timestamp and does not offer user's anonymity. In addition, it lacks message confidentiality because an adversary can determine and view the messages exchanged among the legitimate vehicles by intercepting the messages disseminated over public channel. Finally, we provide probable remedy to mitigate the deficiencies of Limbasiya-Das protocol.

COVID-19 is a global infectious disease that can be easily spread by the contiguity of infected people. To prevent from COVID-19 and reduce its impact in sustainable smart cities, the global research communities are working relentlessly by harnessing the emerging technologies to develop the safest diagnosis, evaluation, and treatment procedures, and Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the pioneers among them. IoT can perform a pivotal role to diminish its immense contagious rate by suitable utilization in emerging healthcare IoT applications in sustainable smart cities. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to outline a survey of the emerging healthcare IoT applications practiced in the perspective of COVID-19 pandemic in terms of network architecture security, trustworthiness, authentication, and data preservation followed by identifying existing challenges to set the future research directions. The salient contributions of this work deal with the accomplishment of a detailed and comprehensive literature review of COVID-19 starting from 2019 through 2021 in the context of emerging healthcare IoT technology. In addition, we extend the correlated contributions of this work by highlighting the weak aspects of the existing emerging healthcare IoT applications, security of different network layers and secure communication environment followed by some associated requirements to address these challenges. Moreover, we also identify future research directions in sustainable smart cities for emerging healthcare IoT utilization in the context of COVID-19 with the most productive results and least network implementation costs.

User authentication is the process that is exercised millions of times around the globe by using different techniques and methods. The most prominent way of authentication is alphanumerical password forms that have been used for decades. Authorized access is becoming a challenging issue because of the introduction of modern technologies. In addition, traditional alphanumerical passwords have significant security issues, for example, humans forget the combination of keys due to the selection of a difficult key combination. Moreover, when they choose an easy key combination, this helps hackers to crack their passwords easily. Traditional passwords are also vulnerable to several types of attacks, for example, dictionary attack, brute force attack, and malware. To provide an easy and more secure authentication technique, a graphical password has been introduced in this paper for consumer electronic devices, which uses an image or a set of images for authentication. We have categorized the existing graphical password methods into recognition-based, cued-recall-based, pure-recall-based, and hybrid techniques. Due to the limitations of the existing graphical passwords, we have introduced a new technique, named graphical random authentication technique (gRAT), which generates a randomized set of images every time a user tries to authenticate him/herself by maintaining the security and usability at the same time. The gRAT technique is also tested by user-centric evaluation in terms of security, usability, usefulness, and utility, and the experimental results show that the proposed technique is more secure and useful in the real-life authentication applications. Deanship of Scientific Research, King Saud University Scopus

Recently, Ostad-Sharif et al. pointed out the susceptibility of three different authentication schemes themed for telecare medicine/medical information systems to key compromise impersonation attack (KCIA). To further address this issue, they proposed an ECC-based authentication and key generation scheme for healthcare applications. In this paper, we show that Ostad-Sharif et al.'s scheme is not only affected with key compromise impersonation attack but also suffers from a key compromise password guessing attack. Several papers have been published by the researchers by applying KCIA on existing authentication protocols. Before any further move in research in this direction, researchers must contemplate about KCIA. We conclude this article with a rigorous analysis of KCIA along with two questions to ponderon for the research community working in this field.

Identity authentication is a main line of defense for network security, and passwords have long been the mainstream of identity authentication. In the field of password security research, large-scale password datasets have played an important role in the efficiency evaluation of password attack algorithms, the feasibility detection of password strength meters, and the correction of password probability models. However, due to user privacy, timeliness, effectiveness and other factors, it is still very difficult for researchers to obtain real large-scale user plaintext passwords. Based on this, this paper proposes a fast simulative password set generation algorithm based on structure partitioning and string recombination, denoted as SPSR-FSPG. The algorithm uses the probability context-free grammar to model the structure of the password, and constructs a string generation model based on the recurrent neural network to generate different types of strings, so as to learn the character composition of the password in the original dataset. In addition, the model fully considers the user's password reuse and modification behavior. Finally, the method is verified by experiment on six real Chinese and English password sets. The results show that the generation rate of SPSR-FSPG is faster than other algorithms. In terms of true password coverage, the SPSR-FPSG simulative password set is increased by 11.36% and 17.5, respectively, relative to SPPG and PCFG, and is increased by about 122.73% and 130.3%, respectively, compared to OMEN and 4-Markov. And the fit of the Zipf distribution is maintained at a level above 0.95, it is better than 0.9 of SPPG. At the same time, the SPPR-FPSG simulative password set is closer to the real password set in terms of length and character composition.

A vision of the future Internet is introduced in such a fashion that various computing devices are connected together to form a network called Internet of Things (IoT). This network will generate massive data that may be leveraged for entertainment, security, and most importantly user trust. Yet, trust is an imperative obstruction that may hinder the IoT growth and even delay the substantial squeeze of a number of applications. In this survey, an extensive analysis of trust management techniques along with their pros and cons is presented in a different context. In comparison with other surveys, the goal is to provide a systematic description of the most relevant trust management techniques to help researchers understand that how various systems fit together to bring preferred functionalities without examining different standards. Besides, the lessons learned are presented, and the views are argued regarding the primary goal trust which is likely to play in the future Internet. 2018 IEEE. This work was supported by Institute for Information & communications Technology Promotion (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. 2018-0-01411, A Micro-Service IoTWare Framework Technology Development for Ultra small IoT Device). Scopus 2-s2.0-85064274877

The Internet of drones (IoD) is a very useful application of the Internet of things (IoT) and it can help the daily life comfort through various functions including the smart city surveillance. The IoD can enhance the comfort to reach inaccessible and hard to access sites and can save lot of effort, time and cost. However, in addition to traditional threats, the IoD may suffer from new threats and requires customized methods to combat the security weaknesses. Very recently, Wazid et al. proposed a security solution for securing IoD application scenario and claimed its security. However, in this paper we show that their scheme cannot resist stolen verifier and traceability attacks. Moreover, an attacker with access to the verifier, can impersonate any user, drone or server of the system. An enhanced scheme is then proposed to cope with these weaknesses. The security claims of proposed scheme are endorsed by formal and informal security analysis. Moreover, the performance and security comparisons show that proposed scheme completes a cycle of authentication with a slight increase in computation time, but it offers all the required security features as compared with the scheme of Wazid et al.

In an Intelligent Precision Agriculture (IPA), several Internet of Things (IoT) smart devices and drones can be deployed to monitor an agricultural environment. The drones can be further utilized to collect the data from smart devices and send to the Ground Station Server ( G S S ) . However, insecure communication among the smart devices, drones and the G S S make the IoT agriculture environment vulnerable to various potential attacks. For this goal, a new authentication and key management scheme for IoT-enabled IPA, called AKMS-AgriIoT, has been put forward with the private blockchain-based solution. The blocks formed with the encrypted transactions and their respective signatures by the G S S are mined by the cloud servers to verify and add the blocks in the private blockchain center. A detailed security analysis and comparative study reveal that the proposed AKMS-AgriIoT supports better security, and provides more functionality features, less communication costs and comparable computation costs as compared to other relevant schemes. In addition, the blockchain-based implementation on the proposed AKMS-AgriIoT has been also carried out.

As a kind of e-health notion, telemedicine employs telecommunication and information technologies to provide remote clinical health care. Telecare medicine information system (TMIS) is a widely used application nowadays. Through the services provided by such e-health systems, doctors can obtain the variation of patients’ conditions and make treatments quickly and accordingly. Recently, researchers have employed the Chebyshev chaotic maps in the authentication process of TMISs. Unfortunately, many kinds of security weaknesses such as off-line guessing attack, destitution of user anonymity and session key agreement happen in relative work. To overcome the disadvantages, we propose a secure remote authentication scheme employing the chaotic maps. We use the formal proof under random oracle model, and the famous verification tool Proverif to prove the security of the proposed scheme. Besides, informal analysis including ten security properties and performance comparison are shown to supplement the security properties. From the formal proof, we can see that the attacker has a negligible probability to crack the scheme over the active guessing attack. The formal verification demonstrates that our scheme can resist the attackers simulated by the tool Proverif. Moreover, we compare our scheme with several recent schemes, and the comparison results show that our scheme reaches the level of security requirements and also has suitable cost in performance. Thus, it is more applicable to telecare medicineenvironments.