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Electronic healthcare based on medical sensors is now developing to incorporate a significant amount of the Internet of Things (IoT) to communicate between sensors and intended recipients. The key requirements in this domain are to exchange messages safely and to provide confidentiality during communication. Designing and implementing an authentication strategy is essential for resolving security concerns, but it is also challenging to work with constrained computing and processing resources during group communication. Standard one-to-one authentication models do not consider the scalability of resource-limited nodes, which is a vital factor to deal with. However, group authentication presents a unique concept for IoT nodes that verify group members concurrently. The conventional group authentication methods based on the IoT are vulnerable to security risks and cannot defend against attacks like replay attacks, forgery attacks, or unauthorized key distribution by the group manager. In this paper, we propose a dynamic and provable group authentication scheme (GAS) based on a secret sharing scheme that can withstand the dishonest behavior of group managers. We introduced a key updating scenario with a provable group authentication model for dynamic node leaving and joining. Our system complies with the requirements for secrecy and accuracy, and based on security analysis, it is resistant to attacks, as mentioned earlier. Performance analysis and security proof show that our approach performs well in terms of computation cost for group members while maintaining security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Internet‐of‐Things (IoT) based applications have shifted from centralized infrastructures to decentralized ecosystems, owing to user data's security and privacy limitations. The shift has opened new doors for intruders to launch distributed attacks in diverse IoT scenarios that jeopardize the application environments. Moreover, as heterogeneous and autonomous networks communicate, the attacks intensify, which justifies the requirement of trust as a key policy. Recently, blockchain‐based IoT solutions have been proposed that address trust limitations by maintaining data consistency, immutability, and chronology in IoT environments. However, IoT ecosystems are resource‐constrained and have low bandwidth and finite computing power of sensor nodes. Thus, the inclusion of blockchain requires an effective policy design regarding consensus and smart contract environments in heterogeneous IoT applications. Recent studies have presented blockchain as a potential solution in IoT, but an effective view of consensus and smart contract design to meet the end application requirements is an open problem. Motivated by the same, the survey presents the integration of suitable low‐powered consensus protocols and smart contract design to assess and validate the blockchain‐IoT ecosystems. We present blockchain‐IoT's emerging communication and security aspects with performance issues of consensus protocols, interoperability, and implementation platforms. A case study of a smart contract‐based blockchain‐driven ecosystem is presented with a comparative analysis of mining cost and latency, which shows its suitability in real‐world setups. We also highlight attacks on blockchain IoT, open issues, potential findings, and future directions. The survey intends to drive novel solutions for future consensus and safe, smart contract designs to support applicative IoT ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming an essential aspect of digital healthcare information; the goal is to monitor various health parameters regularly to make healthcare management more efficient and convenient. Gateway devices can broadcast/multicast messages securely to sensors or intended recipients to guarantee the confidentiality of medical readings in the healthcare environment utilizing IoT sensors. In this context, designing and executing a key management framework is critical for the healthcare environment, and working with limited computing and processing capacities is also challenging. The literature on IoT key management is inclined toward centralized solutions, provides solutions with heavy computation and communication costs, and partially addresses resource-constrained devices that guarantee forward and backward secrecy in the healthcare domain. This paper constructs a group key management scheme with node joining and leaving scenarios to provide forward and backward secrecy focusing on lightweight computation. We use the concept of one-way accumulation for secret message exchange by combining elliptic curve cryptography. We designed a scheme that refreshed the established group key as the group's size grows or shrinks, and the approach also applies to classical ciphers conveniently for the number of message exchanges for healthcare nodes. To demonstrate innovation in our method, we mathematically proved the soundness of our session key management scheme for the network model, and simulation findings show that the method is feasible as the processing and communication costs are reduced compared to related schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is a standard routing protocol for the Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs). It is a part of the IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) protocol stack. Features such as energy-efficient mechanisms and availability of the secure modes of operations make RPL suitable for the constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Hence, the majority of IoT applications rely on RPL for data communication. However, routing security in RPL-based IoT networks is a significant concern, motivating us to study and analyze routing attacks and suggested countermeasures against them. To this end, we provide a comprehensive survey on the state-of-the-art security threats and their corresponding countermeasures in RPL-based IoT networks. Based on our study, we propose a novel classification scheme that uses a mapping between RPL attacks and their countermeasure techniques to the RPL control messages used to develop these techniques. Furthermore, we provide an in-depth statistical analysis that includes analysis of routing attacks through the RPL control messages, distribution of various mitigation techniques as per the method used, RPL control messages involved in the mitigation techniques, and details of the tools used by multiple researchers. In the end, we highlight some open challenges and future research opportunities on this topic. We believe that this survey will be beneficial to researchers and practitioners working in the area of RPL security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along with significant benefits to the end-users, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology also brings unprecedented security challenges. IoT requires many embedded and resource-constrained devices that are usually deployed in an insecure and remote environment. This is where a White-box (WB) attack paradigm, where the attacker has complete control over the execution environment, comes into the picture. Accordingly, the possible capture of these devices makes the entire built-in cryptosystem visible to the adversary. Thus, the adversary gains complete control over the system and can potentially hinder the used cryptographic implementation. A White-box cryptographic (WBC) encryption scheme is employed to counter such WB attacks. Accordingly, we provide a scheme for hiding the private key used in the Elliptic curve encryption scheme considering the WB attack context. Precisely, we use Residue Number System (RNS)-based lookup tables to hide the private key. To show the practicality of the proposed scheme, we deploy it over a widely adopted Message Queuing Telemetry Transport for Sensor Networks (MQTT-SN) protocol. Further, we discuss the WB security goals and analyze the security and performance of the proposed scheme using the Cooja simulator. We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach by comparing it with the traditional Elliptic curve encryption scheme over parameters like end-to-end delay, network throughput, average power consumption, and computational time. The obtained simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides a consistent computational cost and network efficiency, which is practical in deployments demanding a higher level of security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of things (IoT) is renowned for being a massive revolution led by business leaders and researchers. Routing protocol for low-power and lossy network (RPL) is a standardized protocol that serves the routing need of the IPv6-based low-power and lossy networks, which are the significant enablers of the IoT technology. Despite its many outstanding features, RPL offers very low protection against different routing attacks. In this respect, we mainly emphasize on the sybil attack. Specifically, we focus on three different types of sybil attack on a realistic smart home network topology. Considering the involvement of resource-constraint devices, we propose and evaluate a novel decentralized countermeasure against these attacks. The proposed countermeasure is based on a hybrid approach that involves the use of the geographical location of the nodes and a trust value-based parent selection procedure. Along with this, we use specially configured monitoring nodes that are responsible for the detection of the malicious attacker node(s). Further, we use RPL's multi-instance property to integrate the proposed decentralized architecture into the exiting RPL protocol. We implement the proposed countermeasure in Cooja, the Contiki operating system-based network simulator. The results obtained through our experiments validate the practicality of the proposed countermeasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]