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Security is a primary concern in communication for reliable transfer of information between the authenticated members, which becomes more complex in a network of Internet of Things (IoT). To provide security for group communication a key management scheme incorporating Bilinear pairing technique with Multicast and Unicast key management protocol (BMU-IOT) for decentralized networks has been proposed. The first part of the proposed work is to divide the network into clusters where sensors are connected to and is administered by cluster head. Each sensor securely shares its secret keys with the cluster head using unicast. Based on these decryption keys, the cluster head generates a common encryption key using bilinear pairing. Any sensor in the subgroup can decrypt the message, which is encrypted by the common encryption key. The remaining part focuses to reduce communication, computation and storage costs of the proposed framework and the resilience against various attacks. The implementation is carried out and results are compared with the existing schemes that have given considerably better results. Thus, the lightweight devices of IoT can provide efficiency and security by reducing their overhead in terms of complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protocols for encrypting communications in wireless sensor networks have rarely been addressed from a classical network optimization perspective. An underlying procedure of such protocols, known as key distribution , involves assigning cryptographic keys to sensors, which are then used to encrypt and decrypt transmitted data. In context of maximizing communications security objectives, the combinatorial nature of assigning keys to sensors with limited memory capacities exhibits properties conducive to developing methods for finding optimal key distributions. This work focuses on the q -Composite key distribution/assignment protocol, which requires that two sensors share at least q common keys to securely exchange data. As a means of reducing the likelihood of large-scale information breaches if a small number of keys are compromised, a security objective of maximizing the number of non-redundant (unique) keys assigned to the sensors is considered. It is demonstrated that node (sensor) degrees in a spanning tree, along with their memory capacities, can be used to exactly determine the maximum possible number of non-redundant keys assigned. Leveraging on these properties, our method reduces the problem of assigning a maximum number of keys to that of finding a degree-bounded spanning tree in a network. A polynomial time solution algorithm along with a linear time algorithm for assigning a maximum number of unique keys is introduced. Broadly, the proposed method provides a novel approach for designing, analyzing, or identifying secure key distributions in large-scale networks by using properties of the underlying graphs. • Introduce a graph-based method for finding network encryption strategies. • Efficient algorithm that guarantees a maximum cryptographic key distribution. • There exist cases of key distribution problems that reduce to finding spanning trees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Space–Air–Ground Integrated Network (SAGIN) expands cyberspace greatly. Dynamic network architecture, complex communication links, limited resources, and diverse environments make SAGIN’s authentication and key distribution much more difficult. Public key cryptography is a better choice for terminals to access SAGIN dynamically, but it is time-consuming. The semiconductor superlattice (SSL) is a strong Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) to be the hardware root of security, and the matched SSL pairs can achieve full entropy key distribution through an insecure public channel. Thus, an access authentication and key distribution scheme is proposed. The inherent security of SSL makes the authentication and key distribution spontaneously achieved without a key management burden and solves the assumption that excellent performance is based on pre-shared symmetric keys. The proposed scheme achieves the intended authentication, confidentiality, integrity, and forward security, which can defend against masquerade attacks, replay attacks, and man-in-the-middle attacks. The formal security analysis substantiates the security goal. The performance evaluation results confirm that the proposed protocols have an obvious advantage over the elliptic curve or bilinear pairings-based protocols. Compared with the protocols based on the pre-distributed symmetric key, our scheme shows unconditional security and dynamic key management with the same level performance.

Video command and dispatch systems have become essential communication safeguard measures in circumstances of emergency rescue, epidemic prevention, and control command as data security has become especially important. After meeting the requirements of voice and video dispatch, this paper proposes an end-to-end encryption method of multimedia information that introduces a multiple protection mechanism including selective encryption and selective integrity protection. The method has a network access authentication and service encryption workflow, which implants startup authentication and key distribution into the information control signaling procedure. This method constitutes a key pool with the three-dimensional Lorenz system, the four-dimensional cellular neural network (CNN) system, and the four-dimensional Chen system where the key source system and initial conditions are decided by the plaintext video frame itself. Then, this method optimizes the chaotic sequences to further enhance system security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at the privacy protection problem in the multi-application scenarios of edge computing, two policy-based key distribution protocols were proposed.The proposed protocols are based on the concept of constrained pseudo-random functions to achieve efficient and flexible policy selection.Specifically, based on the GGM pseudo-random number generator, the key distribution protocol with a prefix-predicate is constructed, which can effectively support lightweight and efficient key distribution.Moreover, based on the multilinear pairing, the key distribution protocol with a bit fixing predicate is constructed.This protocol can support flexible and fine-grained strategy selection and is suitable for dynamic and flexible multi-device scenarios in heterogeneous networks.Finally, the security proof of the proposed protocols is presented.

A new design of video stream encryption system is introduced，combined with the interleave technology，which is widely used in wireless communication. This paper provided a new key distribution and management system and a modified Output-Feedback encryption operate mode. The provided method keeps the structure of the transport steam packet, has a low protocol cost and a high level of security, compatible with the AES and SM4 encryption algorithm, thus can be easily implemented in hardware and widely used in wireless image transmission and digital video broadcasting system.

Aiming at the privacy protection problem in the multi-application scenarios of edge computing, two policy-based key distribution protocols were proposed. The proposed protocols are based on the concept of constrained pseudo-random functions to achieve efficient and flexible policy selection. Specifically, based on the GGM pseudo-random number generator, the key distribution protocol with a prefix-predicate is constructed, which can effectively support lightweight and efficient key distribution. Moreover, based on the multilinear pairing, the key distribution protocol with a bit fixing predicate is constructed. This protocol can support flexible and fine-grained strategy selection and is suitable for dynamic and flexible multi-device scenarios in heterogeneous networks. Finally, the security proof of the proposed protocols is presented.

While encryption is powerful at protecting information, it critically relies upon the mystery/private cryptographic key's security. Poor key management would compromise any robust encryption algorithm. In this way, securing information is reduced to the issue of securing such keys from unauthorized access. In this work, KeyShield is proposed, a scalable and quantum-safe key management scheme. KeyShield provides the highest security level as it relies on the impossibility of finding a unique solution to an underdetermined linear system of equations. KeyShield achieves the rekeying using a single broadcast message, called a secure lock, in an open channel rather than pairwise secure channels. Security analyses for a list of attacks are provided, along with a detailed discussion on the quantum-safe feature. KeyShield outperforms state-of-the-art schemes in several aspects, including quantum-resistance, computation cost, message overhead, storage cost, and rekeying delay.

The deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSN) in an untended environment and the openness of the wireless channel bring various security threats to WSN. The resource limitations of the sensor nodes make the conventional security systems less attractive for WSN. Moreover, conventional cryptography alone cannot ensure the desired security against the physical attacks on sensor nodes. Physically unclonable function (PUF) is an emerging hardware security primitive that provides low-cost hardware security exploiting the unique inherent randomness of a device. In this article, we have proposed an authentication and key sharing scheme for the WSN integrating Pedersen’s verifiable secret sharing (Pedersen’s VSS) and Shamir’s secret sharing (Shamir’s SS) scheme with PUF which ensure the desired security with low overhead. The security analysis depicts the resilience of the proposed scheme against different active, passive and physical attacks. Also, the performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme possesses low computation, communication and storage overhead. The scheme only needs to store a polynomial number of PUF challenge-response pairs to the user node. The sink or senor nodes do not require storing any secret key. Finally, the comparison with the previous protocols establishes the dominance of the proposed scheme to use in WSN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the secure multicast communication, data is transmitted in such a manner that only authorized group members are able to receive the data. The main challenging issue in dynamic and secure multicast communication is to design a centralized group key distribution protocol with minimum computation and storages complexity. This paper, proposes a more efficient centralized group key distribution (CGKD) protocol that minimizes the computation cost of key server (KS) during key updating. The computation cost of members is balanced during key recovery. This reduction in computation cost of KS is achieved by performing one addition, one multiplication and one encryption during single member join and one subtraction, one division and one encryption during a single member leave operation. Moreover, the storage complexity of KS is also minimized. Further, this paper also proposes an extended CGKD protocol based on clustered tree which is very scalable and efficient to deal with enormous membership changes. By comparing with existing similar protocols, the proposed protocol has significantly reduced computation and storage complexity of KS while maintaining less and balanced communication overhead of KS and storage load of each group member. The proposed protocol is implemented and tested on key-star and cluster tree based structure. The experimental results show that the proposed protocol is efficient in terms of computational overhead of KS and group members.

The large-scale sharing needs of many enterprises promote the development of cloud storage. While the cloud computing stores the shared files outside the trust domain of the owner, the demands and concerns for file security is arising. In this paper, a Group Key Management Protocol for file sharing on cloud storage (GKMP) is proposed. Faced with network attacks from public channel, a group key generation scheme based on mixed encryption technology is proposed. And a verification scheme is used to prevent shared files from being attacked by the collusion attack of cloud providers' and group members'. Security and performance analyses indicate that the proposed protocol is both secure and efficient for data sharing in cloud computing.

A quantum noise stream cipher (QNSC) is a physical layer encryption technology based on quantum noise. Bit error rate loopback measurement (BER-LM) is a method to measure the BER of a loopback channel and extract channel characteristics. Then, channel characteristics can be extracted, and consensus keys can be obtained through negotiation. In previous studies, encryption and key distribution were implemented in independent channels. In this paper, we propose a scheme that combines these two technologies in a single fiber channel to achieve encrypted transmission and key distribution. We verified a 20 Gbps QPSK coherent optical transmission system with a PSK/QNSC scheme. The results show that by reasonably setting the negotiation bit position, the consensus key could be obtained through negotiation, and the requirements of transmission performance could be met. When the negotiation bit position was set to seven, the Q-factor of the system was nine, which met the error-free condition of the 7% forward error correction (FEC) limit.

We analyse a central broadcast continuous variable quantum key distribution protocol in which a beam produced by a thermal source is used to create a secret key between two parties, Alice and Bob. A beam splitter divides the initial beam into a pair of output beams, which are sent to Alice and Bob, with Eve intercepting Bob’s beam. We investigate the protocol in detail, calculating mutual informations through a pair of analytic methods and comparing the results to the outputs of a Monte Carlo simulation of the protocol. In a lossless system, we find that a lower bound on the key rate remains positive in the protocol under a beam splitter attack, provided Bob receives a nonzero proportion of the beam initially sent to him. This suggests that the thermal state protocol could be used experimentally to produce secure keys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new way of Quantum signature masked authentication, in which both user and certifying authority is needed for generating final signature. Our scheme uses decoy particle to protect key from all the attacks in the transmission process and does not require encryption of each key. The paper also shows that our scheme is protected against impersonation, forgery and outside attack and is more efficient than the other masked schemes existing in quantum cryptography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is a promising method for the emerging Internet of Things. Secure information exchange plays a key role in the application of D2D communication. Considering that the wireless devices are powered by batteries, in this paper, a lightweight secure D2D system is designed by using multiple sensors on mobile devices. Specifically, by leveraging an acceleration sensor equipped in two wireless devices, a lightweight and efficient key distribution scheme for secure D2D communication is proposed. Based on the distributed secure key, an efficient near-field authentication is developed with a speaker and a microphone to determine whether these two devices are physically close; and a secure information exchange scheme with high efficiency, which includes message encryption/decryption and message authentication, is presented over the audio channel and the RF channel. The Extensive experiments are provided to demonstrate that our system can achieve a secure information exchange between two wireless devices with low energy consumption and computing resources.

Key distribution is the foundation for protecting users' privacy and communication security in cloud environment. Information hiding is an effective manner to hide the transmission behavior of secret information such as keys, and thus it makes the secure key distribution possible. However, the traditional information hiding systems usually embed the secret information by modifying the carrier, which inevitably leaves modification traces on the carrier. Thus, they cannot resist the detection of the steganalysis algorithm effectively. To avoid this issue, the coverless information hiding technique has been proposed accordingly, in which the original images of which features can express the secret information are directly used as stego-images. Since the existing coverless information hiding methods use the low-level handcrafted image features to express secret information, it is hard for them to realize desirable robustness against common image attacks. Moreover, their hiding capacity is limited. To conquer these problems, we design a novel robust image coverless information hiding system using Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks (Faster-RCNN). We employ Faster-RCNN to detect and locate objects in images and utilize the labels of these objects to express secret information. Since the original images without any modification are used as stego-images, the proposed method can effectively resist steganalysis and will not cause attackers' suspicion. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system has higher performance in terms of robustness and capacity compared to the typical coverless information hiding methods.

Internet of things (IoT) can enable cyber-physical objects to communicate with one another and realize real-time living-needs control such as for vehicles, smart phones, refrigerators, healthcare gadgets and air-conditioners. Of the applications of IoT, collecting and receiving health-related data securely is the most crucial and significant use in the fields of community and hospital healthcare, where any single communication failure or data loss might cause a life damage risk. To address this problem, self-healing mechanism can be used for facilitating secure communications and recovering from the lost data. In this paper, a new key distribution with self-healing for IoT objects of community healthcare is proposed, and the underlying system is composed of two layers. In the top layer, the new scheme implements both deterministic security link and access control which are based on polynomial-based methods. In the bottom layer, we propose a trust-based key distribution scheme with self-healing and a singular value decomposition (SVD) based authentication method. Security and performance analysis show that our protocol can be performed more efficiently in data communication. In addition, results obtained from both security analysis and simulations indicate that our scheme is more suitable for IoT networks.

The security of wireless sensor networks is a significant concern and can be achieved by the application of cryptographic algorithms. The symmetric key encryption techniques are widely used cryptographic mechanisms for the security of sensor networks due to its low computational complexity. A symmetric key encryption technique requires a secret key to be shared between both parties for confidential communication. In a wireless sensor network, it is difficult to know which node is going to be in its communication range at the deployment phase. If prior knowledge of sensor location exists, it is an added advantage and helps in the distribution of secret keys among nodes. Even if with the expected location information, distributing the keys properly among the nodes is a challenging task. A proper algorithm must be used so that it gives the adequate utilization of the distributed keys with a minimal number of keys per sensor node. In this paper, we propose a location-dependent key distribution scheme. We use Delaunay Triangulation for the efficient distribution of keys among sensor nodes. The method gives a high probability of secure communication links among nodes with high resilience to the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key distribution for secret sharing is the core important aspect of any secure cryptosystem, the threshold scheme enables a secret key to be shared among p members in which each member holds a part of the secret key. In recent years, many works have been done on constructing (t + 1, l) threshold schemes using different algebraic aspects of the mathematics. In this paper, we discuss certain aspects of key sharing using Graph Theory and Strongly co-prime integers to present techniques which manage the sharing of keys equally amongst the users keeping the security of the system intact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User interaction constitutes a largely unexplored field in protocol analysis, even in instances where the user takes an active role as a trusted third party, such as in the Internet of Things (IoT) device initialization protocols. Initializing the formal modeling of 3-party authentication protocols where one party is a physical user, this research introduces the 3-party possession user-mediated authentication (3-PUMA) model. The 3-PUMA model addresses active user participation in a protocol which is designed to authenticate possession of a fixed data string—such as in IoT device commissioning. Using the 3-PUMA model, we provide a computational analysis of the ISO/IEC 9798-6:2010 standard's Mechanism 7a authentication protocol which includes a user interface and interaction as well as a device-to-device channel. Furthermore, we introduce existential unforgeability under key collision attacks (EUF-KCA) and provide a corresponding security experiment. We show that the security of ISO/IEC 9798-6:2010 Mechanism 7a relies upon EUF-KCA MAC security. Since it is unknown whether any standardized MAC algorithm achieves EUF-KCA security, this research demonstrates a potential vulnerability in the standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security has become the principal concern in mobile ad-hoc network. Secure communication depends on using cryptographic mechanisms. Cryptographic mechanism involves symmetric key and asymmetric key approaches. The symmetric key approach is more reliable except the key distribution phase. Asymmetric key approach gives robust security, but it results in high computational, high communications and high storage overhead. The propose research uses both the concepts. The symmetric key approach for reliable data exchange and asymmetric key approach for key management and distribution to achieve robust security in constraint based mobile ad-hoc network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasingly serious environment of network space security,the importance of cryptography is becoming more and more prominent.There are many problems in the current application of cryptographic technology and the demand of secure and controllable password resource for key information structure is urgent.According to technology advantages and disadvantages of classical and quantum passwords were analyzed and the integration direction of quantum cryptography and classical password technology was proposed.At the same time,by giving full consideration to the development trend of cloud computing architecture,the password cloud service concept was proposed and the domestic password service cloud platform based on quantum secret communication was designed.It has positive guiding significance for building a new firewall of cyber security based on quantum secret communication.

In the secure multicast communication, data is transmitted in such a manner that only authorized group members are able to receive the data. The main challenging issue in dynamic and secure multicast communication is to design a centralized group key distribution protocol with minimum computation and storages complexity. This paper, proposes a more efficient centralized group key distribution (CGKD) protocol that minimizes the computation cost of key server (KS) during key updating. The computation cost of members is balanced during key recovery. This reduction in computation cost of KS is achieved by performing one addition, one multiplication and one encryption during single member join and one subtraction, one division and one encryption during a single member leave operation. Moreover, the storage complexity of KS is also minimized. Further, this paper also proposes an extended CGKD protocol based on clustered tree which is very scalable and efficient to deal with enormous membership changes. By comparing with existing similar protocols, the proposed protocol has significantly reduced computation and storage complexity of KS while maintaining less and balanced communication overhead of KS and storage load of each group member. The proposed protocol is implemented and tested on key-star and cluster tree based structure. The experimental results show that the proposed protocol is efficient in terms of computational overhead of KS and group members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity‐based cryptography (IBC) is considered as a promising mechanism in the Internet of Things and ad‐hoc networks, providing lightweight authentication and powerful access control. However, it suffers from two inherent problems, i.e. key escrow and the requirement of a secure channel, which are not always good properties in many realistic scenarios. Thus, an efficient key issuing protocol in a distributed setting without the assumption of the secure channel is needed. In this study, the authors give special attention to the IBC standardised in IEEE P1363 and design a multi‐party setup and key issuing protocol for it. Their protocol is proven to be malicious secure by simulation under weaker assumptions. Contrast to prior works that rely on a trusted party for key distribution or the strong assumption of a secure channel, they provide the first practical solution for the distributed architectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security in a wireless sensor network is an essential requirement to safeguard the system from misuse of the collected data. In a wireless sensor network, the sensed data is to be transmitted to a base station securely and safely. In this process, data packets may route through multiple sensor nodes and reached the base station at the end. The encryption is the basic tool to protect data from vulnerable attacks in a wireless sensor network. Among the two basic encryption classes namely symmetric key encryption and asymmetric key encryption, the prior is most suitable for wireless sensor network for its simplicity and low computation cost. In this article, we propose a quaternion based encryption system applicable to the wireless sensor network with a key distribution scheme. We use the IEEE standard half-precision number system in the arrangement of special quaternions and secret keys. The quaternion encryption mainly rotates one quaternion w.r.t. an axis with a given angle and thereby produce a new quaternion. Experimental results for the encryption and decryption process and its efficiency is discussed in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) can be seen as kind of hardware oneway functions, who are easily fabricated but difficult to clone, duplicate or predict. Therefore, PUFs with unclonable and unpredictable properties are welcome to be applied in designing lightweight cryptography protocols. In this paper, a Basic Key Distribution Scheme (Basic-KDS) based on PUFs is firstly proposed. Then, by employing different deployment modes, a Random Deployment Key Distribution Scheme (RD-KDS) and a Grouping Deployment Key Distribution Scheme (GD-KDS) are further proposed based on the Basic-KDS for large scale wireless sensor networks. In our proposals, a sensor is not pre-distributed with any keys but will generate one by the embedded PUF when receiving a challenge from the gateway, which provides perfect resilience against sensor capture attacks. Besides, the unclonable and unpredictable properties of PUF guarantee the key uniqueness and two-way authentication. Analysis and experiment results show that our proposals have better performances in improving the resilience, secureconnectivity, and efficiency as compared to other schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose electronic voting authentication scheme, which is a key management mechanism for electronic voting system intended to limit the number of attacks on a polling station and strengthen the security control. The motivation is to diversify security requirements of messages exchanged between polling stations. There are different types of messages exchanged between polling stations and each type of message has different security needs. A security mechanism developed on the basis of a single key is not enough to ensure the diverse security needs of voting network. In electronic voting authentication scheme, every polling station is responsible to support three different types of keys. These are global key, pairwise key, and individual key. The global keys are public keys shared with all polling stations in the voting network. The pairwise key can be used for communication with polling stations. Individual keys will be used for communication with the server. To ensure authentication of local broadcast, electronic voting authentication scheme uses one-way key chains in a well-organized way. The support of source authentication is a visible advantage of this scheme. We examine the authentication of electronic voting authentication scheme on numerous attack models. The measurement demonstrates that electronic voting authentication scheme is very operative in protecting against numerous elegant attacks such as wormhole attack, Sybil attack, and HELLO Flood attack. The proposed system is evaluated and the results demonstrate that the proposed system is practical and secure as compared to the direct recording electronic and manual systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Counting-based secret sharing is presented recently as a promising approach serving multiuser authentication applications. The scheme originally generates its shares via simple flipping of one or two 0-bits within the entire secret key at various locations. Reconstructing the secret key combines chosen shares, based on (n,k) threshold, in parallel specific counting to recover back the secret key. This paper proposes modifying the shares generation process, for security enhancement, by dividing the secret key into blocks. Each block involves flipping specific bits simultaneously, generating ambiguous shares improving the access system security. The proposed blocks flipping shares methods are implemented in different 64-bits models via fair testing Java platform. Experimentations showed interesting comparisons results providing remarkable secure contributions. The work can be considered an opening applicability direction for further attractive research in improving the counting-based secret sharing technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a Lightweight and Secure Tree-based Routing protocol (LSTR) for Wireless Sensor Networks. The security of data routing from sensor nodes to the Base Station (BS) is achieved based on an efficient ID-based authenticated key-agreement protocol. LSTR reduces the number of required keys to a single permanent private-key preloaded in sensor nodes. This key is used subsequently to generate authenticated pairwise keys with other nodes without further digital signatures or certificates. As a result, LSTR achieves both node's authenticity and confidentiality during data delivery at low cost and without involving the BS. In addition, a single message must be transmitted by the nodes for both the routing-tree construction and key-establishment at the same time, and which reduces the communication overheads. The performance analysis results show that LSTR reduces the storage requirements, the communication overheads and the energy dissipation compared to similar relevant works, particularly during the key-establishment. Additionally, the robustness of our scheme is highlighted through a security analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Cloud computing has been gaining widespread significance in recent times, especially with the advent of state‐of‐the‐art communication technologies and data‐handling systems. Large volumes of data are being handled in real time and their availability is made feasible to consumers in an efficient manner through cloud computing networks. However, security of such data being transferred through clouds characterized in a centralized configuration is of prime concern, which has been investigated in this research paper. Secured transmission of data through a secured key transmission using appropriate authentication mechanism has been the driving force behind the research carried out in this paper. In order to resolve the existing issues in clouds in terms of computational as well as storage complexities, a secure key transmission Rivest‐Shamir‐Adleman (SKT‐RSA) protocol is proposed based on the secure key transmission. Key distribution between the certified authority and the end user is proposed. The proposed protocol is a tree‐based cluster key distribution scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The secret sharing scheme is a data security tool that provides reliability and robustness for multi-user authentication systems. This work focus on improving the counting-based secret sharing technique for higher shares security as well as simple and fast computation. The research considers resolving some originally published defects in the shares reconstruction phase by proposing a new distribution model. This distribution model has been optimized practical and efficient. Also, the shares reconstruction model reflects increasing the security of the system by shares authenticity via steganography. We have employed multimedia image-based steganography methods to store the optimized shares that is presenting comparisons for proofed remarks. The paper experimentations tests the work of the enhancements by assuming different secret sharing key sizes of 64-bit, 128-bit, and 256-bit to make sure of practical variations within the security study. The shares usability has been further optimized by testing embedding each generated share using five different techniques of image-based steganography. The results showed a significant attractive impact making the optimized counting-based secret sharing scheme considered a promising solution for multi-user authentication security applications. This optimized system has been analyzed according to the distortion security and capacity parameters showing attractive contributions opening the research direction for further research to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physical layer security has gained an increasing attention due to its efficiency and simplicity as compared to other conventional security protocols. Thus, it has been recently nominated for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In this paper, a novel key distribution mechanism is proposed for IoT networks. The proposed mechanism exploits the channel diversity to distribute encryption keys among nodes within the network. A main novelty aspect of the proposed mechanism is that it guarantees distributing different keys with different lengths to all nodes at the same time. In addition, an intelligent eavesdropper model has been considered. Simulation results prove the high performance of the proposed scheme and its robustness against channel estimation errors, and immunity against eavesdroppers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Digital TV service, subscribers get the access of channels of their interest. In conditional access systems (CAS), Control Word is used to deliver the multimedia content to legitimate subscribers securely. In order to update the Control Word frequently, a large number of messages are exchanged in the conventional key distribution systems. This article analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the existing key distribution protocols for CAS and presents an efficient key distribution protocol for CAS based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography. The proposed protocol minimizes the storage cost and communication cost of subscribers. In addition to this, the proposed protocol facilitates the unrestricted channel package composition and minimum communication cost on rekeying. The proposed protocol also provides perfect forward and backward secrecy. As a result, the proposed protocol is well suited for Pay-TV systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]