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− There are innumerable ways the Internet of Drones (IoD) technology can impact our society. With the deployment of an airborne network, the IoD can support real-time low-cost delivery of services ranging from military surveillance to a myriad of civilian applications. Nevertheless, the drones employ insecure wireless communication channels to communicate with other entities in the system, inhibiting its induction in sensitive installations if insecure or inefficient Authenticated Key Agreement (AKA) schemes are employed. The blockchain, an open distributed ledger-based technology, is increasingly being adopted to address the security concern as discussed. Recently, Bera et al. presented an efficient blockchain-enabled AKA scheme for data management among various entities in IoD network. However, their scheme does not support anonymity and untraceability for the drones; also, it does not provide resistance to Ground station server impersonation attack, while the protocol has a few redundancies. Later, we proposed an enhanced blockchain-enabled AKA scheme BOD5-IOD to authenticate drones in the system. The BOD5-IOD, other than supporting a robust access control mechanism between drones and GSS, also ensures safe transactions among all entities in the IoD environment. The formal analysis and performance evaluation endorse that our scheme supports security requirements with computational and communication efficiency of 34.4% and 23.3%, respectively.

Wearable health monitoring systems (WHMSs) will play an increasingly important role in future e-healthcare and enable smart and ubiquitous healthcare services. Given its sensitivity, the health data should be protected against unauthorized access. As a result, it is critical to design an end-to-end mutual authentication protocol that enables secure communication between the wearable sensor and medical professionals. Recently, Amin et al. proposed an anonymity preserving mutual authentication protocol for WHMSs. However, we identify that their protocol suffers from stolen mobile device attack, desynchronization attack, and sensor key exposure. Then we put forward an improved end-to-end authentication protocol based on quadratic residues. Comprehensive security analysis is conducted to show that the proposed protocol fixes these flaws of Amin et al.’s protocol and satisfies all desired requirements. The comparison with these existing protocols demonstrates that our protocol provides a practical end-to-end security solution for WHMSs.

Recent technological advances in almost all critical systems’ domains have led to an explosive growth of multimedia big data. Those advances encompass the ever increasing innovative digital and remote mobile devices being operated on the users’ end. Due to the openness of critical system, the service providers in such networks are facing security challenges to authenticate those mobile devices on the field, and delivering services. In this scenario, the Multi-server authentication (MSA) framework seems to be a promising solution that enables its subscribers to avail services from different servers without getting registered to each server individually. In last few years many MSA protocols depending on RC-Offline authentication during mutual authentication, have been presented. However, to date, there is no efficient MSA scheme to our knowledge that is free of all three weaknesses, simultaneously. That is, 1) free from storage of server-based parameters (public keys or other values) in smart card by registration authority, 2) free from the assumption of publishing of server-based public keys publicly and 3) free from a single secret sharing with all servers so that it could avoid server masquerading (insider) attack. Considering these limitations, we present a multi-server authentication protocol that withstands above drawbacks using lightweight cryptographic operations. The rationale of the proposed work was to present an efficient RC-Offline MSA scheme. Our scheme is also backed by formal security analysis based on GNY logic and automated security verification using ProVerif tool.

Mobile cloud computing blend mobile and cloud computing together with the help of wireless communication technology to achieve benefits for the stakeholders. These stakeholders include mobile users, mobile service operators and cloud service providers. Assorted challenges are also there for the implementation of mobile cloud computing but security and privacy are the dominant concerns. In order to achieve security and privacy of the said system several attempts are taken up. As the underlying system is complex and more prone against security threats, therefore strong authentication and privacy preserving schemes are desired. Three factor biometrics based authentication schemes are considered more secure for such huge and complex systems. Moreover, computational intelligence is getting popular nowadays for designing more vigorous and reliable biometrics based authentication schemes. Very recently, Tsai and Lo proposed an identity based authentication scheme for distributed mobile cloud computing environments. They claimed to achieve single sign on authentication for multiple service providers. Furthermore, they emphasized the usefulness and security of their scheme. However, the analysis in this paper shows that Tsai and Lo’s scheme is insecure against server forgery attack. It is proved that any adversaries having knowledge of just public parameters can forge as a valid service provider. Then an improved scheme is proposed to mitigate the security weakness. The security of proposed scheme is instantiated under random oracle model as well as the protocol validation model of popular automated tool ProVerif.

In the multi-server authentication (MSA) paradigm, a subscriber might avail multiple services of different service providers, after registering from registration authority. In this approach, the user has to remember only a single password for all service providers, and servers are relieved of individualized registrations. Many MSA-related schemes have been presented so far, however with several drawbacks. In this connection, recently Li et al. in Wirel. Pers. Commun., (2016). doi: 10.1007/s11277-016-3293-x presented a chaotic map-based multi-server authentication scheme. However, we observed that Li et al. suffer from malicious server insider attack, stolen smart card attack, and session-specific temporary information attack. This research work is based on improving security of Li et al.’s protocol in minimum possible computation cost. We also evaluate the security for the contributed work which is provable under formal security analysis employing random oracle model and BAN Logic.

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) provides a way to control the wired and wireless Voice over Internet Protocol-based communication over an insecure channel. The SIP protocol is not secure due to relying on an intrinsically open text-based communication, which further stresses the strengthening of SIP authentication protocols. Many solutions have been put forward in the last few years to design the secure and efficient SIP authentication protocols for multimedia. Recently, Zhang et al. proposed a SIP authentication protocol with an enhanced feature that enables the server authenticate the users on the basis of biometric verification. However, after a careful observation, one can witness few limitations regarding privileged insider attack, session specific temporary attack, De-synchronization attack; denial-of-service attack, inefficient password modification and lack forward secrecy compromise. We have proposed a secure scheme countering the identified flaws of Zhang et al. and other contemporary schemes. We also demonstrate the security strength of proposed scheme by employing the formal security analysis under BAN logic.

Ubiquitous networks enable mobile users to communicate with each other efficiently and independently without the need of inventing agent. This approach is proved to be delay and spectral efficient. Due to the nature of underlying Big data, such networks are prone to several security and privacy challenges. Because such gigantic data is not only difficult to store, maintain and manipulate but Big data’s open architecture makes the security threats inevitable. Therefore, incorporating authentication between mobile node and foreign network during roaming in ubiquitous networks has become a tedious task. Very recently, Farash et al. found a number of weaknesses in the schemes proposed by Wen et al. and Shin et al. Furthermore, Farash et al. proposed an enhanced scheme for roaming user in ubiquitous network. However, after thorough investigation, we show fragilities of Farash et al.’s scheme against (1) mobile user anonymity violation; (2) disclosure of secret parameter of mobile node; (3) session key disclosure; and (4) mobile node impersonation attacks. Therefore, we propose an improved scheme to fix these fragilities. We analyze the security of proposed scheme using popular automated verification tool ProVerif. The analysis confirms that the proposed scheme resists the known attacks while having quite low overhead as compared with Farash et al.’s scheme. Therefore, in order to get better performance proposed scheme is a suitable candidate to be employed along with supercomputing systems for dealing the security challenges of big data in ubiquitous networks.

In recent past, Mir and Nikooghadam presented an enhanced biometrics based authentication scheme using lightweight symmetric key primitives for telemedicine networks. This scheme was introduced in an anticipation to the former biometrics based authentication system proposed by Yan et al. Mir and Nikooghadam declared that their scheme is invincible against potential attacks while providing user anonymity. Our study and in-depth analysis unveil that Mir and Nikooghadam’s authentication scheme is susceptible to smart card stolen attack, moreover anonymity violation is still possible despite the claim of Mir and Nikooghadam. We have utilized the random oracle model in order to perform security analysis. The analysis endorses that the proposed scheme is robust enough to provide protection against all potential attacks specially smart card stolen attack and user anonymity violation attack. Analysis is further substantiated through an automated software application ProVerif. The analysis also shows that proposed scheme is computationally efficient than Mir and Nikooghadam’s scheme.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices use radio waves to relay identifying information to an electronic reader using low-cost RFID Tag. RFID is expected to replace the conventional bar-code identification system due to its advantage like real-time recognition of a considerable number of objects. However, in RFID systems an attacker can get the tag that may lead to various security threats, and the limited computation power of RFID tags can cause delay. Lightweight authentication protocols proposed using cryptographic algorithms (one-way hash function, symmetric key encryption/decryption, and exclusive-OR) in order to cope with these problems. One such lightweight cryptographic protocol has been presented by Gope and Hwang using RFID systems. However, it analyzed in this article that their protocol is infeasible and vulnerable to Collision Attack, Denial-of-service (DoS), and Stolen verifier Attacks. A realistic, lightweight authentication protocol has been presented in this article to ensure protection against the mentioned attacks for IoT based RFID system. The proposed protocol has been formally analyzed using BAN logic and ProVerif as well as also analyzed informally using security requirement. The results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the existing protocols not only in security enhancements but also in terms of computation and communication complexity. Furthermore, the proposed protocol has also been analyzed for storage complexity.

Authentication is achieved by using different techniques, like using smart-card, identity password and biometric techniques. Some of the proposed schemes use a single factor for authentication while others combine multiple ways to provide multi-factor authentication for better security. lately, a new scheme for multi-factor authentication was presented by Cao and Ge and claimed that their scheme is highly secure and can withstand against all known attacks. In this paper, it is revealed that their scheme is still vulnerable and have some loopholes in term of reflection attack. Therefore, an improved scheme is proposed to overcome the security weaknesses of Cao and Ge’s scheme. The proposed scheme resists security attacks and secure. Formal testing is carried out under a broadly-accepted simulated tool ProVerif which demonstrates that the proposed scheme is well secure.

Internet of drones (IoD) has gained significant importance in recent times due to its applications in several critical domains ranging from commercial to defense and rescue operations. With several drones flying in different zones to carry out specified tasks, the IoD can be beneficial to gather the real time data for interpretation by the users. However, the data access is carried out through an open channel and battery operated drones. Therefore, the drones’ security and privacy are crucial for accomplishing mission-critical, safety-critical, or surveillance operations. In 2020, Bera et al. presented a certificate based access control scheme for securing the IoD access and argued the scheme’s security through formal and informal methods. However, the analysis presented in this paper shows that the scheme of Bera et al. does not provide anonymity and is insecure against multiple threats, including drone impersonation, the man in the middle, and replay attacks. We then designed a generic certificate based access control scheme to provide inter-drone and drone to ground station access control/authentication in the IoD domain (GCACS-IoD). The GCACS-IoD is provably secure against the known attacks and provides anonymity. GCACS-IoD extends security while preserving computation and communication efficiencies.

Fog computing (FC) is an infrastructure consisting of decentralized computing, where computing resources such as storage, applications, and data are scattered among the cloud and data source. Fog computing inherits similar privacy and security concerns present in cloud computing, such as authentication and key management issues. Recently, Wazid et al. presented a scheme of authentication key exchange for fog computing called SAKA-FC to address these issues. We analyzed and identified that the SAKA-FC suffers from some severe vulnerabilities. Furthermore, we presented an improved scheme to mitigate these problems while retaining its strengths. The formal security analysis of the proposed scheme is validated through BAN logic. At the same time, the AVISPA tool is employed for automated formal security verification. Informal security analysis is conducted to attest that the proposal can confront the known attacks. Using computation and communication costs as the metrics, the proposed scheme is also compared with some state-of-the-art schemes. The proposed scheme achieves the same communication cost as of SAKA-FC, whereas the difference in computation cost is 24%. This increase in computation cost is justifiable as the proposal is resistant to clogging attacks and provides better security than the prior schemes.

Recently, Lu et al. presented a mutual authentication scheme for Session Initiation Protocol. Lu et al. claimed their scheme provides safeguard against familiar attacks and offers efficient authentication facility. However, this paper divulges that the scheme of Lu et al. is prone to server and user impersonation attacks. Additionally, the scheme of Lu et al. implicates correctness concerns. Consequently, an enhanced scheme is proposed, not only to resolve correctness concerns but also to provide robustness against server and user impersonation attacks. The proposed scheme makes use of a user-specific secret parameter to deal with the security and correctness issues. The formal and informal security analysis proves the robustness and efficiency of the proposed scheme against all familiar attacks. Furthermore, security analysis is also substantiated through popular automated tool PROVERIF. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The security for Telecare Medicine Information Systems (TMIS) has been crucial for reliable dispensing of the medical services to patients at distant locations. Security and privacy element needs to be there for any physician or caregiver to make certain an appropriate diagnosis, medical treatment or any other exchange of critical information. In this connection, many relevant TMIS-based authentication schemes have been presented, however various forms of attacks and inefficiencies render these schemes inapplicable for a practical scenario. Lately, Amin et al. proposed a scheme based on a multi-server authentication for TMIS. However, the Amin et al., scheme has been found vulnerable to user and server impersonation attacks. We have proposed an improved model with higher performance and efficiency, as evident from the forthcoming sections. Besides, the scheme has been backed up by formal security analysis using BAN logic to ensure the resilience of the proposed scheme.

Internet of Things has drastically expanded the global network for information exchange, because thousands of communication devices are becoming part of the global network. Besides the numerous benefits of global network expansion, secure communication and authentication among the comprising elements of the global network is also posing great challenges. Recently, Huang et al. proposed a key agreement scheme in order to facilitate user authenticity using elliptic curve cryptography. Huang et al. further emphasized the scheme is secure. Nevertheless, comprehensive analysis in this paper, demonstrates that Huang et al. scheme has correctness issues and is prone to impersonation/forgery attack. Then an improved scheme is presented to tenacity the said glitches existent in Huang et al.'s scheme. The security analysis of proposed scheme is substantiated in random oracle model. Furthermore, a simulation of proposed scheme is carried out by automated formal tool ProVerif. The performance and security assessments show that the scheme presented in this paper withstand impersonation attack and offers adequate security while reducing significant computation cost as compared with Huang et al.'s scheme. Hence, due to better performance and security, the proposed scheme is the appropriate one for security sensitive and resource constrained environments.

Telecare medicine information systems (TMISs) provides a platform to the participating medical entities to share medical data over an insecure public channel. Medical drop box (MDB) is used for the said purpose, where electronic health record (EHR) is maintained for national health information exchange (NHIX). EHR is a crucial part of MDB. Therefore, the main challenge in NHIX is to restrict MDB access to only the authenticated entities. Very Recently, Moon et al. introduced a biometrics-based authentication scheme using chaotic maps for TMISs. The authors claimed that their scheme is efficient and robust in terms of its usage and implementation. However, this paper unveils that due to storage of verifier table on server, their scheme is having scalability and efficiency issues. Furthermore, the use of the same parameters $$\mathrm{IM}_1$$ and $$\mathrm{IM}_2$$ during different login requests makes the scheme traceable. Therefore, an improved scheme using chaotic maps has been proposed in this paper, which provides user anonymity and untraceability along with computational efficiency. The security of the proposed scheme is evaluated in detail through the random oracle model. The analysis reveals that the proposed scheme is robust and secure against the known attacks. Moreover, analysis is further verified through popular automated tool ProVerif.

The security provisioning of increasing healthcare data is of critical importance. The e-health clouds can be seen as a move towards an efficient management of such a big volume of healthcare data. Many schemes have been presented to bring more security and privacy along with efficiency, in the handling of data for booming e-health industry. Recently, in this connection, Jiang et al. (J Supercomput 1---24 doi:10.1007/s11227-015-1610-x, 2016) presented a three-factor authentication protocol for e-health clouds. In this letter, we identify a serious flaw in the mutual authentication phase of the scheme, since an adversary may launch a denial-of-service attack (DoS) against the service providing server. Finally, we suggest a modification in the scheme to overcome the DoS attack.

In 2012, Wang and Qin proposed an authentication mechanism in order to get access control for mobile pay-TV organization to enhance the Sun and Leu's technique. Wang and Qin declared that their technique satisfies the security expectations or requirements intended for mobile pay-TV system. However, this work indicates that Wang and Qin's scheme suffers from a nontrivial weakness. Successful impersonation attack is easily possible from an adversary who can impersonate mobile set (MS) to cheat the head-end system (HS). An adversary does not even need secret information to do so. As a remedy, we proposed an enhanced authentication technique for mobile pay-TV systems by taking a slight change in Wang and Qin's scheme. The proposed scheme maintains the merits and covers the demerits of the previous schemes.

Designed an authentication scheme for IoT based smart grid communication.Analyzed the scheme using automated tool ProVerif.The proposed scheme is more lightweight and secure than existing schemes. The Internet of Things (IoT) has plenty of applications including Smart Grid (SG). IoT enables smooth and efficient utilization of SG. It is assumed as the prevalent illustration of IoT at the moment. IP-based communication technologies are used for setting SG communication network, but they are challenged by huge volume of delay sensitive data and control information between consumers and utility providers. It is also challenged by numerous security attacks due to resource constraints in smart meters. Sundry schemes proposed for addressing these problems are inappropriate due to high communication, computation overhead and latency. In this paper, we propose a hybrid Diffie-Hellman based lightweight authentication scheme using AES and RSA for session key generation. To ensure message integrity, the advantages of hash based message authentication code are exploited. The scheme provides mutual authentication, thwarting replay and man-in-the-middle attacks and achieves message integrity, while reducing overall communication and computation overheads.

Social networking is one of the major source of massive data. Such data is not only difficult to store, manipulate and maintain but it's open access makes it security prone. Therefore, robust and efficient authentication should be devised to make it invincible against the known security attacks. Moreover, social networking services are intrinsically multi-server environments, therefore compatible and suitable authentication should be designed accordingly. Sundry authentication protocols are being utilized at the moment and many of them are designed for single server architecture. This type of remote architecture resists each user to get itself register with each server if multiple servers are employed to offer online social services. Recently multi-server architecture for authentication has replaced the single server architecture, and it enable users to register once and procure services from multiple servers. A short time ago, Lu et al. presented two authentication schemes based on three factors. Furthermore, both Lu et al.'s schemes are designed for multi-server architecture. Lu et al. claimed the schemes to be invincible against the known attacks. However, this paper shows that one of the Lu et al.'s scheme is susceptible to user anonymity violation and impersonation attacks, whereas Lu et al.'s second scheme is susceptible to user impersonation attack. Therefore an enhanced scheme is introduced in this paper. The proposed scheme is more robust than subsisting schemes. The proposed scheme is thoroughly verified and validated with formal and informal security discussion, and through the popular automated tool ProVerif. The in-depth analysis affirms that proposed scheme is lightweight in terms of computations while attaining mutual authentication and is invincible against the known attacks, hence is more suitable for automated big data analysis for social multimedia networking environments.

The rapid advancement in communication technologies enables remote users to acquire a number of online services. All such online services are provided remotely facilitating the users to freely move any where with out disruption of the services. In order to ensure seamless and secure services to the remote user such services espouse authentication protocols. A number of authentication protocols are readily available to achieve security and privacy in remote client server architecture. Most of these schemes are tailored for single server architecture. In such scenario, if a user wants to attain the services provided by more than one servers he has to register with each server. In recent times, multiserver authentication has got much attention, where a user can register once and then can acquire services provided by multiple servers. Very recently, Lu et al. proposed a biometric, smart card and password-based three factor authentication scheme usable for multiserver environments. Furthermore, Lu et al. identified their scheme to resist known attacks. However, the analysis in this paper ascertains that Lu et al.’s scheme is vulnerable to impersonation attack. An adversary registered to the system just after knowing the public identity of a user can impersonate himself as the latter. Then we propose an improvement over Lu et al.’s scheme. Our improvement is more robust than the existing schemes. The security of proposed scheme is substantiated formally along with informal security discussion, while same is also validated using a popular automated tool ProVerif. The analysis confirms that proposed scheme achieves mutual authentication and is robust against known attacks. In addition, the proposed scheme does not incur any extra computation as compared with Lu et al.’s scheme.

A handover authentication protocol ensures secure and seamless roaming over multiple access points. A number of such protocols are proposed, but most of these protocols are inefficient or insecure. Very recently, Li et al. (Wireless Pers Commun 80(2):581---589, 2015) proposed a privacy-aware handover authentication protocol, and claimed their protocol to be more lightweight and secure than existing protocols. However, our analysis identifies that Li et al.'s protocol is insecure against access point impersonation attack. As a remedy, we proposed an improved protocol to fix the security weakness of Li et al.'s protocol. The improved protocol achieves the provable security in the random oracle model against the hardness assumptions of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem and elliptic curve computational Diffie---Hellman problem. The proposed handover authentication protocol is also formally analyzed with the automated tool ProVerif. The improved protocol not only enhances the security but is more lightweight than other related protocols.

This comment is presented to identify the drawbacks in a recently published scheme SFVCC by Mishra et al. doi:10.1049/iet-its.2019.0250. In this scheme, a malicious adversary may initiate a replay attack and denial of service attack after eavesdropping the communication. These attacks render the scheme inapplicable for practical deployment.

Wireless Healthcare Sensor Network (WHSN) has become one of the major research fields over the past decades that play a very prominent role in the medical field. Due to the rapid growth of technology in wireless communication, different security challenges have been raised in WHSN. Authentication protocols are used to secure the information transferred over the public channels by WHSN. For this prospect recently, Liu & Chung proposed an authentication and data transmission mechanism for WHSN. However, Challa et al. identified that Liu-Chung’s scheme is vulnerable to stolen smart-card, offline password guessing, privileged insider, and user impersonation attacks. Challa et al. then proposed an enhanced scheme to overcome beforehand stated flaws. This paper denotes out that in accession to before mentioned attacks, Liu-Chung’s scheme is also prone to users’ private key leakage and user impersonation attacks towards sensors. Moreover, Challa et al.’s scheme suffers from incorrectness, broadcasting problem, lack of authentication between Trusted Authority (TA) and sensor nodes, replay attack, Denial of Service (DoS) attack, forgery attack and delay in communication due to the involvement of the TA. Using the elliptic curve cryptography and bilinear paring, an improved scheme is proposed in this paper, to mitigate the weaknesses of Challah et al. and Liu-Chang schemes. The formal security analysis using simulation tool AVISPA and BAN logic demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure. The rigorous informal security analysis also attests that our scheme is safe against well-known attacks.

The standardization activities of the fifth generation communications are clearly over and deployment has commenced globally. To sustain the competitive edge of wireless networks, industrial and academia synergy have begun to conceptualize the next generation of wireless communication systems (namely, sixth generation, (6G)) aimed at laying the foundation for the stratification of the communication needs of the 2030s. In support of this vision, this study highlights the most promising lines of research from the recent literature in common directions for the 6G project. Its core contribution involves exploring the critical issues and key potential features of 6G communications, including: (i) vision and key features; (ii) challenges and potential solutions; and (iii) research activities. These controversial research topics were profoundly examined in relation to the motivation of their various sub-domains to achieve a precise, concrete, and concise conclusion. Thus, this article will contribute significantly to opening new horizons for future research directions.

The energy Internet (EI)-based vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology facilitates the electric vehicles not only to distribute additional electricity into grid systems, but also support receiving back from the power grid in the form of charging. The secure key establishment is quite significant to initiate the bidirectional electricity power delivery into and from the system. To effectively implement any EI-based V2G communication, the authentication protocol must be free from cyber attacks. In this article, we not only explore the drawbacks of several smart grid-based authentication protocols but also bring forth the limitations of a recently presented EI-based V2G scheme by Gope and Sikdar. The examined drawbacks in this protocol may disrupt its proper functioning, since it faces desynchronization problems while logging into the mobile device bearing registration parameters. The scheme is also vulnerable to replay attack and man-in-the-middle attack. The user is also unable to validate session key in the protocol. Considering these limitations, we propose a novel and efficient V2G protocol framework enabling the vehicles to communicate or recharge at desired recharging stations. The results of the proposed framework are compared with several contemporary schemes, and its security features are validated by random oracle model-based formal analysis.

Global Mobility Networks(GLOMONETs) in wireless communication permits the global roaming services that enable a user to leverage the mobile services in any foreign country. Technological growth in wireless communication is also accompanied by new security threats and challenges. A threat-proof authentication protocol in wireless communication may overcome the security flaws by allowing only legitimate users to access a particular service. Recently, Lee et al. found Mun et al. scheme vulnerable to different attacks and proposed an advanced secure scheme to overcome the security flaws. However, this article points out that Lee et al. scheme lacks user anonymity, inefficient user authentication, vulnerable to replay and DoS attacks and Lack of local password verification. Furthermore, this article presents a more robust anonymous authentication scheme to handle the threats and challenges found in Lee et al.’s protocol. The proposed protocol is formally verified with an automated tool(ProVerif). The proposed protocol has superior efficiency in comparison to the existing protocols.

Sessioninitiation protocol (SIP) reformed the controlling routine of voice over Internet Protocol based communication over public channels. SIP is inherently insecure because of underlying open text architecture. A number of solutions are proposed to boost SIP security. Very recently Farash (Peer to Peer Netw. Appl. 1–10, 2014) proposed an enhanced protocol to improve the security of Tu et al.’s protocol (Peer to Peer Netw. Appl. 1–8, 2014). Further, Farash claimed his protocol to be secure against all known attacks. However, in this paper we show that Farash’s protocol is insecure against impersonation attack, password guessing attack, lacks user anonymity and is vulnerable to session-specific temporary information attack. Further, we have proposed an upgraded protocol to enhance the security. The security and performance analysis shows that the proposed protocol reduced one point multiplication as compared with Farash’s protocol, while resisting all known attacks. We have proved the security of proposed protocol using automated tool ProVerif.

Very recently, Kumari et al. proposed a symmetric key and smart card-based remote user password authentication scheme to enhance Chung et al.'s scheme. They claimed their enhanced scheme to provide anonymity while resisting all known attacks. In this paper, we analyze that Kumari et al.'s scheme is still vulnerable to anonymity violation attack as well as smart card stolen attack. Then we propose a supplemented scheme to overcome security weaknesses of Kumari et al.'s scheme. We have analyzed the security of the proposed scheme in random oracle model which confirms the robustness of the scheme against all known attacks. We have also verified the security of our scheme using automated tool ProVerif. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The use of e-payment system for electronic trade is on its way to make daily life more easy and convenient. Contrarily, there are a number of security issues to be addressed, user anonymity and fair exchange have become important concerns along with authentication, confidentiality, integrity and non-repudiation. In a number of existing e-payment schemes, the customer pays for the product before acquiring it. Furthermore, many such schemes require very high computation and communication costs. To address such issues recently Yang et al. proposed an authenticated encryption scheme and an e-payment scheme based on their authenticated encryption. They excluded the need of digital signatures for authentication. Further they claimed their schemes to resist replay, man-in-middle, impersonation and identity theft attack while providing confidentiality, authenticity, integrity and privacy protection. However our analysis exposed that Yang et al.'s both authenticated encryption scheme and e-payment system are vulnerable to impersonation attack. An adversary just having knowledge of public parameters can easily masquerade as a legal user. Furthermore, we proposed improved authenticated encryption and e-payment schemes to overcome weaknesses of Yang et al.'s schemes. We prove the security of our schemes using automated tool ProVerif. The improved schemes are more robust and more lightweight than Yang et al.'s schemes which is evident from security and performance analysis.

The main contribution of this paper is to analyze a secure passwordauthentication mechanism (SPAM), proposed by Chuang et al. in 2013(IEEE Syst J.). The SPAM was used for designing a secure handover inProxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) networks. Chuang et al. in the originalpaper claimed that SPAM provides high security properties and canresist various attacks. However, in this paper we point out thatSPAM is vulnerable to the critical attacks, such as stolen smartcard and off-line dictionary attack, replay attack and impersonationattack. In addition, we show that the identity of MNs and thesession key between MN and MAG can be disclosed by an insiderattacker; resultantly, anonymity and confidentiality between MNs andMAG will be completely broken in SPAM. As a remedy, we also propose an improved scheme which not only conquers the problems of the previous schemes but also provides a reduction in computational cost. Moreover, the proposed scheme provides the user anonymity and untraceability and secure session key agreement. Finally, the security of the improved protocol is proved in the random oracle model. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.46.2.12118

Nowadays, various mobile devices are being an inseparable part of our normal life. Mobile users tend to be connected to the Internet seamlessly, which is provided by mobility management protocols. One of the latest mobility management protocol is Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), which is a network-based protocol. Authentication mechanism as a critical security procedure is not specified in PMIPv6, hence various authentication methods have been proposed. Lee and Bonin proposed a ticket-based authentication scheme for PMIPv6, which is called HOTA in 2013. Even though, HOTA offers some security protection mechanisms, but is vulnerable to DoS attack. Furthermore, we show other existing drawbacks to the scheme such as vulnerability against de-synchronization attack and Session Hijacking attack. In this paper, we propose an enhancement method to mitigate these security drawbacks. Finally, security and performance of the proposed method are analyzed and compared to HOTA method.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) consist of hundreds of miniature sensor nodes to sense various events in the surrounding environment and report back to the base station. Sensor networks are at the base of internet of things (IoT) and smart computing applications where a function is performed as a result of sensed event or information. However, in resource-limited WSN authenticating a remote user is a vital security concern. Recently, researchers put forth various authentication protocols to address different security issues. Gope et al presented a protocol claiming resistance against known attacks. A thorough analysis of their protocol shows that it is vulnerable to user traceability, stolen verifier, and denial of service (DoS) attacks. In this article, an enhanced symmetric key-based authentication protocol for IoT-based WSN has been presented. The proposed protocol has the ability to counter user traceability, stolen verifier, and DoS attacks. Furthermore, the proposed protocol has been simulated and verified using Proverif and BAN logic. The proposed protocol has the same communication cost as the baseline protocol; however, in computation cost, it has 52.63% efficiency as compared with the baseline protocol.

Recently several authentication schemes are proposed for telecare medicine information system (TMIS). Many of such schemes are proved to have weaknesses against known attacks. Furthermore, numerous such schemes cannot be used in real time scenarios. Because they assume a single server for authentication across the globe. Very recently, Amin et al. (J. Med. Syst. 39(11):180, 2015) designed an authentication scheme for secure communication between a patient and a medical practitioner using a trusted central medical server. They claimed their scheme to extend all security requirements and emphasized the efficiency of their scheme. However, the analysis in this article proves that the scheme designed by Amin et al. is vulnerable to stolen smart card and stolen verifier attacks. Furthermore, their scheme is having scalability issues along with inefficient password change and password recovery phases. Then we propose an improved scheme. The proposed scheme is more practical, secure and lightweight than Amin et al.'s scheme. The security of proposed scheme is proved using the popular automated tool ProVerif.

The SIP being an application layer protocol for signaling has been considered as the most appropriate one for multimedia applications. In order to detect some collisions and replay attacks, the SIP offers built-in authentication mechanism as per its specification, designated as HTTP digest based authentication, but study reveals that it is vulnerably susceptible to heterogeneous security issues such as impersonation attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM), server spoofing and password guessing attacks. Very recently Zhang et al. proposed symmetric key based anonymous authentication scheme for SIP. They claimed the scheme to provide privacy and anonymity, but the analysis in this paper expose that Zhang et al.’s scheme does not provide dynamic identity hence it is not anonymous. Furthermore, we proposed an improved anonymous authentication scheme for SIP. The scheme is more secure as compared with Zhang et al.’s scheme.

To enhance the quality of healthcare in the management of chronic disease, telecare medical information systems have increasingly been used. Very recently, Zhang and Qi (J. Med. Syst. 38(5):47, 32), and Zhao (J. Med. Syst. 38(5):46, 33) separately proposed two authentication schemes for telecare medical information systems using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. They claimed that their protocols achieve all security requirements including forward secrecy. However, this paper demonstrates that both Zhang and Qi's scheme, and Zhao's scheme could not provide forward secrecy. To augment the security, we propose an efficient RFID authentication scheme using elliptic curves for healthcare environments. The proposed RFID scheme is secure under common random oracle model.

Telecare medicine information system (TMIS) offers the patients convenient and expedite healthcare services remotely anywhere. Patient security and privacy has emerged as key issues during remote access because of underlying open architecture. An authentication scheme can verify patient's as well as TMIS server's legitimacy during remote healthcare services. To achieve security and privacy a number of authentication schemes have been proposed. Very recently Lu et al. (J. Med. Syst. 39(3):1---8, 2015) proposed a biometric based three factor authentication scheme for TMIS to confiscate the vulnerabilities of Arshad et al.'s (J. Med. Syst. 38(12):136, 2014) scheme. Further, they emphasized the robustness of their scheme against several attacks. However, in this paper we establish that Lu et al.'s scheme is vulnerable to numerous attacks including (1) Patient anonymity violation attack, (2) Patient impersonation attack, and (3) TMIS server impersonation attack. Furthermore, their scheme does not provide patient untraceability. We then, propose an improvement of Lu et al.'s scheme. We have analyzed the security of improved scheme using popular automated tool ProVerif. The proposed scheme while retaining the plusses of Lu et al.'s scheme is also robust against known attacks.

Proxy Mobile IPv6 is a network-based localized mobility management protocol that supports mobility without mobile nodes' participation in mobility signaling. The details of user authentication procedure are not specified in this standard, hence, many authentication schemes have been proposed for this standard. In 2013, Chuang et al., proposed an authentication method for PMIPv6, called SPAM. However, Chuang et al.'s Scheme protects the network against some security attacks, but it is still vulnerable to impersonation and password guessing attacks. In addition, we discuss other security drawbacks such as lack of revocation procedure in case of loss or stolen device, and anonymity issues of the Chuang et al.'s scheme. We further propose an enhanced authentication method to mitigate the security issues of SPAM method and evaluate our scheme using BAN logic.

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

Telecare medical information systems (TMIS) provides rapid and convenient health care services remotely. Efficient authentication is a prerequisite to guarantee the security and privacy of patients in TMIS. Authentication is used to verify the legality of the patients and TMIS server during remote access. Very recently Islam et al. (J. Med. Syst. 38(10):135, 2014) proposed a two factor authentication protocol for TMIS using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) to improve Xu et al.'s (J. Med. Syst. 38(1):9994, 2014) protocol. They claimed their improved protocol to be efficient and provides all security requirements. However our analysis reveals that Islam et al.'s protocol suffers from user impersonation and server impersonation attacks. Furthermore we proposed an enhanced protocol. The proposed protocol while delivering all the virtues of Islam et al.'s protocol resists all known attacks.