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Frontend supply chains involve the transfer of large quantities of products. Therefore, incomplete transfer and product loss are inevitable. This paper presents a high-efficiency group ownership transfer protocol that incorporates blockchains to enable the efficient transfer of large quantities of products and prevent disputes regarding transfer completion. This protocol collocates authenticated information of a manufacturer with its exclusive blockchain address to generate an initial transaction block. The blockchain is then used to trace the original product manufacturers to prevent counterfeiting, and a grouping proof is employed to prevent disputes regarding transfer comprehensiveness. The proposed protocol was capable of resisting common off-chain radio frequency identification ownership transfer attacks, indicating its security. A security testing tool was employed to prove whether the on-chain smart contracts could also resist the attacks on blockchain. The analysis and experiment results revealed that the proposed protocol required fewer messages for ownership transfer and half the calculation time compared with the existing protocols. Thus, for the simultaneous transfer of ownership of a massive number of tags, the proposed protocol is the most efficient, with a reduced calculation time, thus making it most suitable for bulk cargo ownership transfer in the frontend supply chain environment.

Contemporary developments in providing proper security in the Internet of Things (IoT) have been made signcryption scheme highly suitable for various applications such as smart cities, smart healthcare and smart agriculture. However, security and privacy are the primary concerns in protecting data as it was highly sensitive. This paper is proposing a new Identity based online/off-line signcryption scheme suitable to provide secure message communication among IoT devices, gateway, and the server. This method is divided into the online and offline phases, where heavy mathematical computations are carried out in the offline phase and light computations in the online phase. This scheme provides a security solution for integrating Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) into the IoT. Experimentation was done and finally compared against existing techniques and proved that the proposed mechanism reduces the computation time in online by performing a greater number of operations in off-line signcryption phase. Further, it provides indistinguishability against adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks and existential unforgeability against adaptive chosen messages attacks.

The blend of Internet of Things (IoT) and social networking has introduced the emerging notion of social Internet of Things, which is bringing advancements in the operation of concerned industries. There are various prevailing applications of social internet of things; smart grid is one of them. The smart grid is considered as economical robust and intuitive replacement of the conventional grid. However, smart grid experiences two significant challenges, i.e. privacy and security. This article is dedicated to resolve the privacy and security concerns for the vehicle to grid networks to facilitate their large-scale integration with smart grids. As anticipation, a vigorous key agreement protocol is introduced to achieve mutual authentication with an aided feature of user anonymity. Moreover, efficiency in terms of computation, communication and storage needs to be taken care for resource-constrained infrastructure like vehicle to grid network. We have introduced a lightweight key agreement protocol using lightweight cryptographic operations such as exclusive-OR and hash etc. This protocol is validated through a formal security model. An informal security analysis is also elaborated to present the security strength of our protocol against well-known attacks. Furthermore, we have implemented all the cryptographic operations used at trusted agent's side on a desktop system, while the operations used at battery vehicle unit's side are implemented on an Arduino to get the experimental results. In the end, we have presented a performance analysis to compare the performance of our protocol with related ones. This comparison highlights that our protocol is not only lightweight but also efficient in terms of communication and storage cost of related protocols.

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), there are also major information security risks hidden behind them. There are major information security risks hidden behind them. Attackers can conceal their actual attack locations by spoofing IP addresses to attack IoT devices, law enforcement cannot easily track them. Therefore, a method to trace stealth attacks is required. Conventional IP traceback methods that traceback only attackers on the network layer and cannot infer the path information of a packet traversing the switch. This article proposes a method to simultaneously traceback attack sources at the network layer and the data link layer with only one single packet. Even if the core network contains a switch or if multiple attackers launch attacks from different locations, the method can correctly traceback the true devices responsible for the attacks, and its achievements include a zero false negative rate and a low false positive rate.

Among other security concerns, the reliable device to device direct communication is an important research aspect in sensor cloud system application of Internet of things (IoT). The access control mechanism can ensure the reliability through secure communication among two IoT devices without mediation of intermediate agent. Mainly, it requires twofold strategy involving the authentication of each other and session key establishment. Quite recently, in 2019, Das et al. proposed a certificate based lightweight access control and key agreement scheme for IoT devices (LACKA-IoT) to ensure smooth and secure access control and claimed LACKA-IoT to withstand the several attacks. Specifically, it is claimed that LACKA-IoT can resist device impersonation and man in middle attacks. However, the proof in this article refutes their claim and it is shown here, that LACKA-IoT is insecure against both device impersonation and man in middle attacks. An adversary just by using public parameters and by listening the communication channel can impersonate any device. Moreover, the same can also launch successful man in middle attack using public parameters and listened messages from public channel. An improved protocol iLACKA-IoT is then proposed in the paper. The iLACKA-IoT provides resistance against various types of threats and provides the required level of security, for evidence both formal validation through random or real (ROR) model as well as the informal validation through discussion on attack resilience is provided. The iLACKA-IoT is not only better in security but also provides performance efficiency as compared with LACKA-IoT and related schemes.

A security protocol for wireless transmission is essential to defend sensitive information from malicious enemies by providing a variety of facilities such as privacy of the user’s information, secure session key, associated authentication, and user-repeal facility when a person’s authorizations are suddenly disclosed. Singh et al. proposed an improved user authentication and key agreement system for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Authors are sure that their protocol is secure from various attacks. Here, we find several security pitfalls in their scheme, such as an offline password-guessing attack, failure to protect the session key, and a man-in-the-middle attack. To remove the identified pitfalls found in Singh et al.’s scheme, we design an enhanced authentication scheme for WSNs tailored for IoT. We prove the reliability of our proposed protocol using the real or random (RoR) model. We also evaluate the proposed scheme with the associated schemes and show its superior efficacy as compared to its counterparts.

In the IoT environment, many terminal devices are deployed in unattended areas. If these devices are moved elsewhere by an attacker, the wrong environmental sensing values are obtained, which causes a major disaster. In this paper, we propose an ambient authentication mechanism based on audio to be used in multi-factor authentication by using the ambient sensors equipped with a smart phone. An ultrasonic signal that is not detectable by the human ear was transmitted by the authenticator, and the attenuated signal received by the user being authenticated was transmitted back to the authentication server. The transmitted and received decoded symbol sequences of the audio signal are used to calculated the bit error rate, which is used to measure the relative distance. Our proposed method can narrow the authentication distance to less than 0.5 meters, which can greatly improve the security of the authentication system.

In recent years, improvements to the computational ability of mobile phones and support for near-field-communication have enabled transactions to be performed by using mobile phones to emulate a credit card or by using quick response codes. Thus, users need not carry credit cards but can simply use their mobile phones. However, the Europay MasterCard Visa (EMV) protocol is associated with a number of security concerns. In contactless transactions, attackers can make purchases by launching a relay attack from a distance. To protect message transmission and prevent relay attacks, we propose a transaction protocol that is compatible with EMV protocols and that can perform mutual authentication and ambient authentication on near-field-communication-enabled mobile phones. Through mutual authentication, our protocol ensures the legitimacy of transactions and establishes keys for a transaction to protect the subsequent messages, thereby avoiding security problems in EMV protocols, such as man-in-the-middle attacks, skimming, and clone attacks on credit cards. By using ambient factors, our protocol verifies whether both transacting parties are located in the same environment, and it prevents relay attacks in the transaction process.

The design of the Controller Area Network (CAN bus) did not account for security issues and, consequently, attacks often use external mobile communication interfaces to conduct eavesdropping, replay, spoofing, and denial-of-service attacks on a CAN bus, posing a risk to driving safety. Numerous studies have proposed CAN bus safety improvement techniques that emphasize modifying the original CAN bus method of transmitting frames. These changes place additional computational burdens on electronic control units cause the CAN bus to lose the delay guarantee feature. Consequently, we proposed a method that solves these compatibility and security issues. Simple and efficient frame authentication algorithms were used to prevent spoofing and replay attacks. This method is compatible with both CAN bus and CAN-FD protocols and has a lower operand when compared with other methods.

In 2014, Yang proposed a method to enhance the current EMV credit card protocol (EPMAR). However, the protocol ignores the exceeding of a credit quota caused by multiple offline transactions, with the result that the amount spent can exceed the risk control scope. In this paper, we proposed an EMV-compatible offline mobile payment protocol with mutual authentication (EOPMA) to enhance EPMAR. In EOPMA, we use the reverse hash chain technique to guarantee the payment, which solves the problem of credit quotas getting exceeded because of multiple offline payments. During a transaction, in addition to payment for merchandise, an offline authorization certificate for the transaction is sent to the merchant. The merchant can verify the correctness of the transaction in real time. Our protocol is compatible with the EMV standard, which is applicable to the retail environment of numerous merchants and effectively, making EMV transactions more secure and reliable. We use numerical analysis to examine the security and performance of the protocols. We formally check the correctness of EOPMA by using the Gong−Needham−Yahalom logic.

We propose a grouping proof scheme to help the nursing staff on their final check automatically before a medicine round. During the medicine round, even though their RFID reader is offline, our method can generate multiple proofs for each patient and help the medical caretakers follow the five-right policy to correctly administer the drugs to their patients. Besides, because our scheme enables a nurse to target specific group tags during a medicine round, it is able to generate proofs even when the illegitimate tags are on site. We prove that our generated proof is reliable because it can resist most security threats and guarantee the integrity of the proof. Besides, our proposed scheme guarantees anonymity on the RFID tags, so the patients' sensitive information and location privacy can be protected. Last, we run a simulation to show that compared with the related methods our proposed scheme requires the least transmission time and the lowest computation loads to generate a proof.

Near field communication has enabled customers to put their credit cards into a smartphone and use the phone for credit card transaction. But EMV contactless payment allows unauthorized readers to access credit cards. Besides, in offline transaction, a merchant’s reader cannot verify whether a card has been revoked. Therefore, we propose an EMV-compatible payment protocol to mitigate the transaction risk. And our modifications to the EMV standard are transparent to merchants and users. We also encrypt the communications between a card and a reader to prevent eavesdropping on sensitive data. The protocol is able to resist impersonation attacks and to avoid the security threats in EMV. In offline transactions, our scheme requires a user to apply for a temporary offline certificate in advance. With the certificate, banks no longer need to lower customer’s credits for risk control, and users can have online-equivalent credits in offline transactions.