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Abstract With the continuous progress of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, IoT devices have gradually penetrated all aspects of life. However, due to rapid data growth, IoT devices with limited memory resources cannot store massive data. Cloud computing is an Internet-centric network that can provide security services and data storage. The combination of IoT devices with cloud computing considerably promotes resource sharing, facilitates users’ access to information at any time, and provides users with corresponding cloud computing services on time. Because the information transmitted through public channels is easily intercepted, tampered with, and eavesdropped on by malicious attackers. As a result, users’ and servers’ private information are disclosed. Numerous scholars have proposed different authentication protocols in this environment to protect the communications between users and servers. Amin et al. devised a smart card based authentication protocol. Unfortunately, Kang et al. demonstrated that their protocol was insecure. Huang et al. discovered Kang et al.’s improvement also has security flaws and then designed a protocol to enhance security. In this paper, we first show that Huang et al.’s protocol cannot resist privileged insider and temporary value disclosure attacks. Afterward, we propose an enhanced protocol based on their protocol. Finally, we use formal/informal security analysis to demonstrate the security of the improved protocol. The comparison results are indicated that our protocol has lower computational and communication costs under the same security level.

With the advent of state-of-art technologies, the Telecare Medicine Information System (TMIS) now offers fast and convenient healthcare services to patients at their doorsteps. However, this architecture engenders new risks and challenges to patients' and the server's confidentiality, integrity and security. In order to avoid any resource abuse and malicious attack, employing an authentication scheme is widely considered as the most effective approach for the TMIS to verify the legitimacy of patients and the server. Therefore, several authentication protocols have been proposed to this end. Very recently, Chaudhry et al. identified that there are vulnerabilities of impersonation attacks in Islam et al.'s scheme. Therefore, they introduced an improved protocol to mitigate those security flaws. Later, Qiu et al. proved that these schemes are vulnerable to the man-in-the-middle, impersonation and offline password guessing attacks. Thus, they introduced an improved scheme based on the fuzzy verifier techniques, which overcome all the security flaws of Chaudhry et al.'s scheme. However, there are still some security flaws in Qiu et al.'s protocol. In this article, we prove that Qiu et al.'s protocol has an incorrect notion of perfect user anonymity and is vulnerable to user impersonation attacks. Therefore, we introduce an improved protocol for authentication, which reduces all the security flaws of Qiu et al.'s protocol. We also make a comparison of our protocol with related protocols, which shows that our introduced protocol is more secure and efficient than previous protocols.

Modern information technology has been utilized progressively to store and distribute a large amount of healthcare data to reduce costs and improve medical facilities. In this context, the emergence of e-Health clouds offers novel opportunities, like easy and remote accessibility of medical data. However, this achievement produces plenty of new risks and challenges like how to provide integrity, security, and confidentiality to the highly susceptible e-Health data. Among these challenges, authentication is a major issue that ensures that the susceptible medical data in clouds is not available to illegal participants. The smart card, password and biometrics are three factors of authentication which fulfill the requirement of giving high security. Numerous three-factor ECC-based authentication protocols on e-Health clouds have been presented so far. However, most of the protocols have serious security flaws and produce high computation and communication overheads. Therefore, we introduce a novel protocol for the e-Health cloud, which thwarts some major attacks, such as user anonymity, offline password guessing, impersonation, and stolen smart card attacks. Moreover, we evaluate our protocol through formal security analysis using the Random Oracle Model (ROM). The analysis shows that our proposed protocol is more efficient than many existing protocols in terms of computation and communication costs. Thus, our proposed protocol is proved to be more efficient, robust and secure.

The extensive application of the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence technology has greatly promoted the construction and development of smart cities. Smart home as the foundation of smart cities can optimize home lifestyles. However, users access the smart home system through public channels, and the transmitted information is vulnerable to attack by attackers, and the privacy and data security of the home user will be difficult to be guaranteed. Therefore, how to protect users’ data and privacy security becomes critical. In this paper, we design a provably secure authentication scheme for the smart home environment, which ensures that only legitimate users can use smart devices. We use the informal model to verify the security of the scheme and formally analyze the security and correctness of the scheme through the Real or Random model. Finally, through the comparison of security and performance analysis, it is proven that our scheme has higher security under similar performance.

Roaming is when the mobile user goes out of his/her home agent network coverage and loses its signal. Loss of coverage and signals may be limited to a remote area or may occur when mobile user leaves the country and moves to a country where his/her mobile carrier network is not available. In this case, the mobile device is in roaming mode. In this mode, mobile user through connection to a Foreign Agent can still use its home agent services if his/her authentication be successful. In such situations, the authentication mechanism plays a key and important role, where the mobile user often needs to integrate and secure roaming service over multiple foreign agents. Designing a secure mechanism in Global Mobility Network (GLOMONET) is a difficult and complex task due to the computational and processing limitations of most mobile devices, as well as the wireless nature of communication environment. Unfortunately, most of the authentication schemes that have been proposed so far to meet this goal have failed to achieve their goal. In this line, Shashidhara et al. recently reported security vulnerabilities of Xu et al.’s mobile authentication scheme, and also presented an amended version of it. This paper shows that this proposed scheme has security flaws against impersonation, traceability, forward secrecy contradiction, and stolen smart card attacks, which implies that this protocol may not be a proper choice to be used on GLOMONET. On the other hand, we propose AMAPG, as a cost-efficient remedy version of the protocol which provides desired security against various attacks and also prove its security using BAN logic. We also evaluate AMAPG’s security using Scyther as a widely used formal tool to evaluate the security correctness of the cryptographic protocols.

Providing the desired security for constrained devices in the edge of Internet of Things (IoT) systems is a challenging task. Given that those devices are in shortage of the area and energy, many lightweight and ultra-lightweight protocols have been proposed so far in the literature. On the other hand, while we see many new proposals in the literature to secure communications on IoT systems, security analysis of those schemes has not received enough attention. Hence, in this paper, we analyse the security of three recently protocols for constrained environments and show their security loopholes. The analysed schemes include two protocols which have been published by IEEE Access and a recently proposed protocol entitled Extremely Good Privacy (EGP). The designers of all those protocols claimed optimal security against active adversaries. However, in this paper, we propose an efficient secret disclosure attack against EGP that recovers the whole secret parameters of the protocol after eavesdropping/blocking several sessions of the protocol and doing some off-line computations. The probability of the adversary to recover whole $2l$ secret parameters of the tag after eavesdropping/blocking 68 sessions of the protocol is 0.99, targeting a 128-bit security level by $l=128$ . In addition, we show that an adversary can efficiently desynchronize the target tag from the reader/server in polynomial time. In the case of the other protocols, we also present efficient attacks that contradict the designers’ security claims.

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.

Currently, the popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) has brought about an increase in the amount of data, so multi-server distributed cloud computing has been widely used in various applications that have brought convenience to our daily lives. At the same time, the development of the fifth generation (5G) of mobile communication technology has gradually become the main driving force for the popularization of the IoT. Because the 5G network is a heterogeneous network with multiple servers and small cells, the mutual authentication protocol under multiple servers is also applicable to the 5G network environment. However, much of the data will have serious storage and security issues during transmission. Aiming at the security issues in a multi-server (M-S) architecture, in 2018, Wu et al. proposed an authentication protocol in a distributed cloud environment. They claimed that their protocol is secure and resistant to various known types of attacks. However, we found that their protocol does not guarantee perfect forward secrecy (PFS) and suffers from privileged insider (PI) attacks. Such attacks will cause data to be out of sync. Therefore, we improved Wu et al.'s protocol and proposed an improvement in the 5G network environment. Finally, we performed a security analysis on the proposed protocol, including the automatic encryption protocol tool ProVerif, BAN logic, and informal security analysis, which proved that our protocol is secure. Compared with similar existing schemes, we have proved the efficiency of the scheme and achieved higher security standards.

Counterfeit medications are known as the medications that were manufactured for the purpose of deceptively representing as authentic, effective and original in the market. Such medications cause severe health issues for patients. Counterfeited drugs have an inimical effect on the human health. The legal manufacturing companies also face threats to their revenue loss due to these counterfeited medicines. In this paper, we introduce a novel authentication protocol for anti-counterfeited drugs systems based on Internet of Things (IoT) to help checking the validity of drugs “unit dosage”. Our protocol uses the near-field communication (NFC) as it is convenient for mobile environment. The protocol also offers reliable update phase for NFC. Furthermore, our scheme is complemented with performance evaluation along with the use of random oracle model for formal security analysis. We also evaluate our protocol broadly using Py-Charm tool. Results show that proposed protocol resists most of common related flaws almost in equal computing cost with more added security features.

In this paper, we analyse the security of two mutual authentication protocols that have been recently proposed by Gao et al. (IEEE Access, 7:8376-8384, 2019), a hash-based protocol and a Rabin public key based protocol. Our security analysis clearly shows important security pitfalls in these schemes. More precisely, in each protocol, we introduce efficient approaches to desynchronize the tag and the reader/server. The proposed attacks are almost deterministic and the complexity of each attack is a session for the hash-based and three sessions for Rabin public key based protocol. In addition, in the case of the hash-based protocol, we extend the proposed desynchronization attack to a traceability attack in which the adversary can trace any given tag based on the proposed attack with probability of almost one. In the case of Rabin public key based protocol, we extend the proposed desynchronization attack to a tag impersonation attack with the success probability of one. Besides, we propose an enhanced version of the Rabin public key based protocol to provide a secure authentication between the tag and the reader. We evaluate the security of the proposed protocol formally using the Scyther tool and also in Real-or-Random model.

Mobile satellite communication is becoming a crucial component for broadcast and broadband coverage in professional, commercial, military and emergency scenarios. Mobile devices and network control center (NCC) are the basic components of Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellites which communicate with each other with the help of gateways. The communication between these components needs high security. The various existing protocols for the environment of mobile satellite communication are insecure against numerous attacks and can be easily attacked by an adversary. So, there is an indispensable requirement of a reliable protocol which can offer efficient and secure communication for mobile satellite system. Therefore, a robust key agreement authentication scheme for mobile satellite environment is proposed in this article. The proposed protocol is developed according to the major security demands in the satellite communication networks. Our protocol provides mutual-authentication, session-key agreement and correct notion of user anonymity. The performance analysis for evaluation shows that the storage, communication and computation cost of the proposed protocol is less than many of existing protocols. Moreover, our protocol offers additional security features than that are available in the existing protocols. Hence, our protocol offers a secure authentication and key agreement for mobile satellite systems.

Smart architecture is the concept to manage the facilities via internet utilization in a proper manner. There are various technologies used in smart architecture such as cloud computing, internet of things, green computing, automation and fog computing. Smart medical system (SMS) is one of the application used in architecture, which is based on communication networking along with sensor devices. In SMS, a doctor provides online treatment to patients with the help of cloud-based applications such as mobile device, wireless body area network, etc. Security and privacy are the major concern of cloud-based applications in SMS. To maintain, security and privacy, we aim to design an elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) based secure and efficient authentication framework for cloud-assisted SMS. There are six phases in the proposed protocol such as: patient registration phase, healthcare center upload phase, patient data upload phase, treatment phase, checkup phase and emergency phase. In CSEF, there are four entities like healthecare center, patient, cloud and doctor. In CSEF, mutual authentication establishes between healthcare center and cloud, patient and cloud, doctor and cloud, and patient and healthcare center by the using ECC and hash function. The CSEF is secure against security attacks, and satisfies many security attributes such as man-in-the-middle attack, impersonation attack, data non-repudiation, doctor anonymity, replay attack, known-key security property, message authentication, patient anonymity, data confidentiality, stolen-verifier attack, parallel session attack and session key security. Further, the CSEF is efficient in terms of computation and communication compared to others related frameworks. As a result, CSEF can be utilized in cloud-based SMS.

A smart grid is a new ecosystem, which is made by combining a number of smart Internet of Things (IoT) devices that manage wide energy sources by increasing the efficiency and reliability of the smart energy systems. As the IoT devices in the smart grid ecosystem generate a gigantic amount of data that needs to be stored and managed in the cloud server. On the other hand, the stored data in the cloud server can be accessible to a number of data users, therefore the data need authenticity and secrecy. Here, to fulfill the security requirements of such type of communication, signcryption with proxy re-encryption technique is the most suitable option where a semi-trusted third party can alter a ciphertext that has been encrypted for one user into another ciphertext without seeing the original content of the message. However, the existing signcryption with proxy re-encryption schemes for the smart grid environment is suffering from more bandwidth space and greater computational time requirements. Thus, in this paper, we propose a lightweight certificate-based signcryption with a proxy re-encryption (CBSRE) scheme for smart grid based-IoT devices with the intention of reducing the computational and communicational costs. For the security and efficiency of the proposed CBSRE scheme, we used a hyperelliptic curve cryptosystem that uses small parameters with a key size of 80-bits. Furthermore, the proposed scheme provides the security requirements of confidentiality (IND-CBSRE-CCA2-I and IND-CBSRE-CCA2-II), unforgeability (EUF-CBSRE-CMA-I and EUF-CBSRE-CMA-II) and forward secrecy. Additionally, we compared our proposed CBSRE scheme with the existing proxy signcryption with re-encryption schemes and the final results show that the new scheme provides strong security with the expanse of minimal computational and communications resources.

The communication security of constrained objects such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and wireless sensor network (WSN) is very challenging because it is not always possible to use the conventional on-the-shelf solutions for them, due to their limited available power and computational capabilities. To deal with this demand, many security protocols have been developed by the researchers so far. However, in many cases, the later analyses that have been carried out on these protocols have shown that they are vulnerable to one or few attacks, which could be enough to eliminate any application for such protocols. Following this direction, in this article, we analyze the security of four recent ultra-lightweight/lightweight protocols, by presenting important attacks including secret disclosure attack and desynchronization attack against them. To address the shortcoming of the previous protocols, we present a new security protocol based on lightweight block ciphers name it LBCbAP. In this protocol, we use CRAFT as the core security primitive. CRAFT is a tweakable block cipher which has been recently proposed and independent security analysis confirmed its security. Our detailed security analysis of LBCbAP, which is performed both informally and formally through the GNY logic and the Scyther tool, demonstrates its security against various types of attacks including secret disclosure and desynchronization attacks. The cost analysis of the designed protocol and comparison with the related lightweight protocols show that LBCbAP is cost efficient.

Although the Internet of Things (IoT) provides many benefits for our life but it also raises many security threats. The main risk is the security of the transferred data comprising very critical information that its leakage compromises our privacy. In this regard, many security protocols have been introduced in literature, among which multi factor authentication protocols have been received considerable attention. in this paper, in the first step, the first third party security analysis of the newly proposed scheme denoted as ESEAP (designed by Kumari et al.) is presented. The provided analysis shows that this protocol has a number of security flaws including vulnerability to off-line password guessing attack, traceability attack, impersonation attack, insider attack and also desynchronization attack. For the second step, an enhanced protocol denoted as $RESEAP$ is proposed in which we use physically unclonable function to improve its security. We prove the security of RESEAP informally and also formally in real or random model, which is a widely accepted security model to prove the security of a cryptographic protocol. While the security analysis confirms that RESEAP protocol has better security, its comparison with ESEAP also shows its higher efficiency.

The smart home is a crucial embodiment of the internet of things (IoT), which can facilitate users to access smart home services anytime and anywhere. Due to the limited resources of cloud computing, it cannot meet users’ real-time needs. Therefore, edge computing emerges as the times require, providing users with better real-time access and storage. The application of edge computing in the smart home environment can enable users to enjoy smart home services. However, users and smart devices communicate through public channels, and malicious attackers may intercept information transmitted through public channels, resulting in user privacy disclosure. Therefore, it is a critical issue to protect the secure communication between users and smart devices in the smart home environment. Furthermore, authentication protocols in smart home environments also have some security challenges. In this paper, we propose an anonymous authentication protocol that applies edge computing to the smart home environment to protect communication security between entities. To protect the security of smart devices, we embed physical unclonable functions (PUF) into each smart device. Real-or-random model, informal security analysis, and ProVerif are adopted to verify the security of our protocol. Finally, we compare our protocol with existing protocols regarding security and performance. The comparison results demonstrate that our protocol has higher security and slightly better performance.

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.

Anonymous password-authenticated key exchange (APAKE) allows a client to authenticate herself and to establish a secure session key with a remote server via only a low-entropy password, while keeping her actual identity anonymous to the third party as well as to the server. Since that APAKE protocol enjoys both the convenience of password authentication and the advantage of privacy protection, researchers have paid much attention to them. However, most of the existing APAKE protocols are designed in the symmetric setting which does not take into consideration the threat of password file leakage. To mitigate the damage of server compromise, we propose a verifier-based anonymous password-authenticated key exchange protocol, in which the server holds a verifier corresponding to each client instead of the clear password. The construction of our protocol is built on standard cryptographic primitives such public key encryption, smooth projective hash functions and password hashing schemes. The resulting protocol is proved secure in the standard model, i.e., without resorting to random oracles. Comparisons with other similar schemes show that our protocol guarantees stronger security while enjoys considerable efficiency in terms of computational cost.

The Internet of Things (IoT) forms a foundation for cyber-physical systems. We propose an efficient and secure authentication scheme for machine-to-machine (M2M) networks in IoT enabled cyber-physical systems. Smart objects and smart devices over CPS are capable of capturing a variety of multimedia contents; interact with each other and also with the physical world in a fully automatic manner without human interference. The proposed scheme allows any pair of entities in an M2M network to mutually authenticate each other and agree on a session key for communicating data in a secure and efficient way. The authentication process does not incorporate the M2M service provider, and hence eliminates the burden of managing the authentication of massive scale devices at the edge of the network. The burden of the authentication process is offloaded and distributed on the gateways under the authority of this M2M service provider. The proposed scheme requires the mobile user to hold only one secret key provided by the M2M service provider, by which, he can roam randomly in the M2M network and authenticate to any of the gateways in the domain. Then, this authenticated gateway allows the mobile user to authenticate with any sensor node in the domain. In the proposed scheme, the authentication process does not rely on any public key cryptographic operations. Authentication is achieved using very few hash invocations and symmetric key encryptions. Therefore, the scheme is suitable for environmental sensors which are limited in resources (computation, storage, and energy). We analyze the security of the proposed scheme using BAN logic, which is widely accepted as a framework for the assessment of authentication protocols and also using ProVerif. We assess the efficiency of the proposed scheme and compare with some recently proposed schemes.

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

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

With the maturity and popularization of the Internet of Things, we saw the emergence of the Internet of Vehicles. This collects and processes real-time traffic information, alleviates traffic congestion, and realizes intelligent transportation. However, sensitive information, such as real-time driving data of vehicles, are transmitted on public channels, which are easily to steal and manipulate for attackers. In addition, vehicle communications are vulnerable to malicious attacks. Therefore, it is essential to design secure and efficient protocols. Many studies have adopted asymmetric cryptosystems and fog computing to in this environment, but most of them do not reflect the advantages of fog nodes, which share the computational burden of cloud servers. Therefore, it is challenging to design a protocol that effectively uses fog nodes. In this paper, we design an authentication protocol based on a symmetric encryption algorithm and fog computing in the Internet of Vehicles. In this protocol, we first propose a four-layer architecture that significantly reduces the computational burden of cloud servers. To resist several well-known attacks, we also apply Intel software guard extensions to our protocol. This is because it can resist privileged insider attacks. We prove the security of the proposed protocol through the Real-Or-Random model and informal analysis. We also compare the performance of the proposed protocol with recent protocols. The results show better security and a lower computational cost.

The Internet of Health Things (IoHT), which is an extension of the Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare, has provided a new type of telemedicine approach. In IoHT, wearable sensors are used to collect patient health data, and information is transmitted remotely to doctors who can develop accurate treatment plans and provide timely telemedicine services to patients. However, patient health data are transmitted over a public channel, which means that the privacy and medical data of patients are at significant risk of leakage and can be confronted by serious security problems. We proposed a lightweight authentication protocol known as LAP-IoHT for IoHT environments to overcome the various threats that are currently faced by IoHT. We verified the security of LAP-IoHT using a Real-or-Random model and demonstrated its significant performance advantage by conducting a comparative analysis with other similar protocols for a better adaptation to the IoHT environment.

With the rapid development of technology based on the Internet of Things (IoT), numerous IoT devices are being used on a daily basis. The rise in cloud computing plays a crucial role in solving the resource constraints of IoT devices and in promoting resource sharing, whereby users can access IoT services provided in various environments. However, this complex and open wireless network environment poses security and privacy challenges. Therefore, designing a secure authentication protocol is crucial to protecting user privacy in IoT services. In this paper, a lightweight authentication protocol was designed for IoT-enabled cloud computing environments. A real or random model, and the automatic verification tool ProVerif were used to conduct a formal security analysis. Its security was further proved through an informal analysis. Finally, through security and performance comparisons, our protocol was confirmed to be relatively secure and to display a good performance.

At present, the great progress made by the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the emergence of the Internet of Drones (IoD). IoD is an extension of the IoT, which is used to control and manipulate drones entering the flight area. Now, the fifth-generation mobile communication technology (5G) has been introduced into the IoD; it can transmit ultra-high-definition data, make the drones respond to ground commands faster and provide more secure data transmission in the IoD. However, because the drones communicate on the public channel, they are vulnerable to security attacks; furthermore, drones can be easily captured by attackers. Therefore, to solve the security problem of the IoD, Hussain et al. recently proposed a three-party authentication protocol in an IoD environment. The protocol is applied to the supervision of smart cities and collects real-time data about the smart city through drones. However, we find that the protocol is vulnerable to drone capture attacks, privileged insider attacks and session key disclosure attacks. Based on the security of the above protocol, we designed an improved protocol. Through informal analysis, we proved that the protocol could resist known security attacks. In addition, we used the real-oracle random model and ProVerif tool to prove the security and effectiveness of the protocol. Finally, through comparison, we conclude that the protocol is secure compared with recent protocols.

In the literature, many three-party authenticated key exchange (3PAKE) protocols are put forwarded to established a secure session key between two users with the help of trusted server. The computed session key will ensure secure message exchange between the users over any insecure communication networks. In this paper, we identified some deficiencies in Tan’s 3PAKE protocol and then devised an improved 3PAKE protocol without symmetric key en/decryption technique for mobile-commerce environments. The proposed protocol is based on the elliptic curve cryptography and one-way cryptographic hash function. In order to prove security validation of the proposed 3PAKE protocol we have used widely accepted AVISPA software whose results confirm that the proposed protocol is secure against active and passive attacks including replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. The proposed protocol is not only secure in the AVISPA software, but it also secure against relevant numerous security attacks such as man-in-the-middle attack, impersonation attack, parallel attack, key-compromise impersonation attack, etc. In addition, our protocol is designed with lower computation cost than other relevant protocols. Therefore, the proposed protocol is more efficient and suitable for practical use than other protocols in mobile-commerce environments.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are of prominent use in unmanned surveillance applications. This peculiar trait of WSNs is actually the underlying technology of various applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) such as smart homes, smart cities, smart shopping complexes, smart traffic, smart health, and much more. Over time, WSNs have evolved as a strong base for laying the foundations of IoT infrastructure. In order to address the scenario in which a user wants to access the real-time data directly from the sensor node in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), Das recently proposed an anonymity-preserving three-factor authentication protocol. Das’s protocol is suitable for resource-constrained sensor nodes because it only uses lightweight cryptographic primitives such as hash functions and symmetric encryption schemes as building blocks. Das’s protocol is claimed to be secure against different known attacks by providing formal security proof and security verification using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool. However, we find that Das’s protocol has the following security loopholes: (1) By using a captured sensor node, an adversary can impersonate a legal user to the gateway node, impersonate other sensor nodes to deceive the user, and the adversary can also decrypt all the cipher-texts of the user; (2) the gateway node has a heavy computational cost due to user anonymity and thus the protocol is vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks. We overcome the shortcomings of Das’s protocol and propose an improved protocol. We also prove the security of the proposed protocol in the random oracle model. Compared with the other related protocols, the improved protocol enjoys better functionality without much enhancement in the computation and communication costs. Consequently, it is more suitable for applications in WSNs

In 2009, Hsiang-Shih’s proposed an improvement to Yoon-Ryu-Yoo’s scheme to prevent offline password guess attack and parallel session attack; and Kim-Chung proposed amore secure improvement to Yoon-Yoo’s scheme to with stand offline password leak, masquerading attacks and stolen verifier attack. This article shows that the two improved schemes are still vulnerable to offline password guess attack, insider attack or extended insider attack, denial of service attack and other security flaws. We also propose an improved scheme that not only retains the advantages of the aforementioned schemes but also enhances its security by withstanding the flaws discussed.

Healthcare service sector is one of the major applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) acknowledged as Wireless Medical Sensor Network (WMSNs). It deploys tiny medical sensor-nodes ( MS -nodes) on the body of the patient to sense crucial physiological signs which can be accessed and analyzed by registered medical professionals. Recently, Khan et al. analyzed Kumar et al.'s scheme proposed for healthcare applications using WMSNs and observed that the scheme is susceptible to many security weaknesses if an adversary extracts the information from the lost smart card of some user. The adversary can access patient's physiological data without knowing actual password, can deceive medical professionals by sending fake information about patients, can guess the password of a user from the corresponding smart card, and so forth. Besides, the scheme fails to resist insider attack, lacks user anonymity and the session key shared between the user and the MS -node is insecure. To overcome these problems, we propose an improved user authentication scheme for healthcare applications using WMSNs. We show that the scheme is free from the identified weaknesses and excels in performance and efficiency scheme.