Privacy‐preserving authentication scheme for on‐road on‐demand refilling of pseudonym in VANET

Privacy in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) is fundamental because the user's safety may be threatened by the identity and the real‐time spatiotemporal data exchanged on the network. This issue is commonly addressed by the use of certified temporal pseudonyms and their updating strategies to ensure the user's unlinkability and anonymity. IEEE 1609.2 Standard specified the process of certifying pseudonym along with certificates structure. However, the communication procedure between the certifying authority and the requesting vehicle was not defined. In this paper, a new privacy‐preserving solution for pseudonym on‐road on‐demand refilling is proposed where the vehicle anonymously authenticates itself to the regional authority subsidiary of the central trusted authority to request a new pseudonyms pool. The authentication method has two phases, the first one uses anonymous tickets, and the second one is a challenge‐based authentication. The anonymous tickets are certificates that do not include the identity of the user. Instead, it contains a reference number and the certifying authority signature. The challenge authentication is identity‐less to preserve the privacy, yet it is used to prevent the misuse of tickets and the impersonation of its owner. Our proposed scheme is analyzed by the use of Burrows, Abadi and Needham (BAN) logic to demonstrate its correctness. It is also specified and checked by using the Security Protocol ANimator (SPAN) and the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tools. The logical demonstration proved that this privacy‐preserving authentication is assured. The SPAN and AVISPA tools illustrated that it is resilient to security attacks.     

An efficient three factor–based authentication scheme in multiserver environment using ECC

Recently, Li et al have developed a smartcard‐based remote user authentication scheme in multiserver environment. They have claimed that their scheme is secured against some possible cryptographic attacks. However, we have analyzed that the scheme of Li et al cannot preserve all the proclaimed security goals, which are given as follows: (1) It is not withstanding password‐guessing, user impersonation, insider, and smartcard theft attacks, and (2) it fails to facilitate user anonymity property. To remedy these above‐mentioned security flaws, we have proposed an efficient three factor–based authentication scheme in a multiserver environment using elliptic curve cryptography. The Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham logic is used to confirm the security validation of our scheme, which ensures that it provides mutual‐authentication and session‐key agreement securely. Then, the random oracle model is also considered to analyze the proposed scheme, and it shows that the backbone parameters, ie, identity, password, biometrics, and the session key, are secure from an adversary. Further, the informal security analysis confirms that the suggested scheme can withstand against some possible mentioned attacks. Later, the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool is incorporated to ensure its security against passive and active attacks. Finally, the performance comparison of the scheme is furnished to confirm its enhanced security with other relevant schemes.     

An anonymous and robust multi‐server authentication protocol using multiple registration servers

The concept of multi‐server authentication includes multiple numbers of application servers. The registration/control server is the central point in such environment to provide smooth services to a limited number of legitimate users. However, this type of environment is inappropriate to handle unlimited users since the number of users may grow, and thus, the response time may be very high. To eliminate these shortcomings, we have modified the existing multi‐server authentication architecture and then designed a new scheme by including multiregistration server technique that can provide a smooth environment to support unlimited number of users. The main aspect of our design is to provide a secure authentication environment for multi‐server application using password and smartcard so that the participants can securely communicate with each other. The simulation results are obtained by executing our protocol using AVISPA tool. The results provide concrete evidence about the security safety against active and passive attacks. Furthermore, the justification of correctness of the freshness of the session key negotiation and the mutual authentication between the participants has done been evaluated with the BAN logic model. The comprehensive comparative analysis justifies our argument that our protocol has better applicability in multi‐server environments compared to other protocols with similar nature.     

A secure multifactor remote user authentication scheme for Internet of Multimedia Things environment

To attain ubiquitous connectivity of everything, Internet of Things (IoT) systems must include “multimedia things.” Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) is a heterogeneous network of smart multimedia things connected together and with other physical devices to the Internet so as to achieve globally available multimedia services and applications. Due to the ever increasing amount of multimedia data in IoT environments, securing these systems becomes crucial. This is because these systems are easily susceptible to attacks when information or any service is accessed by the users. In this paper, we propose a secure three‐factor remote user authentication scheme for IoMT systems using ECC. The formal security proof performed using ROR model and BAN logic confirms that an attacker will not be able to extract sensitive user information. Through informal security analysis, we justify the resistance of the scheme against several security attacks. The performance comparison shows that the scheme is efficient in terms of computational cost, security features, and attack resistance. Furthermore, simulation of the scheme using AVISPA and Proverif proves that the scheme is secure against all active and passive attacks.     

On the security and improvement of privacy‐preserving 3‐factor authentication scheme for TMIS

The telecare medicine information system (TMIS) enables patients from different regions to remotely share the same telecare services, which significantly enhances the quality and effectiveness of medical treatment. On the other hand, patients' electronic health records usually involve their privacy information, they thus hesitate to directly transmit these information in TMIS over the public network due to the threat of privacy disclosure. The authenticated key agreement, as a core building of securing communications over the public network, is considered to be necessary for strengthening the security of TMIS. Recently, we note Zhang et al introduced a 3‐factor authenticated key agreement scheme for TMIS and asserted that the proposed scheme can resist various well‐known attacks. Unfortunately, in this paper, we point out that the scheme of Zhang et al cannot achieve the claimed security guarantees. Specifically, their scheme is vulnerable to offline password/identity guessing attack and user/server impersonation attack. To conquer the above security pitfalls, we put forward a new 3‐factor authenticated key agreement scheme with privacy preservation for TMIS. The security evaluation and performance discussion indicate that our scheme can be free from those well‐known and classical attacks including offline guessing attack and impersonation attack, without increasing additional computation cost when compared with related works. Consequently, the new authentication scheme would be more desirable for securing communications in TMIS.     

On the design of secure user authenticated key management scheme for multigateway‐based wireless sensor networks using ECC

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), there are many critical applications (for example, healthcare, vehicle tracking, and battlefield), where the online streaming data generated from different sensor nodes need to be analyzed with respect to quick control decisions. However, as the data generated by these sensor nodes usually flow through open channel, so there are higher chances of various types of attacks either on the nodes or on to the data captured by these nodes. In this paper, we aim to design a new elliptic curve cryptography–based user authenticated key agreement protocol in a hierarchical WSN so that a legal user can only access the streaming data from generated from different sensor nodes. The proposed scheme is based upon 3‐factor authentication, as it applies smart card, password, and personal biometrics of a user (for ticket generation). The proposed scheme maintains low computation cost for resource‐constrained sensor nodes, as it uses efficient 1‐way cryptographic hash function and bitwise exclusive‐OR operations for secure key establishment between different sensor nodes. The security analysis using the broadly accepted Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham logic, formal security verification using the popular simulation tool (automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications), and informal security show that the proposed scheme is resilient against several well‐known attacks needed for a user authentication scheme in WSNs. The comparison of security and functionality requirements, communication and computation costs of the proposed scheme, and other related existing user authentication schemes shows the superior performance of the proposed scheme.     

A provably secure biometrics and ECC‐based authentication and key agreement scheme for WSNs

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) underpin many applications of the Internet of Things (IoT), ranging from smart cities to unmanned surveillance and others. Efficient user authentication in WSNs, particularly in settings with diverse IoT device configurations and specifications (eg, resource‐constrained IoT devices) and difficult physical conditions (eg, physical disaster area and adversarial environment such as battlefields), remains challenging, both in research and in practice. Here, we put forth a user anonymous authentication scheme, relying on both biometrics and elliptic curve cryptography, to establish desired security features like forward and backward secrecy. We then make use of the Random‐or‐Real (RoR) model to prove the security of our scheme. We have implemented the proposed scheme in an environment compatible with WSNs. We show after conducting the comparison of the proposed scheme with some recent and related existent schemes that it satisfies various essential and desirable security attributes of a WSN environment. We conclude that the proposed scheme is suitable for the WSN scenario demanding high security.     

User centric three‐factor authentication protocol for cloud‐assisted wearable devices

Wearable devices, which provide the services of collecting personal data, monitoring health conditions, and so on, are widely used in many fields, ranging from sports to healthcare. Although wearable devices bring convenience to people's lives, they bring about significant security concerns, such as personal privacy disclosure and unauthorized access to wearable devices. To ensure the privacy and security of the sensitive data, it is critical to design an efficient authentication protocol suitable for wearable devices. Recently, Das et al proposed a lightweight authentication protocol, which achieves secure communication between the wearable device and the mobile terminal. However, we find that their protocol is vulnerable to offline password guessing attack and desynchronization attack. Therefore, we put forward a user centric three‐factor authentication scheme for wearable devices assisted by cloud server. Informal security analysis and formal analysis using ProVerif is executed to demonstrate that our protocol not only remedies the flaws of the protocol of Das et al but also meets desired security properties. Comparison with related schemes shows that our protocol satisfies security and usability simultaneously.     

An ECC‐based authenticated group key exchange protocol in IBE framework

With the rapid demand for various increasing applications, the internet users require a common secret key to communicate among a group. The traditional key exchange protocols involve a trusted key generation center for generation and distribution of the group key among the various group members. Therefore, the establishment of a trusted key generation center server and the generation (and distribution) of common session key require an extra overhead. To avoid this difficulty, a number of group key exchange protocols have been proposed in the literature. However, these protocols are vulnerable to many attacks and have a high computational and communication cost. In this paper, we present an elliptic curve cryptography–based authenticated group key exchange (ECC‐AGKE) protocol, which provides better security and has lower computational cost compared to related proposed schemes. Further, a complexity reduction method is deployed to reduce the overall complexity of the proposed elliptic curve cryptography–based authenticated group key exchange protocol. The security of proposed work is ensured by the properties of elliptic curves. A security adversarial model is given and an extensive formal security analysis against our claim is done in the random oracle model. We also made a comparison of our proposed protocol with similar works and found that ours have better complexity, security and efficiency over others.     

Secure multi‐factor remote user authentication scheme for Internet of Things environments

Because of the exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT), several services are being developed. These services can be accessed through smart gadgets by the user at any place, every time and anywhere. This makes security and privacy central to IoT environments. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, robust, and multi‐factor remote user authentication and key agreement scheme for IoT environments. Using this protocol, any authorized user can access and gather real‐time sensor data from the IoT nodes. Before gaining access to any IoT node, the user must first get authenticated by the gateway node as well as the IoT node. The proposed protocol is based on XOR and hash operations, and includes: (i) a 3‐factor authentication (ie, password, biometrics, and smart device); (ii) mutual authentication ; (iii) shared session key ; and (iv) key freshness . It satisfies desirable security attributes and maintains acceptable efficiency in terms of the computational overheads for resource constrained IoT environment. Further, the informal and formal security analysis using AVISPA proves security strength of the protocol and its robustness against all possible security threats. Simulation results also prove that the scheme is secure against attacks.     

A privacy‐preserving biometrics based authenticated key agreement scheme using ECC

To ensure secure communication over the insecure public network, this work presents a privacy‐preserving biometrics‐based authenticated key agreement scheme using elliptic curve cryptography, making full use of the advantages that the biometrics can be used to uniquely identify a particular human, and the elliptic curve cryptography can provide the same level security with far less key size compared with other public key cryptography. The proposed scheme realizes the mutual authentication of participants, session key agreement, and various security properties and also can resist kinds of known attacks. Moreover, the proposed scheme has perfect user experience in the aspect of changing password by not interacting with the server. In addition, the security features of our new designed scheme are formally proved under the widely used BPR adversary model. Therefore, from the viewpoint of the authors, the proposed scheme can be considered as the authenticated key agreement scheme for mobile users.     

An efficient and secure 3‐factor user‐authentication protocol for multiserver environment

In the last decade, the number of web‐based applications is increasing rapidly, which leads to high demand for user authentication protocol for multiserver environment. Many user‐authentication protocols have been proposed for different applications. Unfortunately, most of them either have some security weaknesses or suffer from unsatisfactory performance. Recently, Ali and Pal proposed a three‐factor user‐authentication protocol for multiserver environment. They claimed that their protocol can provide mutual authentication and is secure against many kinds of attacks. However, we find that Ali and Pal's protocol cannot provide user anonymity and is vulnerable to 4 kinds of attacks. To enhance security, we propose a new user‐authentication protocol for multiserver environment. Then, we provide a formal security analysis and a security discussion, which indicate our protocol is provably secure and can withstand various attacks. Besides, we present a performance analysis to show that our protocol is efficient and practical for real industrial environment.     

A secure and effective biometric‐based user authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks using smart card and fuzzy extractor

User authentication is a prominent security requirement in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for accessing the real‐time data from the sensors directly by a legitimate user (external party). Several user authentication schemes are proposed in the literature. However, most of them are either vulnerable to different known attacks or they are inefficient. Recently, Althobaiti et al. presented a biometric‐based user authentication scheme for WSNs. Although their scheme is efficient in computation, in this paper, we first show that their scheme has several security pitfalls such as (i) it is not resilient against node capture attack; (ii) it is insecure against impersonation attack; and (iii) it is insecure against man‐in‐the‐middle attack. We then aim to propose a novel biometric‐based user authentication scheme suitable for WSNs in order to withstand the security pitfalls found in Althobaiti et al. scheme. We show through the rigorous security analysis that our scheme is secure and satisfies the desirable security requirements. Furthermore, the simulation results for the formal security verification using the most widely used and accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool indicate that our scheme is secure. Our scheme is also efficient compared with existing related schemes. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An independent three‐factor mutual authentication and key agreement scheme with privacy preserving for multiserver environment and a survey

In the past decades, the demand for remote mutual authentication and key agreement (MAKA) scheme with privacy preserving grows rapidly with the rise of the right to privacy and the development of wireless networks and Internet of Things (IoT). Numerous remote MAKA schemes are proposed for various purposes, and they have different properties. In this paper, we survey 49 three‐factor–based remote MAKA schemes with privacy preserving from 2013 to 2019. None of them can simultaneously achieve security, suitability for multiserver environments, user anonymity, user untraceability, table free, public key management free, and independent authentication. Therefore, we propose an efficient three‐factor MAKA scheme, which achieves all the properties. We propose a security model of a three‐factor–based MAKA scheme with user anonymity for multiserver environments and formally prove that our scheme is secure under the elliptic curve computational Diffie‐Hellman problem assumption, decisional bilinear Diffie‐Hellman problem assumption, and hash function assumption. We compare the proposed scheme to relevant schemes to show our contribution and also show that our scheme is sufficiently efficient for low‐power portable mobile devices.     

Design and analysis of an improved smartcard‐based remote user password authentication scheme

With the fast development of the Internet and the telecommunication technologies, internet users are carrying out various electronic transactions over internet by means of the authentication protocols. To ensure efficient and robust online transaction, security of authentication protocol turns out to be a great concern nowadays. As a result, smartcard‐based password authentication and session key agreement scheme receives significant attention in recent years. In the literature, various authentication schemes have been proposed by the cryptographic research community. Recently, Li et al. analyze some security weaknesses of the authentication scheme of Chen et al. and propose an enhancement based on the discrete logarithm problem and computational Diffie–Hellman problem. This paper further cryptanalyzes the scheme of Li et al. and identifies various security loopholes and then constructs a modified authentication scheme as a remedy. The security and efficiency evaluations demonstrate that our scheme has more security features and low computation costs than the related schemes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cryptanalysis of a dynamic identity‐based remote user authentication scheme with verifiable password update

In the authentication scheme, it is important to ensure that the user's identity changed dynamically with the different sessions, which can protect the user's privacy information from being tracked. Recently, Chang et al. proposed an untraceable dynamic identity‐based remote user authentication scheme with verifiable password update. However, our analysis show that the property of untraceability can easily be broken by the legal user of the system. Besides, we find the scheme of Chang et al. vulnerable to offline password guessing attack, impersonation attack, stolen smart card attack, and insider attack. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A secure and efficient identity‐based mutual authentication scheme with smart card using elliptic curve cryptography

The e‐commerce has got great development in the past decades and brings great convenience to people. Users can obtain all kinds of services through e‐commerce platform with mobile device from anywhere and at anytime. To make it work well, e‐commerce platform must be secure and provide privacy preserving. To achieve this goal, Islam et al. proposed a dynamic identity‐based remote user mutual authentication scheme with smart card using Elliptic Curve Cryptography(ECC). Islam et al claimed that the security of their scheme was good enough to resist various attacks. However, we demonstrate that their scheme is vulnerable to insider attack and suffers from off‐line password guessing attack if smart card is compromised. To overcome the deficiencies, we present an improved scheme over Islam's scheme. The security proof and analysis shows that our scheme can also provide user anonymity and mutual authentication, and the security is enough to against relay attack, impersonation attack, and other common secure attackers. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is more efficient than Islam et al's scheme.     

On the security of a dynamic identity‐based remote user authentication scheme with verifiable password update

Recently, Chang et al. [Chang Y, Tai W, Chang H. Untraceable dynamic identity‐based remote user authentication scheme with verifiable password update. International Journal of Communication Systems 2013; doi:10.1002/dac.2552] proposed a dynamic identity‐based remote user authentication scheme with verifiable password update. They also proved that their scheme could withstand various attacks. Unfortunately, by proposing concrete attacks, we show that their scheme is vulnerable to three kinds of attacks. We also point out that their scheme cannot provide untraceability. The analysis shows that the scheme of Chang et al. is not suitable for practical applications. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.