A Robust Mutual Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Authentication is an important service in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for an unattended environment. Recently, Das proposed a hash‐based authentication protocol for WSNs, which provides more security against the masquerade, stolen‐verifier, replay, and guessing attacks and avoids the threat which comes with having many logged‐in users with the same login‐id. In this paper, we point out one security weakness of Das' protocol in mutual authentication for WSN's preservation between users, gateway‐node, and sensor nodes. To remedy the problem, this paper provides a secrecy improvement over Das' protocol to ensure that a legal user can exercise a WSN in an insecure environment. Furthermore, by presenting the comparisons of security, computation and communication costs, and performances with the related protocols, the proposed protocol is shown to be suitable for higher security WSNs.     

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.     

基于智能卡和密码保护的WSN远程用户安全认证方案

针对无线传感器网络（WSN）用户远程安全认证问题,分析现有方案的不足,提出一种新颖的基于智能卡的WSN远程用户认证方案。通过用户、网关节点和传感器节点之间的相互认证来验证用户和节点的合法性,并结合动态身份标识来抵抗假冒攻击、智能卡被盗攻击、服务拒绝攻击、字典攻击和重放攻击。同时对用户信息进行匿名保护,且用户能够任意修改密码。性能比较结果表明,该方案具有较高的安全性能,且具有较小的计算开销。     

A New Lightweight User Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for WSN

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most up-to-date and newest technologies that allows remote control of heterogeneous networks and has a good outlook for industrial applications. Wireless sensor networks (or in brief WSNs) have a key role on the Internet of industrial objects. Due to the limited resources of the sensor nodes, designing a balanced authentication scheme to provide security in reasonable performance in wireless sensor networks is a major challenge in these applications. So far, several security schemes have been presented in this context, but unfortunately, none of these schemes have provided desired security in reasonable cost. In 2017, Khemissa et al. proposed a security protocol for mutual authentication between sensor node and user in WSNs, however, in this paper we show that this protocol is not safe enough in the confrontation of desynchronization, user impersonation and gateway impersonation attacks. The proposed attacks succeed with the probability of one and to be realized only require an execution of the protocol. Given merits of the Khemissa et al.’s protocol, we also improved their protocol in such a way that provides suitable level of security, and also we prove its security using two formal ways, i.e. BAN logic and also the Scyther tool. We also argue informally about the improved protocol’s security.

     

A new authenticated key agreement for session initiation protocol

The session initiation protocol (SIP) is an authentication protocol used in 3G mobile networks. In 2009, Tsai proposed an authenticated key agreement scheme as an enhancement to SIP. Yoon et al. later pointed out that the scheme of Tsai is vulnerable to off‐line password guessing attack, Denning–Sacco attack, and stolen‐verifier attack and does not support perfect forward secrecy (PFS). Yoon et al. further proposed a new scheme with PFS. In this paper, we show that the scheme of Yoon et al. is still vulnerable to stolen‐verifier attack and may also suffer from off‐line password guessing attack. We then propose several countermeasures for solving these problems. In addition, we propose a new security‐enhanced authentication scheme for SIP. Our scheme also maintains low computational complexity. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Securing Wireless Sensor Networks Against Denial‐of‐Sleep Attacks Using RSA Cryptography Algorithm and Interlock Protocol

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been vastly employed in the collection and transmission of data via wireless networks. This type of network is nowadays used in many applications for surveillance activities in various environments due to its low cost and easy communications. In these networks, the sensors use a limited power source which after its depletion, since it is non‐renewable, network lifetime ends. Due to the weaknesses in sensor nodes, they are vulnerable to many threats. One notable attack threating WSN is Denial of Sleep (DoS). DoS attacks denotes the loss of energy in these sensors by keeping the nodes from going into sleep and energy‐saving mode. In this paper, the Abnormal Sensor Detection Accuracy (ASDA‐RSA) method is utilized to counteract DoS attacks to reducing the amount of energy consumed. The ASDA‐RSA schema in this paper consists of two phases to enhancement security in the WSNs. In the first phase, a clustering approach based on energy and distance is used to select the proper cluster head and in the second phase, the RSA cryptography algorithm and interlock protocol are used here along with an authentication method, to prevent DoS attacks. Moreover, ASDA‐RSA method is evaluated here via extensive simulations carried out in NS‐2. The simulation results indicate that the WSN network performance metrics are improved in terms of average throughput, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), network lifetime, detection ratio, and average residual energy.     

Smart card–based password authenticated key agreement protocol using chaotic maps

In 2015, Lee proposed time stamp–based and nonce‐based password authenticated key agreement protocols based on the Chebyshev chaotic map to enhance the security of relevant schemes. However, in this paper, we demonstrate that Lee's protocols are vulnerable to user impersonation and stolen verifier attacks. To overcome these security problems, we thus provide an improved version using a smart card. Security analysis and comparisons show that the proposed protocol is more secure and maintains better performance. Furthermore, we perform a formal verification of the proposed protocol using the widely accepted AVISPA tool for error detection.     

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.     

Cryptanalysis and security enhancement of a robust two‐factor authentication and key agreement protocol

Two‐factor user authentication scheme allows a user to use a smart card and a password to achieve mutual authentication and establish a session key between a server and a user. In 2012, Chen et al. showed that the scheme of Sood et al. does not achieve mutual authentication and is vulnerable to off‐line password guessing and smart card stolen attacks. They also found that another scheme proposed by Song is vulnerable to similar off‐line password guessing and smart card stolen attacks. They further proposed an improved scheme. In this paper, we first show that the improved scheme of Chen et al. still suffers from off‐line password guessing and smart card stolen attacks, does not support perfect forward secrecy, and lacks the fairness of session key establishment. We then propose a new security‐enhanced scheme and show its security and authentication using the formal verification tool ProVerif, which is based on applied pi calculus. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Lightweight and provably secure user authentication with anonymity for the global mobility network

Seamless roaming in the global mobility network (GLOMONET) is highly desirable for mobile users, although their proper authentication is challenging. This is because not only are wireless networks susceptible to attacks, but also mobile terminals have limited computational power. Recently, some authentication schemes with anonymity for the GLOMONET have been proposed. This paper shows some security weaknesses in those schemes. Furthermore, a lightweight and provably secure user authentication scheme with anonymity for the GLOMONET is proposed. It uses only symmetric cryptographic and hash operation primitives for secure authentication. Besides, it takes only four message exchanges among the user, foreign agent and home agent. We also demonstrate that this protocol enjoys important security attributes including prevention of various attacks, single registration, user anonymity, user friendly, no password/verifier table, and use of one‐time session key between mobile user and foreign agent. The security properties of the proposed protocol are formally validated by a model checking tool called AVISPA. Furthermore, as one of the new features in our protocol, it can defend smart card security breaches. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A simple and efficient authentication scheme for mobile satellite communication systems

In this article, the authors shall propose a simple and efficient authentication scheme for mobile satellite communication systems. The proposed scheme can achieve the following security requirements: (S1) withstand impersonation attacks; (S2) withstand denial server attacks; (S3) withstand smart card loss attacks; (S4) withstand replay attacks; and (S5) withstand stolen‐verifier attacks, and achieve the following functionality requirements: (F1) freely choose identity; (F2) provide mutual authentication; (F3) provide session key agreement; (F4) provide user anonymity; and (F5) provide perfect forward secrecy. In additional, the proposed scheme does not use the high complex computation, such as public key cryptosystem or secret key cryptosystem, for the mobile users' side. The proposed scheme is only based on hash functions and exclusive‐OR operations. Compared with other schemes, the proposed scheme has a lower computation cost. It is more simple and efficient scheme. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Privacy‐preserving registration protocol for mobile network

In this paper, we propose a novel privacy‐preserving registration protocol that combines the verifier local revocation group signature with mobile IP. The protocol could achieve strong security guarantee, such as user anonymity via a robust temporary identity, local user revocation with untraceability support, and secure key establishment against home server and eavesdroppers. Various kinds of adversary attacks can be prevented by the proposed protocol, especially that deposit‐case attack does not work here. Meanwhile, a concurrent mechanism and a dynamical revocation method are designed to minimize the handover authentication delay and the home registration signals. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed scheme could provide high security level besides lightweight computational cost and efficient communication performance. For instance, compared with Yang's scheme, the proposed protocol could decrease the falling speed of handover authentication delay up to about 40% with privacy being preserved. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Efficient authenticated key agreement protocols resistant to a denial‐of‐service attack

Malicious intruders may launch as many invalid requests as possible without establishing a server connection to bring server service to a standstill. This is called a denial‐of‐service (DoS) or distributed DoS (DDoS) attack. Until now, there has been no complete solution to resisting a DoS/DDoS attack. Therefore, it is an important network security issue to reduce the impact of a DoS/DDoS attack. A resource‐exhaustion attack on a server is one kind of denial‐of‐service attack. In this article we address the resource‐exhaustion problem in authentication and key agreement protocols. The resource‐exhaustion attack consists of both the CPU‐exhaustion attack and the storage‐exhaustion attack. In 2001, Hirose and Matsuura proposed an authenticated key agreement protocol (AKAP) that was the first protocol simultaneously resistant to both the CPU‐exhaustion attack and the storage‐exhaustion attack. However, their protocol is time‐consuming for legal users in order to withstand the DoS attack. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a slight modification to the Hirose–Matsuura protocol to reduce the computation cost. Both the Hirose–Matsuura and the modified protocols provide implicit key confirmation. Also, we propose another authenticated key agreement protocol with explicit key confirmation. The new protocol requires less computation cost. Because DoS/DDoS attacks come in a variety of forms, the proposed protocols cannot fully disallow a DoS/DDoS attack. However, they reduce the effect of such an attack and thus make it more difficult for the attack to succeed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A new three-factor authentication and key agreement protocol for multi-server environment

Several password and smart-card based two-factor security remote user authentication protocols for multi-server environment have been proposed for the last two decades. Due to tamper-resistant nature of smart cards, the security parameters are stored in it and it is also a secure place to perform authentication process. However, if the smart card is lost or stolen, it is possible to extract the information stored in smart card using power analysis attack. Hence, the two factor security protocols are at risk to various attacks such as password guessing attack, impersonation attack, replay attack and so on. Therefore, to enhance the level of security, researchers have focused on three-factor (Password, Smart Card, and Biometric) security authentication scheme for multi-server environment. In existing biometric based authentication protocols, keys are generated using fuzzy extractor in which keys cannot be renewed. This property of fuzzy extractor is undesirable for revocation of smart card and re-registration process when the smart card is lost or stolen. In addition, existing biometric based schemes involve public key cryptosystem for authentication process which leads to increased computation cost and communication cost. In this paper, we propose a new multi-server authentication protocol using smart card, hash function and fuzzy embedder based biometric. We use Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic to prove the correctness of the new scheme. The security features and efficiency of the proposed scheme is compared with recent schemes and comparison results show that this scheme provides strong security with a significant efficiency.

     

A secure and efficient remote patient‐monitoring authentication protocol for cloud‐IoT

The ongoing Cloud‐IoT (Internet of Things)–based technological advancements have revolutionized the ways in which remote patients could be monitored and provided with health care facilities. The real‐time monitoring of patient's health leads to dispensing the right medical treatment at the right time. The health professionals need to access patients' sensitive data for such monitoring, and if treated with negligence, it could also be used for malevolent objectives by the adversary. Hence, the Cloud‐IoT–based technology gains could only be conferred to the patients and health professionals, if the latter authenticate one another properly. Many authentication protocols are proposed for remote patient health care monitoring, but with limitations. Lately, Sharma and Kalra (DOI: 10.1007/s40998‐018‐0146‐5) present a remote patient‐monitoring authentication scheme based on body sensors. However, we discover that the scheme still bears many drawbacks including stolen smart card attack, session key compromise, and user impersonation attacks. In view of those limitations, we have designed an efficient authentication protocol for remote patient health monitoring that counters all the above‐mentioned drawbacks. Moreover, we prove the security features of our protocol using BAN logic‐based formal security analysis and validate the results in ProVerif automated security tool.     

Machine Learning Protocol for Secure 5G Handovers

The fifth generation (5G) networks are characterized with ultra-dense deployment of base stations with limited footprint. Consequently, user equipment’s handover frequently as they move within 5G networks. In addition, 5G requirements of ultra-low latencies imply that handovers should be executed swiftly to minimize service disruptions. To preserve security and privacy while at the same time maintaining optimal performance during handovers, numerous schemes have been developed. However, majority of these techniques are either limited to security and privacy or address only performance aspect of the handover mechanism. As such, there is need for a novel handover authentication protocol that addresses security, privacy and performance simultaneously. This paper presents a machine learning protocol that not only facilitates optimal selection of target cell but also upholds both security and privacy during handovers. Formal security analysis using the widely adopted Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic shows that the proposed protocol achieves all the six formulated under this proof. As such, the proposed protocol facilitates strong and secure mutual authentication among the communicating entities before generating the shares session key. The derived session key protected the exchanged packets to avert attacks such as forgery. In addition, informal security evaluation of the proposed protocol shows that it offers perfect forward key secrecy, mutual authentication any user anonymity. It is also demonstrated to be robust against attacks such as denial of service (DoS), man-in-the-middle (MitM), masquerade, packet replays and forgery. In terms of performance, simulation results shows that it has lower packets drop rate and ping–pong rate, with higher ratio of packets received compared with improved 5G authentication and key agreement (5G AKA’) protocol. Specifically, using 5G AKA’ as the basis, the proposed protocol reduces the handover rate by 94.4%, hence the resulting handover signaling is greatly minimized.

     

A lightweight anonymous two‐factor authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks in Internet of Vehicles

Internet of Vehicles (IoV), as the next generation of transportation systems, tries to make highway and public transportation more secure than used to be. In this system, users use public channels for their communication so they can be the victims of passive or active attacks. Therefore, a secure authentication protocol is essential for IoV; consequently, many protocols are presented to provide secure authentication for IoV. In 2018, Yu et al proposed a secure authentication protocol for WSNs in vehicular communications and claimed that their protocol could satisfy all crucial security features of a secure authentication protocol. Unfortunately, we found that their protocol is susceptible to sensor capture attack, user traceability attack, user impersonation attack, and offline sink node's secret key guessing attack. In this paper, we propose a new authentication protocol for IoV which can solve the weaknesses of Yu et al's protocol. Our protocol not only provides anonymous user registration phase and revocation smart card phase but also uses the biometric template in place of the password. We use both Burrow‐Abadi‐Needham (BAN) logic and real‐or‐random (ROR) model to present the formal analysis of our protocol. Finally, we compare our protocol with other existing related protocols in terms of security features and computation overhead. The results prove that our protocol can provide more security features and it is usable for IoV system.     

LEDS: Providing Location-Aware End-to-End Data Security in Wireless Sensor Networks

Providing desirable data security, that is, confidentiality, authenticity, and availability, in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is challenging, as a WSN usually consists of a large number of resource constraint sensor nodes that are generally deployed in unattended/hostile environments and, hence, are exposed to many types of severe insider attacks due to node compromise. Existing security designs mostly provide a hop-by-hop security paradigm and thus are vulnerable to such attacks. Furthermore, existing security designs are also vulnerable to many types of denial of service (DoS) attacks, such as report disruption attacks and selective forwarding attacks and thus put data availability at stake. In this paper, we seek to overcome these vulnerabilities for large-scale static WSNs. We come up with a location-aware end-to-end security framework in which secret keys are bound to geographic locations and each node stores a few keys based on its own location. This location-aware property effectively limits the impact of compromised nodes only to their vicinity without affecting end-to-end data security. The proposed multifunctional key management framework assures both node-to-sink and node-to-node authentication along the report forwarding routes. Moreover, the proposed data delivery approach guarantees efficient en-route bogus data filtering and is highly robust against DoS attacks. The evaluation demonstrates that the proposed design is highly resilient against an increasing number of compromised nodes and effective in energy savings.     

Secure communication in CloudIoT through design of a lightweight authentication and session key agreement scheme

Internet of Things (IoT) is a newly emerged paradigm where multiple embedded devices, known as things, are connected via the Internet to collect, share, and analyze data from the environment. In order to overcome the limited storage and processing capacity constraint of IoT devices, it is now possible to integrate them with cloud servers as large resource pools. Such integration, though bringing applicability of IoT in many domains, raises concerns regarding the authentication of these devices while establishing secure communications to cloud servers. Recently, Kumari et al proposed an authentication scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for IoT and cloud servers and claimed that it satisfies all security requirements and is secure against various attacks. In this paper, we first prove that the scheme of Kumari et al is susceptible to various attacks, including the replay attack and stolen-verifier attack. We then propose a lightweight authentication protocol for secure communication of IoT embedded devices and cloud servers. The proposed scheme is proved to provide essential security requirements such as mutual authentication, device anonymity, and perfect forward secrecy and is robust against security attacks. We also formally verify the security of the proposed protocol using BAN logic and also the Scyther tool. We also evaluate the computation and communication costs of the proposed scheme and demonstrate that the proposed scheme incurs minimum computation and communication overhead, compared to related schemes, making it suitable for IoT environments with low processing and storage capacity.