Reliable and secure data transfer in IoT networks

With the rapid technological improvements in mobile devices and their inclusion in Internet of Things (IoT), secure key management becomes mandatory to ensure security of information exchange. For instance, IoT applications, such as smart health-care and smart homes, provide automated services to the users with less or no user intervention. As these application use user-sensitive data, ensuring their security and privacy should be paramount, especially during the key management process. However, traditional approaches for key management will not suit well in IoT environment because of the inherent resource constraint property of IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed key management scheme for IoT ecosystem. The proposed scheme efficiently provides security to IoT devices by delegating most of the resource consuming cryptographic processing to a local entity. This entity coordinates with other peer entities to provide a distributed key as well as an authentication mechanism to network devices. In particular, the proposed scheme exploits the advantages of mobile agents by deploying them in different subnetworks as and when required: (1) to process the cryptography work for the IoT devices, and (2) to act as an local authenticated entity to perform fast authentication process. To verify the effectiveness and correctness of our proposed scheme, we have simulated it in a large IoT scenario and evaluated against relevant metrics that includes user mobility, certification generation time, and communication overhead.

     

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.     

Security flaws in two improved remote user authentication schemes using smart cards

Understanding security failures of cryptographic protocols is the key to both patching existing protocols and designing future schemes. In this paper, we analyze two recent proposals in the area of password‐based remote user authentication using smart cards. First, we point out that the scheme of Chen et al. cannot achieve all the claimed security goals and report its following flaws: (i) it is vulnerable to offline password guessing attack under their nontamper resistance assumption of the smart cards; and (ii) it fails to provide forward secrecy. Then, we analyze an efficient dynamic ID‐based scheme without public‐key operations introduced by Wen and Li in 2012. This proposal attempts to overcome many of the well‐known security and efficiency shortcomings of previous schemes and supports more functionalities than its counterparts. Nevertheless, Wen–Li's protocol is vulnerable to offline password guessing attack and denial of service attack, and fails to provide forward secrecy and to preserve user anonymity. Furthermore, with the security analysis of these two schemes and our previous protocol design experience, we put forward three general principles that are vital for designing secure smart‐card‐based password authentication schemes: (i) public‐key techniques are indispensable to resist against offline password guessing attack and to preserve user anonymity under the nontamper resistance assumption of the smart card; (ii) there is an unavoidable trade‐off when fulfilling the goals of local password update and resistance to smart card loss attack; and (iii) at least two exponentiation (respectively elliptic curve point multiplication) operations conducted on the server side are necessary for achieving forward secrecy. The cryptanalysis results discourage any practical use of the two investigated schemes and are important for security engineers to make their choices correctly, whereas the proposed three principles are valuable to protocol designers for advancing more robust schemes. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

A provable and secure mobile user authentication scheme for mobile cloud computing services

The mobile cloud computing (MCC) has enriched the quality of services that the clients access from remote cloud‐based servers. The growth in the number of wireless users for MCC has further augmented the requirement for a robust and efficient authenticated key agreement mechanism. Formerly, the users would access cloud services from various cloud‐based service providers and authenticate one another only after communicating with the trusted third party (TTP). This requirement for the clients to access the TTP during each mutual authentication session, in earlier schemes, contributes to the redundant latency overheads for the protocol. Recently, Tsai et al have presented a bilinear pairing based multi‐server authentication (MSA) protocol, to bypass the TTP, at least during mutual authentication. The scheme construction works fine, as far as the elimination of TTP involvement for authentication has been concerned. However, Tsai et al scheme has been found vulnerable to server spoofing attack and desynchronization attack, and lacks smart card‐based user verification, which renders the protocol inapt for practical implementation in different access networks. Hence, we have proposed an improved model designed with bilinear pairing operations, countering the identified threats as posed to Tsai scheme. Additionally, the proposed scheme is backed up by performance evaluation and formal security analysis.     

A Strong Authentication Scheme with User Privacy for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used for many real‐time applications. User authentication is an important security service for WSNs to ensure only legitimate users can access the sensor data within the network. In 2012, Yoo and others proposed a security‐performance‐balanced user authentication scheme for WSNs, which is an enhancement of existing schemes. In this paper, we show that Yoo and others' scheme has security flaws, and it is not efficient for real WSNs. In addition, this paper proposes a new strong authentication scheme with user privacy for WSNs. The proposed scheme not only achieves end‐party mutual authentication (that is, between the user and the sensor node) but also establishes a dynamic session key. The proposed scheme preserves the security features of Yoo and others' scheme and other existing schemes and provides more practical security services. Additionally, the efficiency of the proposed scheme is more appropriate for real‐world WSNs applications.     

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.     

Cryptanalysis and improvement of ‘a robust smart‐card‐based remote user password authentication scheme’

With the use of smart card in user authentication mechanisms, the concept of two‐factor authentication came into existence. This was a forward move towards more secure and reliable user authentication systems. It elevated the security level by requiring a user to possess something in addition to know something. In 2010, Sood et al. and Song independently examined a smart‐card‐based authentication scheme proposed by Xu et al. They showed that in the scheme of Xu et al., an internal user of the system can turn hostile to impersonate other users of the system. Both of them also proposed schemes to improve the scheme of Xu et al. Recently, Chen et al. identified some security problems in the improved schemes proposed by Sood et al. and Song. To fix these problems, Chen et al. presented another scheme, which they claimed to provide mutual authentication and withstand lost smart card attack. Undoubtedly, in their scheme, a user can also verify the legitimacy of server, but we find that the scheme fails to resist impersonation attacks and privileged insider attack. We also show that the scheme does not provide important features such as user anonymity, confidentiality to air messages, and revocation of lost/stolen smart card. Besides, the scheme defies the very purpose of two‐factor security. Furthermore, an attacker can guess a user's password from his or her lost/stolen smart card. To meet these challenges, we propose a user authentication method with user anonymity. We show through analysis and comparison that the proposed scheme exhibits enhanced efficiency in contrast to related schemes, including the scheme of Chen et al. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Improvement of robust smart‐card‐based password authentication scheme

Smart‐card‐based password authentication scheme is one of the commonly used mechanisms to prevent unauthorized service and resource access and to remove the potential security threats over the insecure networks and has been investigated extensively in the last decade. Recently, Chen et al. proposed a smart‐card‐based password authentication scheme and claimed that the scheme can withstand offline password guessing attacks even if the information stored in the smart card is extracted by the adversary. However, we observe that the scheme of Chen et al. is insecure against offline password guessing attacks in this case. To remedy this security problem, we propose an improved authentication protocol, which inherits the merits of the scheme of Chen et al. and is free from the security flaw of their scheme. Compared with the previous schemes, our improved scheme provides more security guarantees while keeping efficiency. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cryptanalysis of Hsiang‐Shih's authentication scheme for multi‐server architecture

From user point of view, password‐based remote user authentication technique is one of the most convenient and easy‐to‐use mechanisms to provide necessary security on system access. As the number of computer crimes in modern cyberspace has increased dramatically, the robustness of password‐based authentication schemes has been investigated by industries and organizations in recent years. In this paper, a well‐designed password‐based authentication protocol for multi‐server communication environment, introduced by Hsiang and Shih, is evaluated. Our security analysis indicates that their scheme is insecure against session key disclosure, server spoofing attack, and replay attack and behavior denial. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Authentication-based Access Control and Data Exchanging Mechanism of IoT Devices in Fog Computing Environment

The emergence of fog computing has witnessed a big role in initiating secure communication amongst users. Fog computing poses the ability to perform analysis, processing, and storage for a set of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Several IoT solutions are devised by utilizing the fog nodes to alleviate IoT devices from complex computation and heavy processing. This paper proposes an authentication scheme using fog nodes to manage IoT devices by providing security without considering a trusted third party. The proposed authentication scheme employed the benefits of fog node deployment. The authentication scheme using fog node offers reliable verification between the data owners and the requester without depending on the third party users. The proposed authentication scheme using fog nodes effectively solved the problems of a single point of failure in the storage system and offers many benefits by increasing the throughput and reducing the cost. The proposed scheme considers several entities, like end-users, IoT devices, fog nodes, and smart contracts, which help to administrate the authentication using access policies. The proposed authentication scheme using fog node provided superior results than other methods with minimal memory value of 4009.083 KB, minimal time of 76.915 s, and maximal Packet delivery ratio (PDR) of 76.

     

Security and key management in IoT‐based wireless sensor networks: An authentication protocol using symmetric key

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

Anonymous authentication protocol based on elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman for wireless access networks

Anonymous channel tickets have been proposed as a way to provide user anonymity and to reduce the overhead of re‐authentication for authentication in wireless environments. Chen et al. proposed a secure and efficient protocol, based on a protocol proposed by Yang et al., which is resistant to guessing attacks on networks from which users’ secret keys are easy to obtain. However, their scheme is time‐consuming in the phases of ticket issuing and authentication. Furthermore, a malicious attacker can utilize the expired time, T_exp, to launch a denial of authentication (DoA) attack, which is a type of denial of service attack. Because T_exp is exposed to any user, it would be easy to launch a DoA attack that could make the scheme impractical. To resist against DoAs that the scheme of Chen et al. might suffer, we propose an improved scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography in this paper. Our scheme not only reduces time cost but also enhances security. The basis of the proposed scheme is the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. The operations of points of an elliptic curve are faster and use fewer bits to achieve the same level of security. Therefore, our scheme is more suitable for mobile devices, which have limited computing power and storage. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Identity-Based User Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Multi-Server Environment with Anonymity

A multi-server environment is an important application paradigm in the Internet of Things (IoT). It enables a user access services from different vendors without having to go through multiple registration. The privacy of one who desires to access these services is often crucial. In order to access this service in a manner that assures user privacy, a user needs to be anonymously authenticated independent of the vendors’ services. However, existing identity-based anonymous schemes are only suitable for the client-server domain. Moreover, these schemes provide conditional anonymity which presupposes that if an adversary discovers the user’s private key, the identity can easily be recovered and misused. To avoid this situation, a new unconditional anonymity identity-based user authenticated key agreement scheme for IoT multi-server environment is introduced in this paper. Our protocol applies a ring signature to allow users to anonymously authenticate themselves in the severs without revealing their identities. Hence, an adversary cannot recover the user’s identity even when the user’s private key is known. We further provide a security proof in the random oracle model. Compared with the existing protocols, our proposed scheme is well fitting for mobile phone applications and guarantees the privacy of users in IoT multi-server domain.

     

Cryptanalysis of smart‐card‐based password authenticated key agreement protocol for session initiation protocol of Zhang et al.

As the core signaling protocol for multimedia services, such as voice over internet protocol, the session initiation protocol (SIP) is receiving much attention and its security is becoming increasingly important. It is critical to develop a roust user authentication protocol for SIP. The original authentication protocol is not strong enough to provide acceptable security level, and a number of authentication protocols have been proposed to strengthen the security. Recently, Zhang et al. proposed an efficient and flexible smart‐card‐based password authenticated key agreement protocol for SIP. They claimed that the protocol enjoys many unique properties and can withstand various attacks. However, we demonstrate that the scheme by Zhang et al. is insecure against the malicious insider impersonation attack. Specifically, a malicious user can impersonate other users registered with the same server. We also proposed an effective fix to remedy the flaw, which remedies the security flaw without sacrificing the efficiency. The lesson learned is that the authenticators must be closely coupled with the identity, and we should prevent the identity from being separated from the authenticators in the future design of two‐factor authentication protocols. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

A certificateless signcryption with proxy re-encryption for practical access control in cloud-based reliable smart grid

Cloud computing has proven to be applicable in smart grid systems with the help of the cloud-based Internet of things (IoT) technology. In this concept, IoT is deployed as a front-end enabling the acquisition of smart grid-related data and its outsourcing to the cloud for data storage purposes. It is obvious that data storage is a pertinent service in cloud computing. However, its wide adoption is hindered by the concern of having a secure access to data without a breach on confidentiality and authentication. To address this problem, we propose a novel data access control scheme that simultaneously accomplishes confidentiality and authentication for cloud-based smart grid systems. Our scheme can enable the storing of encrypted smart grid-related data in the cloud. When a user prefers to access the data, the data owner issues a delegation command to the cloud for data re-encryption. The cloud is unable to acquire any plaintext information on the data. Only authorized users are capable of decrypting the data. Moreover, the integrity and authentication of data can only be verified by the authorized user. We obtain the data access control scheme by proposing a pairing free certificateless signcryption with proxy re-encryption (CLS-PRE) scheme. We prove that our CLS-PRE scheme has indistinguishability against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack under the gap Diffie–Hellman problem and existential unforgeability against adaptive chosen message attack under elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem in the random oracle model.

     

基于生物特征标识的无线传感器网络三因素用户认证协议

为满足高安全级别场景（如军事、国家安全、银行等）的应用需求,进一步提高无线传感器网络用户认证协议的安全性,提出了基于生物特征识别的三因素用户认证协议.针对Althobaiti协议无法防御节点妥协攻击、模拟攻击、中间人攻击和内部特权攻击的安全缺陷,增加智能卡和密码作为协议基本安全因素,并利用生物特征标识信息生成函数与回复函数处理的生物特征标识作为附加安全因素;在密钥管理中,为每个节点配置了与网关节点共享唯一密钥,保证认证过程的独立性与安全性;实现用户自主选择与网关节点的共享密钥,提高公共信道通信的安全性;在网关节点不参与的情况下,设计密码和生物特征标识更新机制,保证二者的新鲜性.通过Dolev-Yao拓展威胁模型的分析与AVISPA的OFMC分析终端的仿真,结果证明该认证协议克服了Althobaiti协议安全缺陷,且对计算能力的需求小于公钥加密.权衡安全性与计算成本,该协议适用于资源受限且安全需求高的无线传感器网络应用.     

An efficient lightweight authentication scheme for human-centered industrial Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) specifies a transparent and coherent integration of assorted and composite nodes. Unification of these nodes with large resources and servers has brought advancement in technology for industrial and government services. The industrial IoT (IIoT), with smart nodes, enhance the development and manufacturing of industrial process, which is on demand now. However, the security concern is substantial, and it is required to control to perform prosperous assimilation of IIoT. Authentication of these smart nodes and establishing mutual trust among them is essential to keep vulnerabilities and potential risks out. Hence, this paper presents an efficient lightweight secure authentication protocol from the perspective of human-centered IIoT. This proposed scheme assumes a registration center which simply generates public and secret information for a node when it initially joins the network. Once registration is done, the registration center is not needed anymore, and advanced processes like mutual authentication, secure key exchange, and communications are independently done by nodes involved. Furthermore, we show that this scheme can reduce exponential computations and computational overhead and resolves various possible attacks.     

A lightweight anonymous authentication scheme for consumer roaming in ubiquitous networks with provable security

Ubiquitous networks provide roaming service for mobile nodes enabling them to use the services extended by their home networks in a foreign network. A mutual authentication scheme between the roamed mobile node and the foreign network is needed to be performed through the home network. Various authentication schemes have been developed for such networks, but most of them failed to achieve security in parallel to computational efficiency. Recently, Shin et al. and Wen et al. separately proposed two efficient authentication schemes for roaming service in ubiquitous networks. Both argued their schemes to satisfy all the security requirements for such systems. However, in this paper, we show that Shin et al. 's scheme is susceptible to: (i) user traceability; (ii) user impersonation; (iii) service provider impersonation attacks; and (iv) session key disclosure. Furthermore, we show that Wen et al. 's scheme is also insecure against: (i) session key disclosure; and (ii) known session key attacks. To conquer the security problems, we propose an improved authentication scheme with anonymity for consumer roaming in ubiquitous networks. The proposed scheme not only improved the security but also retained a lower computational cost as compared with existing schemes. We prove the security of proposed scheme in random oracle model. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.