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.     

A Reputation Framework for Social Participatory Sensing Systems

Social participatory sensing is a newly proposed paradigm that tries to address the limitations of participatory sensing by leveraging online social networks as an infrastructure. A critical issue in the success of this paradigm is to assure the trustworthiness of contributions provided by participants. In this paper, we propose an application-agnostic reputation framework for social participatory sensing systems. Our framework considers both the quality of contribution and the trustworthiness level of participant within the social network. These two aspects are then combined via a fuzzy inference system to arrive at a final trust rating for a contribution. A reputation score is also calculated for each participant as a resultant of the trust ratings assigned to him. We adopt the utilization of PageRank algorithm as the building block for our reputation module. Extensive simulations demonstrate the efficacy of our framework in achieving high overall trust and assigning accurate reputation scores.     

Enhanced Schemes for Data Fragmentation,Allocation, and Replication in Distributed Database Systems

With the growth of information technology and computer networks, there is a vital need for optimal design of distributed databases with the aim of performance improvement in terms of minimizing the round-trip response time and query transmission and processing costs. To address this issue, new fragmentation, data allocation, and replication techniques are required. In this paper, we propose enhanced vertical fragmentation, allocation, and replication schemes to improve the performance of distributed database systems. The proposed fragmentation scheme clusters highly-bonded attributes (i.e., normally accessed together) into a single fragment in order to minimize the query processing cost. The allocation scheme is proposed to find an optimized allocation to minimize the round-trip response time. The replication scheme partially replicates the fragments to increase the local execution of queries in a way that minimizes the cost of transmitting replicas to the sites. Experimental results show that, on average, the proposed schemes reduce the round-trip response time of queries by 23% and query processing cost by 15%, as compared to the related work.     

Eigenbackground Revisited: Can We Model the Background with Eigenvectors?

Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision - Using dominant eigenvectors for background modeling (usually known as Eigenbackground) is a common technique in the literature. However, its results...     

On the Security of “Secure and Lightweight Authentication with Key Agreement for Smart Wearable Systems”

Over the years, the performance of devices used to gather sensitive medical information about individuals has increased substantially. These include implanted devices in the body, placed on or around the body, creating a Wireless body area network. Security and privacy have been a greater concern over a period of time due to the sensitive nature of the data collected and transmitted by the network. It has been noticed that various techniques have been applied to secure the data and provide privacy in WBANs but with a tradeoff of execution overhead. Although the latest available anonymous authentication schemes provide privacy and security but due to the limited computation capacity of WBAN devices, these schemes show greater time cost for authentication and consume more processing time. We review two latest anonymous authentication schemes for the WBAN environment in terms of computation cost. These two schemes provide anonymous authentication and use encryption to secure the data and ensure privacy. Then we analyze a recent lightweight authentication scheme proposed for wearable devices which provides anonymity and privacy along with security with very low computation cost. This scheme uses hash functions in order to obtain authentication and anonymity and doesn’t use encryption in the authentication process. This scheme is not proposed for the WBAN environment, but it can be applied on the WBAN environment with necessary variations. The comparison of these available schemes shows clearly that the computation cost is considerably decreased by applying the latest authentication scheme in the WBAN environment. We propose a new authentication scheme for the WBAN environment based on the light-weight scheme proposed for wearable devices. The detailed analysis shows that our proposed scheme minimizes the computation cost and maintains the privacy and security along with anonymous authentication.