An ID-based remote mutual authentication with key agreement scheme for mobile devices on elliptic curve cryptosystem

Recently, remote user authentication schemes are implemented on elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) to reduce the computation loads for mobile devices. However, most remote user authentication schemes on ECC are based on public-key cryptosystem, in which the public key in the system requires the associated certificate to prove its validity. Thus, the user needs to perform additional computations to verify the certificate in these schemes. In addition, we find these schemes do not provide mutual authentication or a session key agreement between the user and the remote server. Therefore, we propose an ID-based remote mutual authentication with key agreement scheme on ECC in this paper. Based upon the ID-based concept, the proposed scheme does not require public keys for users such that the additional computations for certificates can be reduced. Moreover, the proposed scheme not only provides mutual authentication but also supports a session key agreement between the user and the server. Compared with the related works, the proposed scheme is more efficient and practical for mobile devices.     

Outage costs quantification for benefit–cost analysis of distribution automation systems

Deregulation of electric power industry has motivated electricity customers to pay more attention in evaluating both the direct cost of electric service and the monetary value of reliable electric service. This movement has been recognized by the utilities and the value-based aspects are introduced into the planning and design of power systems to consider the outage costs. The value of service reliability that can portray and respond to actual utility and customer impacts as a result of power interruptions plays a major role on justifying whether a distribution automation (DA) system is beneficial or not. However, for the value of service reliability, there are a number of factors that can affect it. To exactly evaluate the service reliability value, two formulas for quantifying the customer interruption costs and utility reduced energy revenues associated with power failures are derived in this paper. The customer types, feeder loads, feeder failure rate, number of switch, restoration time, and repair time are taken into account. The proposed formulas can provide an exact estimate in outages costs of a feeder and their computation is simplified and straightforward. The estimated outage costs can then be used to calculate the reliability improvement benefit of DA systems for the system benefit–cost analysis. A practical DA system implemented by Taiwan Power Company is used to illustrate the proposed formulas and the benefit–cost analysis result is presented. Sensitivity analysis is also performed to reduce the effects of benefit–cost analysis parameters on the analysis result.     

Improving Computation Efficiency of Source Authentication by Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem

The overload of traditional cryptosystems is too high for real-time applications so there is a need to design a new encryption and signature scheme for the multicast applications. In this paper, we use the elliptic curve cryptosystem to design a source authentication scheme for real-time applications. The proposed scheme uses the message recovery signature to reduce the computation cost. Thus, the proposed source authentication scheme is more suitable for real-time applications, such as online meeting, online movie, and online music.     

A Low Computational-Cost Electronic Payment Scheme for Mobile Commerce with Large-Scale Mobile Users

The electronic transactions on wireless mobile networks, which are also called mobile commerce, become more and more popular in recent years. In mobile commerce, the electronic payment is the most important component and thus many electronic payment schemes for mobile commerce are proposed. However, these schemes need to maintain a large authentication table for a large amount of mobile users. In addition, these schemes have heavy computation loads so they are not suitable for low computational-ability mobile devices. To overcome the above drawbacks, we propose a low computation-cost electronic payment scheme for mobile commerce in this paper. The proposed scheme can be applied to large-scale mobile user environments without maintaining a large authentication table. Moreover, the proposed scheme has low computation loads for mobile users because the elliptic curve cryptography is adopted in the proposed scheme. Therefore, the proposed scheme is more efficient and practical than the related works.     

ID-Based User Authentication Scheme for Cloud Computing

In cloud computing environments, user authentication is an important security mechanism because it provides the fundamentals of authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA). In 2009, Wang et al. proposed an identity-based (ID-based) authentication scheme to deal with the user login problem for cloud computing. However, Wang et al.'s scheme is insecure against message alteration and impersonation attacks. Besides, their scheme has large computation costs for cloud users. Therefore, we propose a novel ID-based user authentication scheme to solve the above mentioned problems. The proposed scheme provides anonymity and security for the user who accesses different cloud servers. Compared with the related schemes, the proposed scheme has less computation cost so it is very efficient for cloud computing in practice.     

An efficient three-party authenticated key exchange protocol using elliptic curve cryptography for mobile-commerce environments

For secure communications in public network environments, various three-party authenticated key exchange (3PAKE) protocols are proposed to provide the transaction confidentiality and efficiency. In 2008, Chen et al. proposed a round-efficient 3PAKE protocol to provide the computation and communication efficiency for user authentication and session key exchange. However, we discover that the computation costs and communication loads of their protocol are still high so that it cannot be applied to mobile communications. Therefore, we propose an efficient three-party authenticated key exchange protocol based upon elliptic curve cryptography for mobile-commerce environments. Because the elliptic curve cryptography is used, the proposed 3PAKE protocol has low computation costs and light communication loads. Compared with Chen et al.’s protocol, the proposed protocol is more suitable and practical for mobile-commerce environments.     

ID-Based User Authentication Scheme for Cloud Computing

In cloud computing environments, user authentication is an important security mechanism because it provides the fundamentals of authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA). In 2009, Wang et al. proposed an identity-based (ID-based) authentication scheme to deal with the user login problem for cloud computing. However, Wang et al.’s scheme is insecure against message alteration and impersonation attacks. Besides, their scheme has large computation costs for cloud users. Therefore, we propose a novel ID-based user authentication scheme to solve the above mentioned problems. The proposed scheme provides anonymity and security for the user who accesses different cloud servers. Compared with the related schemes, the proposed scheme has less computation cost so it is very efficient for cloud computing in practice.     

Guest Editorial Special Issue on Cloud Computing

Cloud computing becomes a hot research topic recently.Before the concept of cloud computing was introduced,similar concepts or computing models have been proposed such as distributed computing and grid computing. Cloud