Anonymous Key Agreement Research Articles

Designing Anonymous Key Agreement Scheme for Secure Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Designing Anonymous Key Agreement Scheme for Secure Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

An efficient and provably secure certificateless protocol for the power internet of things

The Power Internet of Things (IoT) is a specific application of the IoT in the power grid. The threat existing in the Power IoT mainly comes from the terminal deployed in the open environment, which has the risk of being tampered with and impersonated. Thus, we design a certificateless anonymous key agreement protocol for the Power IoT to solve the problem of terminal access. The proposed protocol completes session key agreement in only one round exchange of key materials on the basis of certificatelessness, which saves the cost of certificate management. It also achieves anonymity by encrypting the authentication information to ensure the identity privacy of terminals. In addition, the protocol prevents malicious connections of internal systems by setting up software defined perimeter (SDP) controllers to complete pre-access authentication of terminals. Moreover, an improved eCK security model is designed and applied to demonstrate the proposed protocol. An experiment and analyses indicate that our scheme has advantages in terms of the communication and computation costs that are suitable for Power IoT.

A revocable attribute-based encryption EHR sharing scheme with multiple authorities in blockchain.

With the development of digital healthcare, sharing electronic medical record data has become an indispensable part of improving medical conditions. Aiming at the centralized power caused by the single attribute authority in current CP-ABE schemes and the problem that cloud servers are curious and even malicious, we design a revocable CP-ABE EHR sharing scheme with multiple authorities (MA-RABE) in blockchain. In this solution, a group of authorities complete user attribute distribution, key generation and user management through secret sharing and transactions. Besides, we innovatively implemented a distributed one-way anonymous key agreement so that other participants cannot obtain useful information from the fully hidden policy embedded in the ciphertext. Taking into account the computational overhead of a large number of bilinear operations in the decryption process, the solution also supports the cloud server to pre-decrypt the ciphertext, and the data user only needs to perform exponentiation operation once to obtain the plaintext from the pre-decryption result. Theoretical analysis and performance evaluation show that the scheme has reliable security and lower user revocation and ciphertext update overhead.

Lightweight anonymous authentication and key agreement protocols for mobile edge computing

Lightweight anonymous authentication and key agreement protocols for mobile edge computing

SALS-TMIS: Secure, Anonymous, and Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Scheme for IoMT-Enabled TMIS Environments

With the Telecare Medical Information System (TMIS), patients and doctors can access various healthcare services through wireless communication technology without visiting the hospital in person. However, TMIS must have the necessary security requirements, including authentication and anonymity because information of legitimate patient is transmitted via an open channel. Therefore, secure privacy-preserving schemes are essential to ensure reliable healthcare services for legitimate patient in TMIS. Recently, the existing schemes proposed a secure healthcare authentication protocol with attack-resilience and anonymous key agreement in TMIS environments. However, we demonstrate that their scheme cannot prevent impersonation, session key disclosure, and man-in-the-middle attacks and cannot ensure secure mutual authentication. To improve the security flaws of the existing schemes, we design a secure, anonymous, and lightweight privacy-preserving scheme in internet of medical things (IoMT)-enabled TMIS environments, called SALS-TMIS. Our scheme withstands potential security threats and ensures the essential security functionalities. We evaluate the security of the SALS-TMIS using informal and formal security analyses, including ROR oracle model and AVISPA implementation. We then compare the computation and communication costs of SALS-TMIS with existing schemes. SALS-TMIS provides superior security and efficiency than related schemes for IoMT-enabled TMIS.

How to Design a Secure Anonymous Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Multi-Server Environments and Prove Its Security

An anonymous authentication and key agreement (AAKA) protocol provides anonymous members symmetric authentication and establishes a symmetric session key for secure communication in public networks. Today, numerous popular remote services are based on multi-server architecture, such as the internet of things (IoT), smart cities, cloud services, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET), and telecare medicine information systems (TMIS). Many researchers have attempted to design AAKA protocols in multi-server environments for various applications. However, many of these have security defects, even if they have so-called “formal” security proofs. In this paper, we analyze related AAKA protocols to identify the common design defects, expound the process of designing secure AAKA protocols, and explain why the present AAKA protocols still suffer attacks, despite having security proofs. We instruct readers on how to design a secure AAKA protocol and how to prove the security. This paper will therefore be helpful for the design of new AAKA protocols, and for ensuring their security.

An anonymous key agreement protocol with robust authentication for smart grid infrastructure

An anonymous key agreement protocol with robust authentication for smart grid infrastructure

SHAPARAK: Scalable healthcare authentication protocol with attack-resilience and anonymous key-agreement

Security in wearable sensor networks and telecare medical information systems (TMIS) has turned to an issue of scholarly interest in recent years. Adequate security to agree on a temporary session key is essential for establishing a secure connection on various layers of the protocol stack in the Internet of Things (IoT) environments. Recently, Gupta et al. proposed a lightweight authentication and key agreement scheme for wearable sensing devices. Our analysis of Gupta et al.’s scheme revealed that it is insecure against privileged-insider attack, compromise sensing device, and desynchronization attacks in wearable sensor registration and login and authentication phases. In this paper, a Scalable Healthcare Authentication Protocol with Attack-Resilience and Anonymous Key-agreement, SHAPARAK, is proposed to overcome security flaws of existing schemes. The proposed protocol offers more scalability as it uses a public channel in the process of registration of each wearable sensing device. It also contains the password and biometrics changing phase without involvement of the trusted server. The security analysis of the proposed scheme is evaluated using the GNY logic, AVISPA tool, random oracle model, and informal security analysis. It is also shown that the proposed protocol is cost-efficient in terms of computation and communication overheads, compared to the existing schemes.

Fast Secure and Anonymous Key Agreement Against Bad Randomness for Cloud Computing

In cloud computing, resources are usually in cloud service provider’s network and typically accessed remotely by the cloud users via public channels. Key agreement enables secure channel establishment over a public channel for the secure communications between a cloud user and a cloud service provider. Existing key agreement protocols for cloud computing suffer from some challenges, e.g., realizing low connection delay, eliminating certificate management problem, enhancing user privacy and avoiding bad randomness. To tackle these challenges, we propose a certificateless 0-RTT anonymous AKA protocol against bad randomness for secure channel establishment in cloud computing. As a 0-RTT protocol, it significantly speeds up the efficiency of the secure channel establishment process. Further, our protocol does not need for the certificates to bind a public key with an entity’s identity and hence solves the certificate management problem. Finally, concrete security analysis of the protocol is also proposed. The protocol not only satisfies the traditional security attributes (e.g., known-key security, unknown key-share), but also strong security guarantees, i.e., user privacy and bad randomness resistance.

An anonymous authenticated key-agreement scheme for multi-server infrastructure

Due to single-time registration, the multi-server authentication provides benefit for getting services from different servers through trusted agent. Generally, users feel hesitation for registering themselves individually with all service providers due to the problem of memorizing the multiple passwords. The multi-server authentication allows a quick access to services by real-time customer validation on public channel. Thereafter, hundreds of multi-server authentication protocols have been introduced. However, the more efficient and robust authentication schemes are being explored by the research academia. We introduce an anonymous scheme that resists the major security threats like impersonation attack, insider attack and password modification attacks in viable computing cost. We use random oracle model for formal security analysis of the proposed scheme. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme incurs less computation, energy, communication and storage cost as compared to related protocols. This analysis and comparison show that our proposed scheme is quite effective for the purpose of anonymous authentication and key agreement.

Provably Secure Escrow-Less Chebyshev Chaotic Map-Based Key Agreement Protocol for Vehicle to Grid Connections With Privacy Protection

Security and privacy concerns necessitate the careful management of shared keys in the vehicle to grid (V2G) networks. To do so, in recent years, several interesting key agreement protocols have been proposed to be employed in the context of V2G networks. As the efficiency is of prime significance in V2G networks, many of these protocols have been designed to be as light as possible. Nevertheless, review of the previous works indicates that the existing lightweight schemes cannot provide the desired security properties. Furthermore, the existing secure protocols are not so proper to be used by computationally limited devices in the V2G networks. Therefore, in this article, by utilizing the efficient Chebyshev chaotic map-based public key cryptosystem, we propose an anonymous key agreement scheme, which can not only provide the expected security requirements, but also has a proper level of performance. To demonstrate the security of the proposed scheme, we present a rigorous formal security proof using the random oracle model. In addition, to show its outperformance, we both compare it with several recently published well-known schemes and perform the experimental study. In general, the results indicate the efficiency of the proposed protocol in comparison to the related ones.

An Efficient Lightweight Key Agreement and Authentication Scheme for WBAN

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a promising field that may improve the quality of life by using it in patients’ health monitoring process. However, the mobility and open access of wireless networks have resulted in several security gaps which may lead to critical health-related data compromise issues. Therefore, there existed a need to develop a mechanism to secure patient health-related data from all security impairments. Recently, a lightweight authentication scheme that depends on the assumption that the base node is reliable is proposed. Nevertheless, it does not seem feasible practically. Hence, the researchers present a lightweight cryptographic scheme based on three levels that provide anonymous key agreement and authentication for the data communicated on the wireless channel. The proposed authentication scheme shows its efficiency to protect against various known cyber-attacks especially the base station compromise attack and sensor node impersonation attack. The scheme was formally verified with BAN logic and simulated informally using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocol and Applications (AVISPA) tool. The proposed key agreement and authentication scheme was also compared with the results of other related researches. The simulation results and security analysis indicate that the proposed improved scheme has overcome different identified gaps in terms of storage requirements, computational, and communicational costs.

Why elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) is replacing Diffie-Hellman (DH)

The Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman is an anonymous key agreement protocol that allows two parties, each having an elliptic-curve public-private key pair, to establish a shared secret over an insecur...

Identity-based and anonymous key agreement protocol for fog computing resistant in the Canetti–Krawczyk security model

Fog computing allows to connect the edge of the network, consisting of low cost Internet of Things devices, with high end cloud servers. Fog devices can perform data processing, which can significantly reduce the delay for the application. Moreover, data aggregation can be carried out by fog devices which decrease the bandwidth needed being very important for the wireless part of the communication with the cloud servers. The edge-fog-cloud architecture is currently being rolled out for several applications in the field of connected cars, health care monitoring, etc. In this paper, we propose an identity-based, mutual authenticated key agreement protocol for this fog architecture, in which end device and fog are able to establish a secure communication without leakage of their identities. Only the cloud server is able to control the identities of device and fog. We formally prove that the session keys are also protected in the Canetti–Krawczyk security model, in which adversaries are considered to have access to session state specific information, previous session keys, or long-term private keys. The scheme is very efficient as it only utilises elliptic curve operations and basic symmetric key operations.

Privacy-preserving decentralized ABE for secure sharing of personal health records in cloud storage

Personal health record (PHR) system has become an important platform for health information exchange, in which patients can effectively manage and share personal health information in cloud storage. In general, all health information will be encrypted before they are uploaded to the cloud server. However, the cloud server is unreliable and the sensitive information of users may be disclosed in this process. The general encryption algorithm cannot protect both confidentiality and privacy of the uploaded information. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) provides a solution to it. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving decentralized ABE scheme for secure sharing of PHR based on Lewko and Waters′s scheme, in which an anonymous secret key issuing protocol is used to hide GIDs. This protocol can make the authorities generate the correct decryption key for users without knowing their GIDs. In addition, the one-way anonymous key agreement is used to hide the attributes in the access policy. The presented scheme keeps the security of the Lewko and Waters′s scheme and removes the random oracle. Finally, we show that the security of the proposed scheme is reduced to static assumptions based on dual system encryption instead of other strong assumptions.

Pairing based anonymous and secure key agreement protocol for smart grid edge computing infrastructure

The most vital concern in the realization of the Internet of Things (IoT) is to encounter the disparate communication systems and technologies. Interoperability solutions such as standards can help us to integrate plenty of diverse devices and their applications in an interoperable framework. Since Smart Grid is a non-trivial prevalent application of Edge computing under the umbrella of IoT. The Smart Grid furnishes communication through Internet Protocol to enable interoperability. However, IP-Based communication makes it vulnerable to serious security threats. Therefore, the secure information sharing among diverse communicating agents in the smart grid environments has become a vital concern. Specifically, to enable secure communication between the smart meter and utility, key management prior to authentication is the most critical task to do. Nowadays, several mechanisms have been introduced to establish secure communication within the emerging smart grid environment. Although, these protocols do not support smart meter anonymity and fail to offer reasonable security. In this paper, we use the identity-based signature to present an anonymous key agreement protocol for the Smart Grid infrastructure. This protocol enables the smart meters to get connected with utility control anonymously to avail the services provided by them. The smart meters realize this objective with the private key in the absence of trusted authority. The trusted authority is involved only during the registration phase The proposed protocol is verified and validated through random oracle model and automated tool ProVerif. Moreover, performance analysis is also observed to consolidate the reliability and efficiency of the proposed protocol.

Anonymous mutual authentication with location privacy support for secure communication in M2M home network services

Machine to machine (M2M) communications have significant application potential in the emerging networks including home network. The advent of M2M communication brings numerous security issues as well, while existing efforts have not fully solved those issues. In this article, we propose a secure lightweight anonymous authentication and key agreement protocol for M2M home network service, which can guarantee to resist various security issues like, forgery attacks, insider attacks, masquerade attacks, resilience to key exposure, etc. Furthermore, the proposed protocol generates reasonable additional computational and communication overhead, which is also verified by performance analysis.

무선센서네트워크에서 익명의 사용자 인증과 키동의 기법에 대한 가장 공격

무선센서네트워크에서 익명의 사용자 인증과 키동의 기법에 대한 가장 공격

Anonymous Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol in Multi-Server Architecture for VANETs

Anonymous Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol in Multi-Server Architecture for VANETs

Authenticated commutator key agreement protocol

AbstractThe original commutator key agreement (CKA) protocol is a two party anonymous key agreement protocol invented by I. Anshel, M. Anshel and D. Goldfeld. In this paper we propose a modification of the CKA protocol with mutual authentication without introducing any additional computational assumptions. In addition, we propose a new zero-knowledge Feige–Fiat–Shamir-type authentication protocol.