Efficient Key Management Research Articles

Securing Data Transmission from Adversaries in Cybersecurity WSN Using Efficient Key Management Techniques

Concern over cyber security is becoming more and more prevalent in today's international politics. National security is now evaluated not only in terms of military might or economic might, but also in terms of technological innovation. The fact that today's society is heavily dependent on computer communication and control systems, which opens up infinite opportunities, shows how important technology is in the national security area. By effectively changing the keys, the suggested work aimed to provide WSN with complicated security solutions that would ensure data integrity, security, and genuine transmission for many additional network operations through structured cryptography approaches. The study's protective measures can be applied to a variety of WSN configurations, including heterogeneous WSNs with and without mobility aid and static homogeneous WSNs. Because WSN is more limited to hardware resources, not all applications can be protected using the same method.

Providing an effective key management scheme to increase transaction security of homogeneous mobile wireless sensor networks

Network security is one of the key concerns with wireless sensor networks. Because sensor nodes employ radio channel frequencies, which are riskier than traditional networks, the attacker may be able to force the node to compromise, disrupt data integrity, eavesdrop, or insert false data into the network, wasting network resources. Creating dependable sensor networks that offer the highest level of security while using the fewest resources is thus one of the problems. The designers of wireless sensor networks can take into account providing an efficient key management system that can enhance any efficiency features such as communication overhead, calculation rate, memory demand, and energy consumption rate. The energy level of nodes is determined in this article using a novel approach based on fuzzy systems and simple to implement in both hardware and software. In this study, the memory needed to carry out the plan was decreased, and the search performance was raised by integrating elliptic curve cryptography with an AVL search tree and a LEACH model. Also, the frequency range of radio channels in this study is 2.4 GHz. Based on the theoretical analysis as well as the outcomes of the experiments, the suggested key management strategy for wireless sensor networks improves security while also reducing computational overhead by 23%, energy consumption by 14%, and memory consumption parameters by 14%. 18% of people have used the network. Additionally, it was demonstrated that the suggested approach is scalable and extendable. Because of this, the suggested technique has a wide range of applications in massive wireless sensor networks.

TAKM-FC: Two-way Authentication with efficient Key Management in Fog Computing Environments

TAKM-FC: Two-way Authentication with efficient Key Management in Fog Computing Environments

Survey on Digital Sovereignty and Identity: From Digitization to Digitalization

Through digital transformation, lots of personal data are captured, but individuals often do not have ownership or control over them. This results in the emerging Web 3.0, where people demand data sovereignty. There are actually two conceptually related terms, data sovereignty and digital sovereignty. This paper first explains these two concepts in terms of their points of focus, guiding principles, laws and regulations requirements, and then analyses the requirements and technical challenges of their implementation. To understand the emerging trend shift in digital sovereignty towards individuals taking control of security and privacy preserving over their own digital assets, this paper conducts a systematic review and analysis on Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), which is a user-centric decentralized model and autonomy for an individual to self-determine the access and use of one's identity and credentials. The review covers existing SSI solutions and points out that an efficient key management system, the scalability and interoperability of the solution, and a well-established standard are some of the challenges for SSI deployment. Finally, the paper concludes with open issues about digital identity, including dynamic attributes, persona, and attribute ownership, that challenge the current reference architecture of SSI as well as its implementation.

Enhancing IoT Security: An Innovative Key Management System for Lightweight Block Ciphers.

This research paper presents a study on designing and implementing a robust key management scheme for lightweight block ciphers in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Key management is a critical concern for IoT devices due to their limited resources and susceptibility to security threats. The proposed scheme utilises partial key pre-distribution to achieve lightweight and secure key management. The protocol's security has been analysed against various attacks, demonstrating its resistance. Performance evaluation results indicate that the proposed key management technique is suitable for resource-constraint IoT networks, as it reduces communication overhead, power consumption, and storage space requirements. The methodology employed in this research includes designing and implementing the proposed key management scheme and conducting scenario-based analyses of its functionality. The results affirm that the proposed solution effectively ensures secure communication in IoT networks. Overall, this research contributes to developing a secure and efficient key management scheme for lightweight block ciphers in IoT networks.

Robust Key Update With Controllable Accuracy Using Support Vector Machine for Secure OFDMA-PON

In this paper, we first propose a novel secret key update scheme only with a single support vector machine (SVM). To achieve robust and efficient key management for secure orthogonal frequency division multiple access-based passive optical network (OFDMA-PON). The key sequences required to be shared between multiple optical network units (ONUs) and optical line terminal (OLT) are converted into partial quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) symbol phases, and then masked into the whole upstream signal using two-dimensional chaos. The session keys can be distributed in real-time without consuming exclusive secure channels and resulting in data rate loss. A well-trained support vector machine (SVM) implemented at the receiver enables error-free key decision. Moreover, the numerous cross validations are conducted to verify the superior generalization performance under various parameters including key length and modulation format. The 16-QAM, 32-QAM, and 64-QAM OFDM signal transmissions are successfully demonstrated over 25 km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) by an experiment. The results show that the controllable restored accuracy of key can be realized by regulating the pivotal algorithm parameter to flexibly adapt to different system conditions, thus this scheme can be a promising efficient key update technology for future secure PON.

DECENT: Decentralized and Efficient Key Management to Secure Communication in Dense and Dynamic Environments

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), one aspect of the Smart City paradigm, aim to improve the efficiency, convenience, and safety of travelers. The integration of (vehicular) communication technologies allows communication between the on-board communication units (OBUs) of vehicles, roadside units (RSUs), and vulnerable road users (VRUs), and contribute to the efficacy of ITS applications. However, these additional sources of information must be reliable and accurate. Security primitives such as confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity are required, but only achievable when supported with a suitable cryptographic key management scheme. This paper presents the design of a decentralized and efficient key management scheme, abbreviated as the DECENT scheme. This scheme provides secure multi-hop communication in dense and dynamic network environments while functioning in a self-organized manner. Through threshold secret sharing techniques, network nodes act as a distributed trusted third party (TTP) such that a threshold number of nodes can collaborate to execute key management functions. These functions include decentralized node admission and key updating. Novelties include (i) the unique self-healing characteristic, meaning that DECENT is capable of independently recovering from network compromise, and (ii) guidelines for choosing an appropriate security threshold in any deployment scenario which maximizes the level of security while simultaneously guaranteeing that decentralized key management services can be provided.

AI-Enabled Cryptographic Key Management Model for Secure Communications in the Internet of Vehicles

Recent advancements in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) technology have pathed the way for the use of various smart services for the management of urban traffic, including authentication and key management. Key management protocols are an important means of addressing security and privacy concerns. However, they can be resource-intensive in terms of network traffic and workload management, particularly at times of traffic congestion, which in turn can increase the ECU and RSU processing load and adversely impact network communications. This paper introduces a more efficient key management method, named AI-enabled and Layered Key Management (ALKM), which uses an Artificial Intelligence (AI) approach and a layered workflow to reduce network traffic and workload. Specifically, the ALKM distributes dynamic synchronous time-dependent keys among Road Side Units (RSUs) rather than static cryptographic keys. It provides three layers of secure communications: public, tunnel, and hierarchy. The public layer creates a flat secure layer between the Traffic Management Center (TMC) and all RSUs. Using AI-enabled features, the tunnel layer predicts short-term and long-term congestion areas by analysis of the acquired trajectory data, and then establishes a secure communication channel between the selected RSUs and the TMC. In the hierarchy layer, in multiple tiers, the TMC and higher-level RSUs assist lower RSUs in message decryption (but not vice-versa). Our extensive analysis shows that the ALKM generates overall between 48% and 99% less network traffic per generated key than the Master Key method, depending on the operational lifetime of the keys used.

BSKM-FC: Blockchain-based secured key management in a fog computing environment

With an increase in the number of devices in the edge layer connected to the fog server of the fog computing environment, it is found that vulnerable and unauthorized activities are also increasing relatively. Thus, there is a requirement for authorized access control in such an environment that is governed by secured and efficient key management between the communicating devices. Many researchers have presented conventional solutions for key management depending on a third party. The third party operated for a key generation or key distribution in a fog computing environment based on a centralized architecture which leads to the drawbacks like a single-point failure and inconsistency of key management. So, effective and secured key management between the edge devices which are willing to communicate is the major concern to be addressed in the current digital world to achieve access control. This paper proposes a BSKM-FC (Blockchain-based Secured Key Management in a Fog Computing Environment) which is a decentralized system in a fog computing environment without using a third party. The BSKM-FC makes use of a one-way hash chain for the generation of private and public key pairs and ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) for secured sharing. Upon successful authentication, the session key generation at both edge devices is based on the key pair provided by the fog server and stored securely in the blockchain. The BSKM-FC system uses private blockchain technology in the fog layer to provide secured storage and management. The work is implemented in the Truffle Blockchain and found that BSKM-FC performs better in terms of overall block preparation time. The security analysis of the proposed scheme is carried out based on the ROR model and also verified using AVISPA for some known attacks. Informal security analysis of the proposed work is performed by considering some of the known attacks where we observe that the proposed scheme overcomes such attacks. Performance overhead analysis is demonstrated using MIRACL considering computation cost, communication cost, and storage cost. The results show that the proposed scheme meets security requirements and performs effectively. The computation overhead, communication overhead, storage overhead, and block preparation time of the proposed scheme were improved by 7% to 14%, 9% to 18%, 7% to 17%, and 14% to 28%, respectively, as compared to existing schemes.

A public and private key image encryption by modified approach of Vigener cipher and the chaotic maps

ABSTRACT The article presents a real-time image encryption using a modified approach of Vigenère cipher and the chaotic maps with an efficient key management. The modification is provided to Vigenère cipher through the key expansion procedure. The proposed encryption chooses four random keys of 8-tuples to expand into the initial key block. Thereafter, the Vigenère cipher encrypts the pixels blocks using the initial key block and the next blocks through key updation using the XOR operation and the Arnold transform. Later, the partially encrypted image is further scrambled through the Baker map to increase the randomness and unpredictability of the data. The chosen secret key parameters are exchanged publicly through the Diffie–Hellman key exchange agreement. Simulation results and comparison analysis of some extant systems ensure that the proposed algorithm is secure against cryptanalytic attacks and efficient in real-time image processing. Further, the average execution time for encryption and decryption of an image with size is 0.4926 which is very efficient than a typical and recent encryption scheme.

IFKMS: Inverse Function-based Key Management Scheme for IoT networks

Due to the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), secure communication is becoming a significant concern. Nodes that compose such a dynamic network need to exchange sensitive and valuable data. The data must be kept safe against attacks. This protection requires the development of efficient key management protocols. However, this task is challenging because of the high resource constraints of most IoT devices in terms of storage, communication, processing, and energy capabilities. Some existing key management techniques have certain weaknesses since sensitive parameters are not protected during transmission, and cryptographic keys are stored in plain text and usually renewed at a fixed period of time. This paper proposes a new key management protocol aiming to secure communications before and after key establishment. Our scheme uses hash and one–one functions to achieve security during the key establishment process. The symmetrical character of the invertible functions is thus exploited to conceal critical data and pairwise keys stored in nodes’ memories. Moreover, the key refresh period is variable, which can be adjusted according to the number of occurred attacks in the network. BAN (Burrows Abadi Needham) logic is employed to assess the correctness of the proposed scheme. The results show that our scheme operates correctly and does not have redundancies or security flaws. Furthermore, the security and performance analysis point out that the proposed scheme is resilient against well-known attacks, and efficient in terms of storage, communication, computation overhead, and energy consumption.

Enhanced cipher text-policy attribute-based encryption and serialization on media cloud data

PurposeThere are various system techniques or models which are used for access control by performing cryptographic operations and characterizing to provide an efficient cloud and in Internet of Things (IoT) access control. Particularly in cloud computing environment, there is a large-scale distribution of these traditional symmetric cryptographic techniques. These symmetric cryptographic techniques use the same key for encryption and decryption processes. However, during the execution of these phases, they are under the problems of key distribution and management. The purpose of this study is to provide efficient key management and key distribution in cloud computing environment.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses the Cipher text-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) technique with proper access control policy which is used to provide the data owner’s control and share the data through encryption process in Cloud and IoT environment. The data are shared with the the help of cloud storage, even in presence of authorized users. The main method used in this research is Enhanced CP-ABE Serialization (E-CP-ABES) approach.FindingsThe results are measured by means of encryption, completion and decryption time that showed better results when compared with the existing CP-ABE technique. The comparative analysis has showed that the proposed E-CP-ABES has obtained better results of 2373 ms for completion time for 256 key lengths, whereas the existing CP-ABE has obtained 3129 ms of completion time. In addition to this, the existing Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) scheme showed 3449 ms of completion time.Originality/valueThe proposed research work uses an E-CP-ABES access control technique that verifies the hidden attributes having a very sensitive dataset constraint and provides solution to the key management problem and access control mechanism existing in IOT and cloud computing environment. The novelty of the research is that the proposed E-CP-ABES incorporates extensible, partially hidden constraint policy by using a process known as serialization procedure and it serializes to a byte stream. Redundant residue number system is considered to remove errors that occur during the processing of bits or data obtained from the serialization. The data stream is recovered using the Deserialization process.

Efficient Key Management Mechanism with Trusted Gateways for Wireless Mesh Networks

Securing wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is a crucial issue due to its intrinsic characteristics. Several endangered features might emerge due to the exposure of the networks to a diversity of medium access control (MAC) layers such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, false reply attacks, and other identity attacks. Against these attacks, the determination of existing techniques is insufficient to ensure the complete security solutions to protect the backbone network at multiple levels. As a result, effective, scalable, and integrated security solutions for WMNs are required. In WMNs, protecting legitimate gateway nodes and internal mesh routers against malicious attacks at the MAC layer remains a difficult problem. Our proposed trust-based security mechanism includes distributed authentication and deauthentication algorithms that validates backbone mesh routers as well as gateway nodes. Particularly, this proposed model targets DDoS attacks in the network. The proposed DDoS attack prevention mechanism (DAPM) uses distributed authentication and deauthentication algorithms to build trusted group heads for managing secure data communication in the network. Our research and practical results show that the proposed mechanism decreases the severity of malicious nodes and strengthens the security compared to existing centralized schemes such as digital signature authentication (DSA-Mesh, MENSA, Mobisec, and AHKM). The experimental solutions show the significance of the proposed work with 10% to 12% of better performance than the existing techniques.

SCD2: Secure Content Delivery and Deduplication With Multiple Content Providers in Information Centric Networking

As one of the promising next generation network architectures, information centric networking (ICN) is highly anticipated to improve the bandwidth usage of the Internet and reduce duplicate traffic. Since contents in ICN are disseminated in the whole network, ICN is much more vulnerable and the issue of how to deliver contents securely has been intensively discussed. However, the scalability of the existing schemes is limited. A scalable scheme is expected to be able to achieve fine-grained access control and at the same time also support multiple content providers scenario with efficient key management at user side. Besides, different content providers may publish some identical contents and these contents may be cached in the same intermediate routers, which causes high data redundancy and in turn exerts an adverse impact on the performance of ICN. In this paper, we propose a Secure Content Delivery and Deduplication scheme, called SCD2, to achieve secure and efficient fine-grained access control in ICN with multiple content providers. We first propose a scalable key-policy attribute-based encryption (SKP-ABE) to provide fine-grained access control and allow different attribute authorities to share some public attributes to simplify the key management. Furthermore, based on SKP-ABE, we design a simple but effective mechanism to conduct content deduplication. Finally, we implement a prototype of SCD2 to test its performance and compare it with some existing schemes. The results show that SCD2 has lower storage overhead, a higher degree of deduplication, and better retrieval efficiency.

Integrated IoT-Based Secure and Efficient Key Management Framework Using Hashgraphs for Autonomous Vehicles to Ensure Road Safety.

Autonomous vehicles offer various advantages to both vehicle owners and automobile companies. However, despite the advantages, there are various risks associated with these vehicles. These vehicles interact with each other by forming a vehicular network, also known as VANET, in a centralized manner. This centralized network is vulnerable to cyber-attacks which can cause data loss, resulting in road accidents. Thus, to prevent the vehicular network from being attacked and to prevent the privacy of the data, key management is used. However, key management alone over a centralized network is not effective in ensuring data integrity in a vehicular network. To resolve this issue, various studies have introduced a blockchain-based approach and enabled key management over a decentralized network. This technique is also found effective in ensuring the privacy of all the stakeholders involved in a vehicular network. Furthermore, a blockchain-based key management system can also help in storing a large amount of data over a distributed network, which can encourage a faster exchange of information between vehicles in a network. However, there are certain limitations of blockchain technology that may affect the efficient working of autonomous vehicles. Most of the existing blockchain-based systems are implemented over Ethereum or Bitcoin. The transaction-processing capability of these blockchains is in the range of 5 to 20 transactions per second, whereas hashgraphs are capable of processing thousands of transactions per second as the data are processed exponentially. Furthermore, a hashgraph prevents the user from altering the order of the transactions being processed, and they do not need high computational powers to operate, which may help in reducing the overall cost of the system. Due to the advantages offered by a hashgraph, an advanced key management framework based on a hashgraph for secure communication between the vehicles is suggested in this paper. The framework is developed using the concept of Leaving of Vehicles based on a Logical Key Hierarchy (LKH) and Batch Rekeying. The system is tested and compared with other closely related systems on the basis of the transaction compilation time and change in traffic rates.

An Efficient Key Management and Multi-Layered Security Framework for SCADA Systems

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) networks play a vital role in industrial control systems. Industrial organizations perform operations remotely through SCADA systems to accelerate their processes. However, this enhancement in network capabilities comes at the cost of exposing the systems to cyber-attacks. Consequently, effective solutions are required to secure industrial infrastructure as cyber-attacks on SCADA systems can have severe financial and/or safety implications. Moreover, SCADA field devices are equipped with microcontrollers for processing information and have limited computational power and resources. This makes the deployment of sophisticated security features challenging. As a result, effective lightweight cryptography solutions are needed to strengthen the security of industrial plants against cyber threats. In this paper, we have proposed a multi-layered framework by combining both symmetric and asymmetric key cryptographic techniques to ensure high availability, integrity, confidentiality, authentication and scalability. Further, an efficient session key management mechanism is proposed by merging random number generation with a hashed message authentication code. Moreover, for each session, we have introduced three symmetric key cryptography techniques based on the concept of Vernam cipher and a pre-shared session key, namely, random prime number generator, prime counter, and hash chaining. The proposed scheme satisfies the SCADA requirements of real-time request response mechanism by supporting broadcast, multicast, and point to point communication.

Efficient Key Management System Based Lightweight Devices in IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) has changed our lives significantly. Although IoT provides new opportunities, security remains a key concern while providing various services. Existing research methodologies try to solve the security and time-consuming problem also exists. To solve those problems, this paper proposed a Hashed Advanced Encryption Standard (HAES) algorithm based efficient key management system for internet-based lightweight devices in IoT networks. The proposed method is mainly divided into two phases namely Data Owner (DO) and Data User (DU) phase. The DO phase consists of two processes namely authentication and secure data uploading. In authentication, the registration process consists of three phases namely KGC, SCC and DVC. In Key Generation Center (KGC), the device ID is converted into a 128-bit hash key using the Point on Curve based Fowler–Noll–Vo (PoC-FNV) algorithm. In DVC, the Data Access Policy (DAP) is created by using the selected attributes which is in turn selected by using the Chen Chaotic Chimp Optimization Algorithm(CCCOA). Thus, the authentication information is stored in the blockchain. If the person is an authorized, then the data is securely stored and uploaded into the cloud server using HAES. In the DU phase, the DU sends the data access request to the blockchain then the blockchain forwards the request to the DO, if the DO accepts the request then the DU obtains the data by using the DAP. Finally, the performance of the proposed method is compared with the existing methods and attains better result than the existing research methodologies.

A Key Recovery Protocol for Multiparty Threshold ECDSA Schemes

Recently, threshold ECDSA schemes have received much attention from the security community, due to the need of efficient key management in the blockchain system. For the practical use of threshold cryptosystem, a key recovery protocol is essential for users who lost their own secret shares to recover them. It was studied for a long time in the proactive secret sharing area, but the main aim of recent studies in that area is to achieve stronger security and so they are immoderate for the currently existing threshold ECDSA schemes. In this paper, we provide a new key recovery protocol for threshold ECDSA schemes that is secure against static corruptions by malicious adversaries, as in the common adversary model of the state-of-the-art threshold ECDSA schemes. Our proposed protocol reduces both the computational and communication costs to <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">O</i> ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">t</i> <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ) from <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">O</i> ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">t</i> <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> ) where <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">t</i> is the threshold of the schemes, that is, the minimum number of users required for generating a valid signature. According to our experimental results, when <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">t</i> = 2 with 128-bit security, while the previous result takes 10.46 ms in total for all computations (excluding the transmission time on the network), our protocol takes 4.21 ms, which improves by a factor of about 2.48 times. The advantage of our protocol over the previous result is bigger when <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">t</i> is larger. For example, when <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">t</i> = 9 with 128-bit security, while the previous result requires 333.42 ms in total for all computations, our protocol requires 56.61 ms, which outperforms the previous result by a factor of about 5.89 times.

A New Hybrid Online and Offline Multi-Factor Cross-Domain Authentication Method for IoT Applications in the Automotive Industry

Connected vehicles have emerged as the latest revolution in the automotive industry, utilizing the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, most IoT-connected cars mechanisms currently depend on available network services and need continuous network connections to allow users to connect to their vehicles. Nevertheless, the connectivity availability shortcoming in remote or rural areas with no network coverage makes vehicle sharing or any IoT-connected device problematic and undesirable. Furthermore, IoT-connected cars are vulnerable to various passive and active attacks (e.g., replay attacks, MiTM attacks, impersonation attacks, and offline guessing attacks). Adversaries could all use these attacks to disrupt networks posing a threat to the entire automotive industry. Therefore, to overcome this issue, we propose a hybrid online and offline multi-factor authentication cross-domain authentication method for a connected car-sharing environment based on the user’s smartphone. The proposed scheme lets users book a vehicle using the online booking phase based on the secured and trusted Kerberos workflow. Furthermore, an offline authentication phase uses the OTP algorithm to authenticate registered users even if the connectivity services are unavailable. The proposed scheme uses the AES-ECC algorithm to provide secure communication and efficient key management. The formal SOV logic verification was used to demonstrate the security of the proposed scheme. Furthermore, the AVISPA tool has been used to check that the proposed scheme is secured against passive and active attacks. Compared to the previous works, the scheme requires less computation due to the lightweight cryptographic algorithms utilized. Finally, the results showed that the proposed system provides seamless, secure, and efficient authentication operation for the automotive industry, specifically car-sharing systems, making the proposed system suitable for applications in limited and intermittent network connections.

An Energy- Efficient Optimal multi-dimensional location, Key and Trust Management Based Secure Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network

An Energy- Efficient Optimal multi-dimensional location, Key and Trust Management Based Secure Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network