Elliptic Curve Cryptography-based Authentication Research Articles

A novel secure and distributed architecture for privacy-preserving healthcare system

Patients often visit several hospitals to obtain medication, generating a significant volume of data. Moreover, hospitals use different data analytic techniques to improve healthcare services, leading to patient data privacy. However, no integrated architecture has a trustworthy data repository and secure communication protocols to store and share the data with various parties (e.g., hospitals and data analysts) for different healthcare services. This study proposes an innovative three-tier secure and distributed privacy-preserving healthcare architecture that addresses the aforementioned challenges. The first tier introduces a trustworthy data repository called custodian, where the data owner stores encrypted data and offer real-time privacy-preserving health monitoring service. The second tier provides Elliptic Curve Cryptography-based authentication for secure data exchange between the data owner and the hospital. The third tier utilizes smart contracts and local differential privacy (LDP) for secure machine learning model training. All transactions are recorded on the blockchain and managed by a smart contract. Security analysis shows that the proposed framework ensures privacy, security, and data integrity. Performance analysis is done based on score metrics, scalability metrics, and formal analysis. A transaction takes 0.00121 s in the first tier, and in the second tier, it takes 0.1267 s. The third tier uses ɛ−LDP with a privacy budget of ɛ = 3 on Random Forest and achieves 97%, 83%, and 74% accuracy on breast cancer, heart disease, and diabetic datasets. This accuracy is higher than the previous state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the proposed healthcare framework ensures privacy, security and outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods.

A Secure, Privacy-Preserving, and Lightweight Authentication Scheme for VANETs

The vehicular network is a collection of vehicles and other components facilitated with versatile sensors to communicate, which is backboned by authentication. Present authentication protocols focus on either the lightweight feature or security. On the other hand, privacy during authentication is essential. Moreover, existing schemes are dependent on the trusted authority for checking the legitimacy of a communicating node, which suffers from the infrastructure-less scenario. Alternatively, existing protocols are dependent on a secure communication channel during the registration phase. To address these concerns, an elliptic curve cryptography-based authentication protocol has been designed. Moreover, a secure key establishment is shown in this paper. Pseudo-id-based authentication is used to provide the privacy-preservation on the scheme. On the other hand, symmetric-key cryptography with a session key is used for message encryption during communication. A security analysis on the proposed scheme using the BAN logic and AVISPA shows the protocol’s resilience capabilities on various attacks. Alternatively, the mathematical proof of the protocol represents the proof of correctness. Moreover, extensive performance analysis with the existing authentication schemes shows that the proposed algorithm is better in computation cost, communication cost, and energy cost. Lastly, the NS3 simulation shows the packet data transfer among the nodes in the network.

ECCAuth: A Secure Authentication Protocol for Demand Response Management in a Smart Grid System

The devices in smart grids (SG) transfer data to a utility center (UC) or to the remote control centers. Using these data, the energy balance is maintained between consumers and the grid. However, this flow of data may be tampered by the intruders, which may result in energy imbalance. Thus, a robust authentication protocol, which supports dynamic SG device validation and UC addition, both in the local and global domains, is an essential requirement. For this reason, ECCAuth: a novel elliptic curve cryptography-based authentication protocol is proposed in this paper for preserving demand response in SG. This protocol allows establishment of a secret session key between an SG device and a UC after mutual authentication. Using this key, they can securely communicate for exchanging the sensitive information. The formal security analysis, informal security analysis, and formal security verification show that ECCAuth can withstand several known attacks.

Design and hardware implementation of a security-enhanced elliptic curve cryptography based lightweight authentication scheme for smart grid communications

Security and privacy are among the main concerns in the smart grid adoption. The different parties of smart grid can communicate securely by means of symmetric key algorithms. However, in order to utilize the symmetric key encryption methods, the parties need to establish a common key beforehand. To do so, several key management schemes have been presented during the last decade to be employed in the context of smart grid. Quite recently, Mahmood et al. have proposed an interesting elliptic curve cryptography-based authentication and key agreement scheme for smart grid communications. They have said that their presented scheme can withstand several known attacks and can provide the perfect forward secrecy. After careful deliberation, we found that their scheme cannot provide the perfect forward secrecy. Furthermore, their scheme is vulnerable under the commonly accepted Canetti–Krawczyk adversarial model. That is to say, the private key of users and shared session keys can be easily compromised in case of ephemeral secrets leakage. As a result, to remedy the existing challenges, in this paper, an authentication scheme is proposed that can both provide the desired security features and offer better efficiency in communication and computational costs than several recently-published schemes. Finally yet importantly, the security of our proposed scheme has been validated using the widely-accepted ProVerif tool and the cryptographic elements have been implemented on a suitable hardware for smart meters. The results are indicative of the betterment of the proposed scheme for real-world applications. We hope that the obtained results be useful for other researches in this field.

Elliptic Curve Cryptography-Based Authentication with Identity Protection for Smart Grids

In a smart grid, the power service provider enables the expected power generation amount to be measured according to current power consumption, thus stabilizing the power system. However, the data transmitted over smart grids are not protected, and then suffer from several types of security threats and attacks. Thus, a robust and efficient authentication protocol should be provided to strength the security of smart grid networks. As the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system provides the security protection between the control center and substations in most smart grid environments, we focus on how to secure the communications between the substations and smart appliances. Existing security approaches fail to address the performance-security balance. In this study, we suggest a mitigation authentication protocol based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography with privacy protection by using a tamper-resistant device at the smart appliance side to achieve a delicate balance between performance and security of smart grids. The proposed protocol provides some attractive features such as identity protection, mutual authentication and key agreement. Finally, we demonstrate the completeness of the proposed protocol using the Gong-Needham- Yahalom logic.

Robust elliptic curve cryptography‐based three factor user authentication providing privacy of biometric data

Recently, to achieve privacy protection using biometrics, Fan and Lin proposed a three-factor authentication scheme based on password, smart card and biometrics. However, the authors have found that Fan and Lin's proposed scheme (i) has flaws in the design of biometrics privacy, (ii) fails to maintain a verification table, making it vulnerable to stolen-verifier attack and modification attack, and (iii) is vulnerable to insider attacks. Thus, the authors propose an elliptic curve cryptography-based authentication scheme that is improved with regard to security requirements. The authors’ proposed scheme overcomes the flaws of Fan and Lin's scheme and is secured from attacks. Furthermore, the authors have presented a security analysis of their scheme to show that their scheme is suitable for the biometric systems.