Existing Authentication Schemes Research Articles

An improved lightweight and privacy preserving authentication scheme for smart grid communication

Smart grid is an efficient and reliable technical framework for controlling computers and automation equipment, and how to ensure the communication security in smart grid is an important issue. Cryptographic authentication scheme is a feasible solution, and the existing authentication schemes for smart grid seek to ensure better performance. Some existing authentication schemes lack comprehensive security considerations and have security or privacy vulnerabilities, which makes them vulnerable to specific attacks. The paper reviews a recent scheme ISG-SLAS (Yu and Park, 2022) and analyzes its potential insecure aspects in detail, including unable to resist ESL attack, cannot provide un-traceability and etc. To this end, the paper designs an improved authentication scheme for smart grid based on symmetric cryptography. Through informal security analyses and formal security analyses with real-or-random (ROR) model and Scyther platform, the security of the proposed scheme is demonstrated. From the perspective of performance, the proposed scheme is compared with ten advanced authentication schemes for smart grid, and the results show that the proposed scheme excels other recent schemes in computational overhead, communication overhead and storage overhead, reduced by 10.1%, 30.8% and 36.1% of ISG-SLAS and 58.9%, 64.1% and 24.3% of the average value of all alternatives respectively.

“A lightweight authentication scheme for 6LoWPAN-based Internet-of -things”

ABSTRACT IPv6-based IoT networks, i.e. 6LoWPAN network, require authentication for security. The existing authentication schemes on symmetric-key based approaches for 6LoWPAN consume huge computational and processing overhead in the literature. In a large network, pre-deployment of the key leads to huge memory consumption due to storing many keys. Furthermore, in asymmetric key cryptography, operations with the public key are computationally expensive, which is unsuitable for resource-constrained devices. We proposed a lightweight key exchange and authentication scheme for 6LoWPAN to mutually authenticate the sensor nodes, the gateway, and the server with less computational overhead and without compromising any security credentials. The authentication scheme helps to generate a session key without storing any secrets in the 6LoWPAN devices. We utilized a one-way hash function and XOR operation to reduce overhead in multi-hop communication. The AVISPA verification tool and the formal verification show that the proposed method is resistant to well-known attacks. The proposed scheme outperforms relevant methods in computational overhead, communication cost, and computation time.

An Anonymous Authenticated Group Key Agreement Scheme for Transfer Learning Edge Services Systems

The visual information processing technology based on deep learning (DL) can play many important yet assistant roles for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) navigation in complex environments. Traditional centralized architectures usually rely on a cloud server to perform model inference tasks, which can lead to long communication latency. Using transfer learning (TL) to unload deep neural networks (DNN) to the edge-fog collaborative networks has become a new paradigm for dealing with the conflicts between computing resources and communication latency. However, ensuring the security of edge-fog collaborative networks entity is still challenging. For such, we propose an anonymous authentication and group key agreement scheme for the UAV-enabled edge-fog collaborative networks, consisting of UAV authentication protocol and collaborative networks authentication protocol. Utilizing the AVISPA assessment tool and security analysis, the security requirements and functional features of the proposed scheme are demonstrated. From the performance results of the proposed scheme, we show that it is superior to existing authentication schemes and promising.

Blockchain-Based Lightweight Message Authentication for Edge-Assisted Cross-Domain Industrial Internet of Things

In edge-assisted cross-domain Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), blockchain-based authentication is an effective way to build cross-domain trust and secure cross-domain data. However, existing authentication schemes still have serious challenges in terms of efficiency and security. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based lightweight message authentication scheme. First, to address efficiency challenges, we build a blockchain-enabled edge-assisted lightweight authentication framework. This framework uses edge servers to assist smart devices in achieving cross-domain authentication and effectively reduce redundant interactions between entities. Second, to resolve the security challenges, we design a lightweight message authentication algorithm for cross-domain IIoT. The algorithm guarantees message security with low computational overhead and is suitable for multi-receiver cross-domain IIoT. The security proof and analysis demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure under the random oracle model and can resist various attacks. The performance evaluation shows that our proposed scheme is superior in terms of computation and communication overhead when compared with other related schemes.

Enhancing healthcare data security: a two-step authentication scheme with cloud technology and blockchain

In the modern world, medical data leakage has many external and internal threats. Information systems of medical organizations are constantly subject to various types of cyber-attacks and unauthorized penetration attempts, which leads to the publication of patient medical data online. Existing authentication schemes using blockchain technologies in medical organization systems ensure the integrity of medical data and secure access to patient data. However, one of the serious reasons for unauthorized access to the healthcare system is the human factor, which manifests itself in a negligent attitude towards account security, non-compliance with the rules and policies of information security, and transferring to third parties personal login details to the information system of a medical organization. This paper proposes a solution to this problem through an improved two-step authentication scheme using cloud technology and blockchain. The combined use of cloud technologies and blockchain is a distinctive feature of the proposed authentication scheme since it provides two levels of protection: 1) two-step authentication, the second stage of which includes biometrics through a mobile application. It prevents unauthorized access to the system by third parties; 2) cloud encryption keys for decrypting medical data, which are also accessed through the user's biometrics. The practical part of the paper includes the implementation of biometric login in Python using the OpenCV library. As a result of the practical part, unique fingerprint samples were obtained. The biometric user verification algorithm is designed for a mobile application, which we plan to implement in the future

Privacy-preserving fuzzy commitment schemes for secure IoT device authentication

Privacy-Preserving Fuzzy Commitment Schemes (PPFCS) have emerged as a promising solution for secure Internet of Things (IoT) device authentication, addressing the critical need for privacy and security in the rapidly growing IoT ecosystem. This paper presents a novel PPFCS-based authentication mechanism that protects sensitive user data and ensures secure communication between IoT devices. The proposed scheme leverages error-correcting codes (ECC) and cryptographic hash functions to achieve reliable and efficient authentication. The PPFCS framework allows IoT devices to authenticate themselves without revealing their true identity, preventing unauthorized access and preserving users’ privacy. Furthermore, our PPFCS-based authentication mechanism is resilient against various attacks, such as replay, man-in-the-middle, and brute-force attacks, by incorporating secure random nonce generation and timely key updates. We provide extensive experimental results and comparative analysis, demonstrating that the proposed PPFCS significantly outperforms existing authentication schemes in terms of security, privacy, and computational efficiency. As a result, the PPFCS offers a viable and effective solution for ensuring secure and privacy-preserving IoT device authentication, mitigating the risks associated with unauthorized access and potential data breaches in the IoT ecosystem.

Secure authentication schemes in cloud computing with glimpse of artificial neural networks: A review

The fast growth of the cloud computing technology has led to immense development in the public and private sectors. Cloud computing provides a high level of virtualization, massive scalability, multitenancy and elasticity. This has enabled organizations, academia, government departments and the public to move forward with this technology. However, they are unable to assuredly place their information over the clouds due to many security threats. Cloud security plays a vital role to establish a confidence between the cloud service providers, consumers and the multi-users to maintain the security levels of their data. This paper focuses the survey for cloud security issues, existing authentication schemes, data storage technologies and offers a glimpse of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) applied to the cloud security.

Analysis and Improvement of a Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for Telecare Medical Information System Environment

Telecare Medical Information System (TMIS) can provide various telemedicine services to patients. However, information is communicated over an open channel. An attacker may intercept, replay, or modify this information. Therefore, many authentication schemes are proposed to provide secure communication for TMIS. Recently, Yu et al proposed a privacy-preserving authentication scheme in the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)-enabled TMIS environments. They emphasize that their scheme is resistant to various attacks and ensures anonymity. Unfortunately, this paper demonstrates that Yu et al's scheme is vulnerable to impersonation attacks, replay attacks, and tracking attacks and cannot mutually authenticate. To overcome the shortcomings of Yu et al's scheme, we mainly improve the authentication and key agreement process and propose a corresponding improved scheme. We also compare the improved scheme with several existing authentication schemes in terms of security and computational efficiency.

A secure and lightweight batch authentication scheme for Internet of Drones environment

Internet of Drones (IoD) ushered in a rapid growth period and is gradually expanded from military field to civilian field. Currently, there are more and more scenarios where multiple drones are needed to complete a task together. Usually, identity authentication is required to ensure the execution of the task. The existing authentication schemes are basically aimed at the authentication of a single drone. For the multiple-drones scenario, the authentication protocol needs to be executed one by one for all the participating drones, which is extremely inefficient and will directly affect the efficiency of task execution. Therefore, we propose a novel lightweight authentication scheme, which supports users' batch authentication of multiple drones to ensure high efficiency of authentication. In our scheme, we only use hash function and point multiplication to complete batch authentication. In addition, Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are introduced into our scheme to resist physical capture attack. Furthermore, our formal and informal security analyses reveal that our scheme can withstand most known attacks. The experimental result shows that our scheme can provide better security and lower storage and computation overheads when authenticating multiple drones, as compared with existing similar schemes.

Efficient Anonymous Batch Authentication Scheme With Conditional Privacy in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) Applications

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has emerged as a robust solution to improve real-time road traffic conditions, safety, and driving comfort. However, the road’s dynamic environment and network heterogeneity make communication insecure. It poses many security threats like man-in-the-middle attacks, impersonation attacks, replay attacks, etc. Therefore, the message exchanges and real identities of nodes over the IoV network need to be preserved. The existing authentication schemes are inefficient and incur computational and communication overhead. They are unsuitable for resource-constrained IoV networks due to their highly dynamic nature, open communication, and chaotic road environment. Therefore, this paper proposes an elliptic curve cryptography-based secure and efficient anonymous batch authentication scheme with conditional privacy (EABAS-CP) for the IoV environment. The EABAS-CP scheme achieves conditional privacy by tracing the malicious vehicle efficiently. The RSU’s distributed parameters generate a pseudo-identity for vehicles and unique signatures that do not require secure channels and trusted authorities (TAs) for secure communication. Furthermore, the EABAS-CP scheme supports batch signature verification in which multiple signatures can be verified simultaneously and efficiently. The Random Oracle Model (RoM) provides unforgeability against adaptive message attacks by using the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP). The AVISPA simulation tool is used to evaluate the proposed protocol for its reliability and protection from the attacks like man-in-the-middle and replay attacks. The proposed EABAS-CP scheme is also proven secure against replay, impersonation, stolen verifier, ephemeral secret leakage, and linkability attacks. The network performance of the EABAS-CP scheme has been evaluated in terms of end-to-end delay, throughput, average message delay, average message loss ratio, communication cost, and computation cost through the NS-2 simulator and compared with existing schemes to demonstrate its efficiency.

Blockchain-Based Decentralized and Lightweight Anonymous Authentication for Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a promising technology for achieving privacy-preserving edge intelligence and has attracted extensive attention from industry and academia. However, in the FL training process, the server directly aggregates local models from mobile devices, which poses serious privacy and security threats. The identity authentication mechanism can provide FL with local model integrity and source authentication. However, the existing schemes are centralized, and most of them are computationally expensive, resulting in limited performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes a decentralized and lightweight anonymous FL identity authentication scheme, namely DAFL. In our scheme, we first design a decentralized and simplified storage FL authentication framework by combining the directed acyclic graph (DAG) blockchain and accumulator. Then, we propose a lightweight digital signature algorithm that supports batch verification for authentication. Finally, nodes interact through pseudonyms to achieve anonymous communication, and the trusted authority (TA) can track and recover the real identities of nodes when malicious behavior occurs. We theoretically prove the security of the proposed DAFL. The extensive experiments demonstrate that DAFL achieves lower authentication overhead and better convergence performance compared to existing authentication schemes and vanilla FL systems.

LCDMA: Lightweight Cross-Domain Mutual Identity Authentication Scheme for Internet of Things

With the widespread popularity of mobile terminals in the Internet of things (IoT), the demand for cross-domain access of mobile terminals between different regions has also increased significantly. The nature of wireless communication media makes mobile terminals vulnerable to security threats in cross-domain access. Identity authentication is a prerequisite for secure data transmission in cross-domain, and it is also the first step to guarantee the credibility of data sources. Most existing authentication schemes are based on bilinear pairing or public key encryption and decryption with high computation overhead, which are not suitable for the resource-limited mobile IoT terminals. Moreover, these schemes have some security drawbacks and cannot meet the security requirements of cross-domain access. In this paper, we propose a lightweight cross-domain mutual identity authentication (LCDMA) for mobile IoT environment. LCDMA uses symmetric polynomial instead of high-complexity bilinear pairing in the traditional schemes. We theoretically analyze the security performance under the random oracle model. Our results show that LCDMA not only resists common attacks, but also preserves secure traceability while guaranteeing anonymity. Performance evaluation further demonstrates that our scheme has better performance in terms of computation and communication overhead, compared with other existing representative schemes.

Research on Identity Authentication Scheme for UAV Communication Network

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) play a vital role in many fields, such as agricultural planting, security patrol, emergency rescue, and so on. The development and implementation of these devices have become vital in terms of reachability and usability. Unfortunately, as drones become more widely used in various fields, they become more and more vulnerable to attacks and security threats, including, but not limited to, eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks, and known session key attacks. In order to deal with these attacks and security threats and meet the needs of lightweight UAV communication, a secure and efficient authentication scheme is essential. To meet the security and lightweight requirements of an identity authentication scheme in a UAV communication network, this paper proposes an identity authentication scheme sdronelig based on an elliptic curve cryptosystem. The scheme realizes the mutual authentication and session key agreement configuration between the UAV and the ground station, and the authentication and key agreement between the UAVs can be realized with the help of the control station. The sdronelig authentication scheme is based on the ECDH key exchange protocol in the elliptic curve cryptography algorithm and adopts the MAC message authentication code technology and the method of pre-calculating part of the process. Under the premise of ensuring the security of the UAV communication network, the authentication efficiency is improved, the communication overhead and communication times are reduced, and the lightweight requirement of the UAV authentication scheme is met. Additionally, a formal verification tool is used to verify the security of the sdronelig scheme under the Dolev-Yao threat model, which is suitable for UAV networks. Finally, a detailed comparative study was conducted on security features, communication overhead, the number of communications, and computational overhead. The results show that the proposed sdronelig authentication scheme not only provides superior security features but also has better or comparable overhead compared to other existing authentication schemes.

Research on Lightweight Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol in Power Grid Based on the SM9 Cryptographic Algorithm

With the wide application of power grids, the massive heterogeneous terminals become important data collection nodes and data relay nodes. However, the openness of the power system exposes the power grid to various security threats. Authentication key agreement protocol can provide authentication and session key sharing services and is the most important technical means to protect the communication security of power grids. However, the design of authentication key agreement protocols for power grids faces many challenges. Firstly, the members of the power grid change frequently, and each new member needs to be authenticated with the edge side equipment every time it joins, so the existing authentication scheme has a large computational overhead. Furthermore, the network communication bandwidth is limited, and the existing schemes have a high time overhead due to the number of communication interactions when performing terminal authentication with the edge side equipment. Finally, the existing schemes all use non-national secret algorithms, which cannot achieve autonomous control. This paper designs a lightweight power grid authentication key agreement protocol based on the state-secure SM9 algorithm to address the above technical challenges. Also, corresponding security proofs based on the threat model of power grids and the existing attack patterns are offered, and code implementation is carried out. It is experimentally verified that the computation time overhead and communication overhead of this scheme are smaller than those of the existing authentication key agreement protocols based on identification cryptosystems.

PACM: Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme With on-Chain Certificate Management for VANETs

Privacy-preserving authentication is designed to protect vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) from illegitimate users and fake messages while maintaining the privacy of legitimate users’ identities. However, existing authentication schemes have disadvantages such as non-transparent certificate issuance and revocation, high identity authentication and certificate revocation overhead. In this paper, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving authentication scheme with on-chain certificate management (PACM) in VANETs, where the service manager (SM) of each domain serves as a node of the blockchain to build a distributed system. Specifically, based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and exclusive-OR operations, we achieve secure and lightweight mutual authentication between vehicles and roadside units (RSUs) by regularly updated pseudonyms. Then, we adopt the blockchain to record the issuance and revocation of all certificates, which makes SM’s activities transparent. Moreover, we introduce the counting garbled bloom filter (CGBF) to enable fast query and revocation of certificates. Besides, we design a non-forgeable and non-repudiable billing mechanism based on the hash chain technology. Security analysis and experimental results show that PACM achieves stronger security with less overhead.

Improved Certificateless Aggregate Signature Scheme Against Collusion Attacks for VANETs

Vehicle ad-hoc networks (VANETs) can offer numerous benefits, but also face many privacy and security issues. There exist the certificate management burden and key escrow issue in traditional public key infrastructure (PKI)-based and identity (ID)-based privacy-preserving authentication schemes, respectively. In addition, the security of some existing cryptographic schemes depends on strong assumptions about the ideal tamper-proof devices. To address these issues, a certificateless aggregate signature (CLAS) scheme for VANETs has been proposed, which was claimed provably unforgeable. However, we found that this scheme cannot resist collusion attacks, which means the equivalent validity of the aggregate signature would be broken. Therefore, this article proposes an improved CLAS scheme against collusion attacks for VANETs (CA-CLAS). Security and performance analyses show that the proposed CA-CLAS scheme not only offers privacy and security guarantees for VANETs, but also improves efficiency compared to existing authentication schemes.

Blockchain-Based Anonymous Authentication in Edge Computing Environment

Authentication is an important requirement for the security of edge computing applications. The existing authentication schemes either frequently rely on third-party trusted authorities, leading to the security risk of user information disclosure, or have high authentication overhead, causing certain pressure on the computation and communication of lightweight terminal equipment in the edge environment. In this paper, we proposed a blockchain-based anonymous authentication scheme for edge computing environments. We first designed a blockchain-based authentication architecture to store a small number of authentication elements in the blockchain network, and provide a decentralized and trusted authentication environment to ensure device anonymity and improve the security of authentication processes. Then, an elliptic cryptographic curve-based authentication scheme is proposed. It uses the chameleon hash function to dynamically generate the authentication data according to the elements stored in the blockchain and negotiate the session key, which effectively reduces the computational overhead in the authentication process. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves a secure authentication process and effectively reduces the authentication overhead by up to 43.16% compared to three state-of-the-art schemes.

Lattice-Based Authentication Scheme to Prevent Quantum Attack in Public Cloud Environment

Public cloud computing provides a variety of services to consumers via high-speed internet. The consumer can access these services anytime and anywhere on a balanced service cost. Many traditional authentication protocols are proposed to secure public cloud computing. However, the rapid development of high-speed internet and organizations’ race to develop quantum computers is a nightmare for existing authentication schemes. These traditional authentication protocols are based on factorization or discrete logarithm problems. As a result, traditional authentication protocols are vulnerable in the quantum computing era. Therefore, in this article, we have proposed an authentication protocol based on the lattice technique for public cloud computing to resist quantum attacks and prevent all known traditional security attacks. The proposed lattice-based authentication protocol is provably secure under the Real-Or-Random (ROR) model. At the same time, the result obtained during the experiments proved that our protocol is lightweight compared to the existing lattice-based authentication protocols, as listed in the performance analysis section. The comparative analysis shows that the protocol is suitable for practical implementation in a quantum-based environment.

An efficient conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme with scalable revocation for VANETs

In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), secure information sharing between vehicles is critical for improving traffic efficiency and driving safety. However, existing identity-based communication protocols for VANETs face problems of over-reliance on ideal Tamper-Proof Devices (TPDs) and the efficiency of verifying multiple messages in areas of high traffic density. Besides, many existing authentication schemes suffer from the heavy workload of revoking malicious vehicles when they misbehave. For addressing these problems, we propose an efficient Identity-Based conditional privacy-preserving authentication protocol, which does not rely on the ideal TPD. In our scheme, the System Secret Key (SSK) is not directly preloaded with the TPD, thus avoiding a system crash when a vehicle is corrupted. To revoke malicious vehicles’ identity, we propose an efficient key updating method based on Shamir’s secret sharing algorithm, which improves key-update efficiency from linear to logarithmic in the number of unrevoked vehicles. Moreover, our scheme is based on Elliptic Curves Cryptosystem and avoids bilinear pairing operation while supporting batch verification, enabling faster verification even when the number of signatures is increasing. According to the results of exhaustive comparative analysis, our proposed scheme is secure against key leakage attack and efficient in overhead of computation and communication compared to related schemes.

Stateful-CCSH: An Efficient Authentication Scheme for High-Resolution Video Surveillance System

Video cameras have been widely deployed for surveillance and smart city. But the authenticity of a video scene faces a great challenge due to the ease of tampering with video data without leaving visible traces. Unfortunately, existing authentication schemes are not efficient for emerging high-resolution videos. In this article, we propose stateful correlation coefficient sampling-based hash (Stateful-CCSH), which adopts correlation coefficient sampling in image hash and learns from previous frames to sample those blocks with more dynamic contents and thus, more likely to be tampered in a video forgery. To decrease the impact of false detection introduced by compression and sampling, we also propose a group smoothing-based authentication scheme. The experimental results show that Stateful-CCSH not only achieves excellent performance in forgery detection, particularly, the detection of moving object removal, but also saves significant computation and communication costs even when the video resolutions are high.