Key Establishment Phase Research Articles

An efficient and secure CLAKA protocol for blockchain-aided wireless body area networks

The effective usage of a WBAN elaborated as a wireless body area network in remote healthcare services is made conceivable by the speedy progression of wireless transmission technologies. Wearable sensors are used in WBANs to gather patient health information and communicate it over a public channel to the controller node. Due to the wireless nature of communication, many attacks can be attempted over WBAN communication. This necessitates an appropriately authenticated key agreement mechanism and protected information transfer between the user’s device and the controller node. The key escrow issue plagues identity-based systems and is avoided by certificateless authenticated key agreement (CLAKA) protocols, which also eliminate certificateless operational overheads in public key infrastructure. This paper proposes an efficient and secure protocol named ES-CLAKA for WBANs based on blockchain, which satisfies multiple security features. Informal analysis confirms that the attributes of forward security, key security, known temporary key security, key control security, key escrow, anonymity, verifiability, consensus, immutability, and unknown key share are fulfilled by ES-CLAKA. The security of the authenticated key-establishment phase and the concealment of the established key have been established through a formal analysis of the ES-CLAKA protocol utilizing the BAN logic and the ROR model, respectively. Results show that compared to the other most effective CLAKA protocols, ES-CLAKA consumes 47.4% less computational time, 20% less communication bandwidth, and 16.67% less storage overhead under reasonable assumptions. Comparative assessment of the security attributes has revealed that, when equated to other analogous schemes, the proposed ES-CLAKA protocol offers the highest level of security.

A dynamic and multi-level key management method in wireless sensor networks (WSNs)

Wireless sensor networks include a set of ultralight sensor nodes with limited energy, low storage capacity, and constrained processing power. Security is a challenging issue in these networks. One approach to maintain security in these networks is key management. When designing key management schemes, the main challenge is to achieve the acceptable security level and manage resources, especially energy. Today, many key management methods use authentication mechanisms. However, these methods are faced with different challenges due to the limited computational capability of nodes and high energy consumption in the network. In this paper, we present a dynamic and multi-level key management method for homogeneous wireless sensor networks. The proposed key management approach uses an authentication mechanism based on message authentication code (MAC), which is calculated by the shared symmetric keys between the transmitter and receiver nodes. In our scheme, the network is divided into five levels. Then, the clustering process is performed at each level, so that the size of the clusters varies in different levels. The proposed approach includes four phases: (1) Network leveling phase (2) Clustering phase (3) Key establishment phase (cluster key, pairwise key, and gateway key) (4) Rekeying phase. In the proposed method, a symmetric encryption algorithm called RC5 is used for producing keys. Our method contributes to the state of the art in wireless sensor networks by proposing a dynamic and multi-level key management approach. The use of a MAC-based authentication mechanism and the division of the network into different levels and clusters allows for efficient key establishment and rekeying, while minimizing energy consumption and communication overhead. Our proposed method is implemented using the NS2 simulator. Then, the simulation results are compared with SKWN and KMP methods. The results show that our proposed method outperforms SKWN and KMP in terms of average energy consumption, required memory, and communication overhead. However, its computational overhead is slightly more than SKWN and KMP.

A robust and efficient vector-based key management scheme for IoT networks

Information and communication security is a critical concern in the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) networks that need to exchange sensitive data. Therefore, key management is essential to address such networks’ security problems. In this context, several existing research work focuses on key management solutions, which consider the resource-limitation of IoT devices. However, the weaknesses of these solutions are (1) the lack of protection for sensitive parameters during transmission, (2) security and performance metrics’ misbalancing, and (3) the vulnerability to node-compromising attacks. This paper presents a new key management scheme based on pre-distributed vectors to overcome these limits to secure key establishment, refresh, and revocation. Moreover, the network area is divided into subareas, which makes our solution lightweight, flexible, scalable, and resilient to multiple attacks while minimizing communications, computation, and storage overheads on IoT devices. We assess the proposed scheme by using (1) the BAN (Burrows Abadi Needham) formal verification logic, (2) the informal security to demonstrate its resilience against some known attacks, and (3) the performance analysis to prove its correctness. The obtained results show that the proposed scheme is more efficient than other schemes in terms of storage by saving more than 81.84%, communications by 100% during the group-wise key establishment, computation overheads by reducing the number of multiplication operations to 50%, and energy consumption by saving up to 99.99% during the group-wise key establishment phase. Moreover, the results show that our scheme is more resilient against node capture attacks by up to 96.43% during the initialization phase and by more than 9.89% after, making it suitable for use in resource-limited IoT networks.

A Scalable Security Protocol for Intravehicular Controller Area Network

Intravehicular communication relies on controller area network (CAN) protocol to deliver messages and instructions among different electronic control units (ECU). Unfortunately, inherent defects in CAN include the absence of confidentiality and integrity mechanism, enabling adversaries to launch attacks from wired or wireless interfaces. Although various CAN cryptographic protocols have been proposed for entity authentication and secure communication, the redundancy in the key establishment phase weakens their availability in large-scale CAN. In this paper, we propose a scalable security protocol suite for intravehicular networks and reduce the communication costs significantly. A new type of attack, suspension attack, is identified for the existing protocols and mitigated in our protocol by leveraging a global counter scheme. We formally verify the security properties of the proposed protocol suite through the AVISPA tool. The simulation results indicate that the communication and computation efficiency are improved in our protocol.

A class of key-node indexed hash chains based key predistribution (KPS): Signed weighted graphs

Key management solutions are cornerstone requirements for any security service. Due to resource limitations, public key cryptographic (PKC) solutions are unsuitable for IoT devices like sensors of WSN. Consequently we opt for key predistribution schemes (KPS) to preload lightweight symmetric cryptographic keys and later establish them. KPS are designed over random and/or combinatorial graphs and requires several devices to share individual keys (conventionally r many). This causes a dip in the resultant system’s resilience. Cichoń et al. [10] introduces a technique that involve recursive use of a one-way function to distinguish each key’s cycle and improve the given system’s resilience. Bechkit et al. [2,3] considers a cryptographic hash function to form their hash chains (KPS), i.e., HC(x) for a given KPS x. They construct hash chains according to node identifiers (ids) and consider modulo n,(n∈Z+) to reduce hash chains. This paper uses signed weighted graph (SWG) to conceal node ids in the key sharing graph of the underlying KPS x during short-lived key establishment phase (KEP). The concealment of information permits distinct indexing of each sensor according their position in the cycles of preloaded keys. Resultant system remains distributed with improved resilience and is independent of other parameters. In this way, a new class of KPS, named as key-node indexed hash chains (KPS), i.e., KNIHC(x) for the selected KPS x is proposed. It eliminates smart attack (SA). Moreover being fully connected (due to choice of underlying KPS), the proposed system supports mobility.

Secure Access Control Method for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) contain a large number of resource-constrained and energy-limited sensor nodes that are generally deployed in an open environment. Those sensor nodes communicate with each other or with a base station via wireless channels. Therefore, secure access control is an important issue in WSNs because sensor nodes are susceptible to various malicious attacks during the authentication and key establishment phase and the new node addition phase. In this study, we propose a new access control method based on elliptic curve cryptography and the chameleon hash function. This method addresses the security problems in the existing research. It also has additional advantages since it does not require time synchronization between communication nodes, nor does it require node verification tables. In addition to our proposal, the correctness, security, resistance to possible attacks, and the performance of the proposed method are analyzed and evaluated. The results of our study demonstrate that the proposed method has an outstanding performance and fulfills all the requirements for secure communication in WSNs.

Frequency quorum rendezvous for fast and resilient key establishment under jamming attack

This paper proposes a novel Frequency Quorum Rendezvous (FQR) scheme for fast and resilient pre-key establishment in anti-jamming spread spectrum techniques. While nodes hop over own frequencies during the key establishment phase, using a quorum system improves their rendezvous probability and reduces time latency.