Group Key Research Articles

Neural Cryptography Based on Complex-Valued Neural Network.

Neural cryptography is a public key exchange algorithm based on the principle of neural network synchronization. By using the learning algorithm of a neural network, the two neural networks update their own weight through exchanging output from each other. Once the synchronization is completed, the weights of the two neural networks are the same. The weights of the neural network can be used for the secret key. However, all the existing works are based on the real-valued neural network model. There are seldom works studying the neural cryptography based on a complex-valued neural network model. In this technical note, a neural cryptography based on the complex-valued tree parity machine network (CVTPM) is proposed. The input, output, and weights of CVTPM are a complex value, which can be considered as an extension of TPM. There are two advantages of the CVTPM: 1) the security of CVTPM is higher than that of TPM with the same hidden units, input neurons, and synaptic depths and 2) the two parties with the CVTPM can exchange two group keys in one neural synchronization process. A series of numerical simulation experiments is provided to verify our results.

A Scalable and Secure Group Key Management Method for Secure V2V Communication.

Safety applications based on vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications can significantly enhance road safety and reduce traffic fatalities. Ensuring the security and privacy of the vehicular network is essential for the widespread adoption of V2X communications for commercial use. V2X safety and service applications require periodic broadcast communications among all the vehicles. However, compared to unicast communication, it is extremely challenging to provide broadcast communication with network security requirements such as confidentiality, in infotainment contents distribution, sensor data sharing, and security credentials management services. To address the providing confidentiality of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) broadcasting, we propose a group key management and message encryption method that is secure, lightweight, and scalable. The proposed group key management method can efficiently handle various scenarios like a node joining or leaving the group, with scalable rekeying algorithms. It employs a distributed and scalable architecture that offers several advantages such as the reduction of the key management overhead and the enhancement of the security level by keeping the key sizes with large networks. In addition, the proposed method employs a lightweight matrix-based encryption algorithm that can be easily applicable with the proposed group key management method. Further, we have implemented the proposed method and evaluated the performance using a V2V network simulator with several networks of highly dynamic group members. The simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce computation time for group key generation and message encryption by more than 80% compared to existing methods.

Compiled Constructions towards Post-Quantum Group Key Exchange: A Design from Kyber

A group authenticated key exchange (GAKE) protocol allows a set of parties belonging to a certain designated group to agree upon a common secret key through an insecure communication network. In the last few years, many new cryptographic tools have been specifically designed to thwart attacks from adversaries which may have access to (different kinds of) quantum computation resources. However, few constructions for group key exchange have been put forward. Here, we propose a four-round GAKE which can be proven secure under widely accepted assumptions in the Quantum Random Oracle Model. Specifically, we integrate several primitives from the so-called Kyber suite of post-quantum tools in a (slightly modified) compiler from Abdalla et al. (TCC 2007). More precisely, taking as a starting point an IND-CPA encryption scheme from the Kyber portfolio, we derive, using results from Hövelmanns et al. (PKC 2020), a two-party key exchange protocol and an IND-CCA encryption scheme and prove them fit as building blocks for our compiled construction. The resulting GAKE protocol is secure under the Module-LWE assumption, and furthermore achieves authentication without the use of (expensive) post-quantum signatures.

A Research on Identification Cultivar of Dahlia Cav. Growns In Traditional Van Gardens

Exotic ornamental plants belonging to various cultural centers are grown in Van Gardens that goes back to the Urartians. Dahlia Cav. is one of the exotic types brought to be grown in Van. Exotic ornamental plants belonging to various cultural centers in Van Gardens dating back to the Urartians are grown. There were the exotic plants that grow in tradition Van gardens. Dahlia Cav. was one of the exotic plants brought to be grown in Van Gardens. As a result of the experimentations, 3 groups of Dahlia cv. having different morphologic characteristics have been identified in Eminpaşa District. According to the group keys of identified Dahlia cv., it has been identified that the first group consists of the flowers having yellow color and is 10 cm in diameter, the second one has red color and its diameter is under 10 cm, and the last one has a purple color and is under 10 cm in diameter. In Van and its vicinity, Dahlia cv. types which fit the climate, soil and other surrounding conditions have existed up until today. The usage of these types that do not belong to the very nature of Van, that is, not from Van, would be a cultural and biological achievement in reforming the urban identity.

Blockchain-based batch authentication protocol for Internet of Vehicles

The vehicles in Internet of Vehicles (IoV) can be used to opportunistically gather and distribute the data in a smart city environment. However, at the same time, various security threats arise due to insecure communication happening among various entities in an IoV-based smart city deployment. To address this issue, we aim to design a novel blockchain-enabled batch authentication scheme in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-envisioned IoV-based smart city deployment. The latest trends and revolutions in technologies incorporate AI/Machine Learning (ML) in blockchaining to produce a secure, efficient and intelligent blockchain based system. The data stored in the blocks in the blockchain are authentic and genuine, which makes the AI/ML algorithms to work at their exceptions in order produce correct predictions on the blockchain data. Through the signing phase of the proposed scheme, each vehicle in a dynamically formed cluster broadcasts a message to its own member and respective road-side unit (RSU). In the proposed scheme, two types of authentication take place: vehicle to vehicle (V2V) authentication allows a vehicle to authenticate its neighbor vehicles in its cluster, while batch authentication permits a group of cluster vehicles to be authenticated by their R S U . At the end, a group key is established among the vehicles and R S U in their cluster. R S U then gathers securely data from its vehicles and form several transactions including the information of vehicles and its own given information to the cluster member vehicles. The transactions are formed later by the nearby fog server associated with R S U and then by the cloud server to form a complete block. The created blocks are mined by the cloud servers in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) cloud server network through the voting-based Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus algorithm. The authentic and genuine data of the blockchain are utilized for Big data analytics through AI/ML algorithms. It is shown that the proposed scheme is highly robust against various attacks through formal and informal security analysis, and also through formal security verification tool. A detailed comparative analysis reveals that the proposed scheme achieves superior security and functionality features, and offers comparable storage, communication and computational costs as compared to other existing competing schemes. Finally, the blockchain implementation has been carried out on the proposed scheme to show its effectiveness.

Decentralized Lightweight Group Key Management for Dynamic Access Control in IoT Environments

Rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices dealing with sensitive data has led to the emergence of new access control technologies in order to maintain this data safe from unauthorized use. In particular, a dynamic IoT environment, characterized by a high signaling overhead caused by subscribers’ mobility, presents a significant concern to ensure secure data distribution to legitimate subscribers. Hence, for such dynamic environments, group key management (GKM) represents the fundamental mechanism for managing the dissemination of keys for access control and secure data distribution. However, existing access control schemes based on GKM and dedicated to IoT are mainly based on centralized models, which fail to address the scalability challenge introduced by the massive scale of IoT devices and the increased number of subscribers. Besides, none of the existing GKM schemes supports the independence of the members in the same group. They focus only on dependent symmetric group keys per subgroup communication, which is inefficient for subscribers with a highly dynamic behavior. To deal with these challenges, we introduce a novel Decentralized Lightweight Group Key Management architecture for Access Control in the IoT environment ( DLGKM-AC). Based on a hierarchical architecture, composed of one Key Distribution Center (KDC) and several Sub Key Distribution Centers (SKDCs), the proposed scheme enhances the management of subscribers’ groups and alleviate the rekeying overhead on the KDC. Moreover, a new master token management protocol for managing keys dissemination across a group of subscribers is introduced. This protocol reduces storage, computation, and communication overheads during join/leave events. The proposed approach accommodates a scalable IoT architecture, which mitigates the single point of failure by reducing the load caused by rekeying at the core network. DLGKM-AC guarantees secure group communication by preventing collusion attacks and ensuring backward/forward secrecy. Simulation results and analysis of the proposed scheme show considerable resource gain in terms of storage, computation, and communication overheads.

A Blockchain-Based Authentication and Dynamic Group Key Agreement Protocol.

With the rapid development of mobile networks, there are more and more application scenarios that require group communication. For example, in mobile edge computing, group communication can be used to transmit messages to all group members with minimal resources. The group key directly affects the security of the group communication. Most existing group key agreement protocols are often flawed in performance, scalability, forward or backward secrecy, or single node failure. Therefore, this paper proposes a blockchain-based authentication and dynamic group key agreement protocol. With our protocol, each group member only needs to authenticate its left neighbor once to complete the authentication, which improved authentication efficiency. In addition, our protocol guarantees the forward secrecy of group members after joining the group and the backward secrecy of group members after leaving the group. Based on blockchain technology, we solve the problem of single node failure. Furthermore, we use mathematics to prove the correctness and security of our protocol, and the comparison to related protocols shows that our protocol reduces computation and communication costs.

Tree and elliptic curve based efficient and secure group key agreement protocol

Group Key Agreement Protocol (GKAP) is a cryptographic mechanism where members of a group agree on a common key by sharing their blinded keys over a public channel. Sharing a key over a public channel is a security threat and expensive in terms of communication cost. In this paper, we proposed the GKAP based on tree and elliptic curve. For reducing the communication cost, we have used the divide-and-conquer mechanism with that group is divided into small subgroups and forming a tree-like structure. The modified Elliptic-Curve-Diffie–Hellman used for sharing the blinded key over a public network channel securely. This paper discussing different group key management operations are initialization, join, mass join, leave, mass-leave, merge with their communication cost are the number of rounds, unicast cost, broadcast cost, messages. This paper discussing the establishment of common keys not only for the group but also for the subgroups. Based on communication cost, we have compared the performance of proposed method with the existing approaches like Communication-Computation Efficient Group Key Algorithm (CCEGK), Tree-based group key agreement (TGDH), Ternary-tree based group key agreement protocol for dynamic group (TTGKAP), Group key generation tree protocol (GKGT), Ternary tree-based group key agreement protocol over elliptic curve for dynamic group (TTEGKAP), Efficient Group key agreement using hierarchical key tree (EGKAKT). From performance analysis, it is cleared that proposed approach performed better in most of the cases than the existing approaches. The proposed approach is safe against passive attack, collaborative attack, forward secrecy, backward secrecy, and man-in-the-middle attack.

The Group Key Agreement Protocol Based on Multi-Dimensional Virtual Permutation

In current network environment, it is difficult to determine a completely trusted third party to achieve secure key distribution. To solve this problem, this article proposes a method to build a secure communication channel for communication without a trusted third party. It is suitable for the environment with wide distribution, limited computing power and storage capacity, such as intelligent terminal sensor network. This letter realizes multi-dimensional virtual permutation, designs the security model and detailed process of the protocol for virtual permutation function. It can generate a large number of keys conforming to the security rules quickly. Then we carry out security analysis and performance evaluation for the group key agreement protocol based on multi-dimensional virtual permutation. The result shows this protocol improves the security and efficiency.

Plant infesting arthropods sold in supermarkets in the Federal District, Brazil

Many Brazilian supermarkets offer ornamental and fruit plants for sale, and many become infested by insects and other arthropods during commercialization. This work reflects the importance of knowing the pests that occur in these plants, to verify possible dissemination of these arthropods to other areas. This study was carried out with monthly visits to five supermarkets chosen at random in the Federal District, Brazil. The plants were identified and visually inspected for the presence of insects and other arthropods. The collected specimens were preserved in jars containing 70% alcohol. Their respective levels of infestation and damage were also observed and noted. Each specimen collected was identified according to specific books and keys for each taxonomic group collected. As a result, 65 plants were found to be infested with insects and mites. Of these, 48 contained sucking insects (Hemiptera) and 17 had spider mites (Tetranychus urticae Koch). Although the insects found are relatively common and have already been reported to be associated with several ornamental plants, this is the first work that records the occurrence of arthropods in ornamentals sold in commercial establishments.

Lightweight and flexible key distribution schemes for secure group communications

Key distribution is one of the most fundamental cryptographic primitives that can establish secure group communications in both centralized and distributed networks. A one-time session key is needed to be shared among all users to protect the exchanged messages. In traditional one-to-one communication, a one-time key is shared between two users. But in modern many-to-many communication, a group key is shared among multiple users. Lightweight group key distributions are especially attractive for wireless/mobile applications, since most mobile devices only have limited power in computation and communication. But most of the existing group key distributions need to execute complicate mathematical operations. In this paper, we first present a novel design of key distribution. The basic key distribution protocol requires only logic XOR operation. Then, we show the flexibility of our basic scheme by demonstrating its applications in various network models, including both centralized and distributed key distributions. All key distribution schemes proposed in this paper are lightweight since they only require logic XOR operations. Logic operation is the most efficient operation which is much faster than the other mathematical operations. Furthermore, all our proposed schemes are non-interactive and they require the least amount of communication.

DM-GKM: A key management scheme for dynamic group based applications

In recent years, group-based applications (GBAs) have gained popularity due to their interesting and promising functionalities such as video on demand, teleconferencing, and pay per view. The advancements in wireless networks and the emergence of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have also increased the demands for GBAs.However, the implementation of group key management protocols for GBAs leads to significant computational, storage and communication overheads as well as potential system bottlenecks due to the high mobility of group members. The goal of this research is to address these issues and design a lightweight key management framework that requires fewer computations of keys for dynamic mobile users. A new group key management framework is proposed in this research, which is called the “DynaMic Group Key Management” (DM-GKM) framework. This framework exploits the advantages of the asymmetric key cryptosystem in order to guarantee security and it alleviates the rekeying overhead and distributing the independent Group Key (GK) for each cluster. Simulation and performance analysis demonstrates that the DM-GKM framework fulfils the requirements of a lightweight key management framework for large, dynamic groups of users. An analytical model is also developed to determine the performance and security features of the proposed framework.

Quantum Diffie-Hellman Extended to Dynamic Quantum Group Key Agreement for e-Healthcare Multi-Agent Systems in Smart Cities.

Multi-Agent Systems can support e-Healthcare applications for improving quality of life of citizens. In this direction, we propose a healthcare system architecture named smart healthcare city. First, we divide a given city into various zones and then we propose a zonal level three-layered system architecture. Further, for effectiveness we introduce a Multi-Agent System (MAS) in this three-layered architecture. Protecting sensitive health information of citizens is a major security concern. Group key agreement (GKA) is the corner stone for securely sharing the healthcare data among the healthcare stakeholders of the city. For establishing GKA, many efficient cryptosystems are available in the classical field. However, they are yet dependent on the supposition that some computational problems are infeasible. In light of quantum mechanics, a new field emerges to share a secret key among two or more members. The unbreakable and highly secure features of key agreement based on fundamental laws of physics allow us to propose a Quantum GKA (QGKA) technique based on renowned Quantum Diffie–Hellman (QDH). In this, a node acts as a Group Controller (GC) and forms 2-party groups with remaining nodes, establishing a QDH-style shared key per each two-party. It then joins these keys into a single group key by means of a XOR-operation, acting as a usual group node. Furthermore, we extend the QGKA to Dynamic QGKA (DQGKA) by adding join and leave protocol. Our protocol performance was compared with existing QGKA protocols in terms of Qubit efficiency (QE), unitary operation (UO), unitary operation efficiency (UOE), key consistency check (KCC), security against participants attack (SAP) and satisfactory results were obtained. The security analysis of the proposed technique is based on unconditional security of QDH. Moreover, it is secured against internal and external attack. In this way, e-healthcare Multi-Agent System can be robust against future quantum-based attacks.

Enhanced attribute based access control with secure deduplication for big data storage in cloud

The cloud storage is the best option to outsource big data, as the cloud has the capability of storing a huge volume of data. However, cloud storage brings new concerns for privacy, fine-grained access control and data duplication, which are crucial for big data storage in the cloud. Existing solutions of data duplication over encrypted data schemes do not provide fine-grained access control. Recently, Cui et al. proposed the data duplication over encrypted data along with attribute based access control in 2017. However, this scheme suffers from the following issues: 1) it does not verify the data ownership which is essentially required for data protection when multiple users outsource the same data 2) it does not provide the data ownership management, which creates a chance to upload the false data by the ownership revoked owner 3) it suffers from communication and computation overhead during deduplication and encryption process. To improve the Cui et al. scheme, in this paper, we propose an enhanced attribute based access control with secure deduplication for big data storage in cloud (EABAC-SD). Our EABAC-SD scheme achieves dynamic ownership management using the group key. Our scheme allows only authorized data owners to upload the data which enhances the security. Further, our EABAC-SD scheme cuts down the communication and computation overhead of the encryption and deduplication process. In addition, security analysis proves that our scheme protects the data privacy and consistency. Further, our scheme proves that ineligible data owners and ownership withdrawn data owners are not able to upload the data. Performance analysis shows that our EABAC-SD scheme is more efficient than Cui et al. scheme.

A group-key-based sensitive attribute protection in cloud storage using modified random Fibonacci cryptography

Cloud computing is an eminent technology for providing a data storage facility with efficient storage, maintenance, management and remote backups. Hence, user data are shifted from customary storage to cloud storage. In this transfer, the sensitive attributes are also shifted to cloud storage with high-end security. Current security techniques are processed with high encryption time and provide identical security of entire data with single key dependent. These processes are taking high computational time and leaks entire information if the key is hacked. The proposed Group Key Based Attribute Encryption using Modified Random Fibonacci Cryptographic (MRFC) technique rectifies these issues. Instead of machine learning technique, data owner preference-based attributes segregation is used to divide an input dataset into sensitive and non-sensitive attribute groups. Based on inter-organization usage and data owner’s willingness, sensitive attribute is divided into ‘n + 1′ subgroups and each subgroup is encrypted by ‘n + 1’ group keys. The encrypted sensitive subgroups are merged with non-sensitive attributes and uploaded into a private cloud. The novelties of this paper are, (1) data owner preferred sensitive attribute classification instead of machine learning algorithms, (2) sensitive attribute encryption instead of entire attributes, (3) To reduce encryption time without compromising data owner privacy, (4) To decrypt and access the required subgroup instead of the entire attribute. Our experimental results show that, the proposed method takes minimal processing time, better classification accuracy and minimal memory space with high security to selected attributes as compared to existing classification and security techniques. Hence, sensitive data security and privacy is achieved with minimal processing cost.

A Computationally Efficient and Scalable Key Management Scheme for Access Control of Media Delivery in Digital Pay-TV Systems

In today’s Internet era, group communications in multimedia applications are becoming more and more popular. The issues of controlling illegal access to multimedia contents require efficient and secure mechanisms for distribution of common key called scrambling key or group key. In order to provide secure delivery of multimedia contents in digital pay-TV systems, a large number of keying information messages are exchanged for group key/scrambling key updates in the traditional key distribution schemes. In this paper we propose a Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) based key distribution protocol which is highly secure and computationally efficient. The proposed protocol, 1) has drastically reduced the computational complexity of Group Manager (GM) and members for updating the keys, 2) has greatly increased the security by using an additional secret parameter at Group Manager and members areas, 3) can efficiently handle large and dynamically updating groups and, 4) can update the group key in one message, without updating member’s key. With our proposed key distribution scheme, only legal members can access the multimedia contents correctly and the illegal access can be prevented. The proposed scheme is applicable in Conditional Access System (CAS) of digital pay-TV systems without increasing storage and communication overheads on GM and members. The comparative analysis of our proposed scheme with existing schemes in terms of computational cost assures the effectiveness of our scheme. As a proof of concept, we implement our scheme to a decentralized architecture-based key management system and demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly reduces the computational complexity.

Hexagonal Clustered Trust Based Distributed Group Key Agreement Scheme in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Secure and efficient group communication among mobile nodes is one of the significant aspects in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The group key management (GKM) is a well established cryptographic technique to authorise and to maintain group key in a multicast communication, through secured channels. In a secure group communication, a one-time session key is required to be shared between the participants by using distributed group key agreement (GKA) schemes. Due to the resource constraints of ad hoc networks, the security protocols should be communication efficient with less overhead as possible. The GKM solutions from various researches lacks in considering the mobility features of ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose a hexagonal clustered one round distributed group key agreement scheme with trust (HT-DGKA) in a public key infrastructure based MANET environment. The proposed HT-DGKA scheme guarantees an access control with key authentication and secrecy. The performance of HT-DGKA is evaluated by simulation analysis in terms of key agreement time and overhead for different number of nodes. Simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme guarantees better performance to secure mobile ad hoc network. It is demonstrated that the proposed scheme possesses a maximum of 2250 ms of key agreement time for the higher node velocity of 25 m/s and lower key agreement overhead. Also, the HT-DGKA scheme outperforms the existing schemes in terms of successful message rate, packet delivery ratio, level of security, computation complexity, number of round, number of exponentiations and number of message sent and received that contribute to the network performance.

A Lightweight and Secure Group Key Based Handover Authentication Protocol for the Software-Defined Space Information Network

With rapid advances in satellite technology, space information network (SIN) has been proposed to meet the increasing demands of ubiquitous mobile communication due to its advantages in providing extensive access services. However, due to satellites’ resource constraint and SIN’s highly dynamic topology, it poses a challenge on management and resource utilization in the development of SIN. There have been some works integrating the software defined network (SDN) into SIN, defined as software defined space information network (SD-SIN), so as to simplify the management and improve resource utilization in SIN. However, these works ignore the security issue in SD-SIN. Meanwhile, the existing security mechanisms in SDN are still unable to cope with the uniqueness of satellite network, and some other critical security issues still haven’t yet been well addressed. In this paper, based on $(t,n)$ secret sharing, an SIN-specific lightweight group key agreement protocol is proposed for SD-SIN to ensure both the security and applicability. Moreover, considering the highly dynamic network topology, we also design a group key-based secure handover authentication scheme to reduce the overhead of handover authentication. Security analysis shows that the handover authentication protocol can resist to various known attacks. In addition, further performance evaluation shows its efficiency in terms of computation and communication overheads. Finally, the simulation results of computing overhead to the network entities demonstrate that our protocol is feasible in practical implementation.

Lightweight Dynamic Group Rekeying for Low-Power Wireless Networks in IIoT

In this article, a novel pseudorandom key chaining (PRKC) algorithm is introduced and evaluated. This lightweight symmetric scheme enables a transmission-triggered time variation of group keys in low-power wireless networks during broadcasting or multicasting. The proposed algorithm uses pseudorandom (PR) sequences, generated at the physical (PHY) layer of radio transceivers during a communication session, to symmetrically refresh the encryption keys on both sides of a communication link. This solution is scalable and suitable for large networks of nodes with limited resources in an Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) environment. The strength of generated keys was tested with the use of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication 800-22 (NIST SP 800-22) statistical suit. No binary patterns that may indicate a vulnerability were detected. The randomness of generated key sequences was further analyzed with the use of strange attractors approach which demonstrated that these sequences are robust against attacks, such as spoofing or intelligent brute forcing. To assess the real-time delay and computational overhead of the algorithm, it was implemented on a Raspberry Pi board. The results demonstrated that the PRKC algorithm runs over 60% faster and requires over 40% less CPU effort per round than the conventional hashing-based schemes. In addition, it does not require any communication overhead and transmission energy.

Lightweight Noninteractive Membership Authentication and Group Key Establishment for WSNs

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) exhibit their potential capacity in the next generation of mobile communication networks and wireless systems (5G). Collected data in WSNs are different from most data transmitted in digital communication applications. Most collected data in WSNs contain only few bits of information. Conventional protocols are not suitable for WSNs since this environment needs more flexible and lightweight protocols for secure group communications. Hence, how to realize the mutual secure and lightweight communication is a big challenge for WSNs. User authentication and key establishment are two fundamental security services in secure communications for WSNs. In this paper, we propose a novel design which embeds the function of membership authentication and group key establishment in WSNs. By using an asymmetric bivariate polynomial, membership authentication and pairwise shared keys distribution are realized. Then, each member mixes his/her input with pairwise shared keys with other members and releases the encrypted value in a broadcast channel. After collecting all released values, each member can compute the group key efficiently. Our proposal is noninteractive and lightweight. As it enjoys low computation and communication costs compared with the state-of-the-art cryptographic solutions, this design is more suitable for efficient membership authentication and group key establishment in WSNs.