Lightweight Anonymous Authentication Research Articles

Lightweight Anonymous Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for a Smart Grid

Lightweight Anonymous Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for a Smart Grid

Blockchain and FEF-Based Lightweight Anonymous Authentication Protocol for Wireless Medical Sensor Networks

Authentication ensures the privacy of patients by enabling access control within wireless medical sensor networks. However, many schemes do not consider the resource-constrained environments, making those protocols unusable. Meanwhile, sensitive patient information continues to be stored and accessed in a central location, increasing the risk of “single points of failure.” To solve this problem, the researchers designed a lightweight anonymous authentication protocol based on blockchain technology and fuzzy extraction. First, they created a multiround session key negotiation mechanism. Then, they utilized the fuzzy extraction function to extract and recover multimodal biometric features. Decentralization was achieved through blockchain and smart contracts. Simultaneously, the researchers also provided a formal security proof by Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic. Finally, experiments using the Java Pairing-Based Cryptography Library show that this scheme outperforms the comparison schemes in terms of computational overhead and communication overhead.

Lightweight Certificate-Less Anonymous Authentication Key Negotiation Scheme in the 5G Internet of Vehicles

In the current 5G vehicle network system, there are security issues such as wireless intrusion, privacy leakage, and remote control. To address these challenges, an improved lightweight anonymous authentication key negotiation scheme based on certificate-less aggregate signatures is proposed and its security and efficiency are analyzed. The result shows that the scheme can offer security attributes including anonymity, traceability, and revocability, as well as effective identity authentication, and it can resist forgery attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, tampering attacks, and smart card loss attacks. Moreover, compared with similar schemes, it possesses superior security and more efficient computational efficiency and less communication overhead, thereby being more appropriate for high-speed, large-capacity, low-latency, and resource-constrained 5G vehicle network application scenarios.

Blockchain-based anonymous authentication and data aggregation for advanced metering infrastructure in smart grid

This paper proposes a blockchain-based scheme, focusing on anonymous identity authentication and data aggregation, for safer and more reliable bidirectional communication between the utility company and power consumers based on Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). Firstly, to cope with the mutual identity authentication between resource-constrained Smart Meters, a lightweight anonymous authentication strategy is designed using Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Meanwhile, a reputation-based consensus protocol is developed to accomplish data aggregation in AMI by using decentralization and non-tampering features of the blockchain. During the communication, in each time slot, the proposed scheme only needs to select a trusted user randomly to undertake the mining node rather than to introduce a third-party in a centralized manner to summarize and record the user-side data into the blockchain. Such scheme can effectively prevent data tampering and also be effective to decrease the processing complexity. The AVISPA tool is adopted to formally evaluate its security. The simulation results show promising performance. The proposed scheme not only can guarantee secure communication but also effectively decrease the computational cost in AMI.

LAAKA: Lightweight Anonymous Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for Secure Fog-Driven IoT Systems

Fog computing is a new computing model with limited resources located near the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to provide low transmission delay, mobility, and location awareness services. However, fog technology not only extends the cloud resources but also inherits its properties and security problems, such as device capture, man-in-the-middle, secret key compromise, identity impersonation, and message replay attacks. These vulnerabilities pose significant risks to the integrity of IoT-fog communications. Nevertheless, the existing mutual authentication approaches either suffer from high computational overheads or fail to provide secure mutual authentication. To address this gap, this paper introduces LAAKA, a Lightweight Anonymous Authentication and Key Agreement scheme. Considering the constrained resources of IoT and fog devices, LAAKA utilizes lightweight operations such as hash function and bitwise XOR. Its main objective is to facilitate mutual authentication and establish secure session keys between IoT devices and fog servers, making it useful for various IoT applications. We validate the robustness of LAAKA against various security threats by conducting comprehensive formal security analysis, including Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and Random Oracle Model (ROM), as well as informal analysis. The efficacy of our scheme is further demonstrated through evaluation with the Scyther tool. Compared to other proposed authentication approaches, the results illustrate the superior performance and efficiency of our approach in enhancing the security features, minimizing the computational cost, and optimizing storage utilization.

ASAP-IIOT: An Anonymous Secure Authentication Protocol for Industrial Internet of Things.

With the increasing demand for a digital world, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is growing rapidly across various industries. In manufacturing, particularly in Industry 4.0, the IIoT assumes a vital role. It encompasses many devices such as sensing devices, application servers, users, and authentication servers within workshop settings. The security of the IIoT is a critical issue due to wireless networks' open and dynamic nature. Therefore, designing secure protocols among those devices is an essential aspect of IIoT security functionality and poses a significant challenge to the IIoT systems. In this paper, we propose a lightweight anonymous authentication protocol to preserve privacy for IIoT users, enabling secure IIoT communication. The protocol has been validated to demonstrate its comprehensive ability to overcome various vulnerabilities and prevent malicious attacks. Finally, the performance evaluation confirms that the proposed protocol is more effective and efficient than the existing alternatives.

A Lightweight Anonymous Authentication and Key Negotiation Scheme in Smart Home Environments

With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, smart home users can access and control smart devices remotely to enjoy convenient and efficient services. However, sensitive data collected by smart devices is vulnerable to attacks such as eavesdropping and simulation when transmitted through public channels. At the same time, the security of resource-constrained smart devices is low, and attackers may use the controlled devices to carry out malicious operations further. To address the aforementioned existing security issues, this paper proposes a lightweight user anonymous authentication scheme for resource-constrained smart home environments. At the same time, the security analysis is carried out to further prove the proposed scheme's security. Finally, the performance analysis between the proposed scheme and the existing similar schemes proves that the proposed scheme has advantages in calculation cost and safety characteristics.

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.

A Practical Lightweight Anonymous Authentication and Key Establishment Scheme for Resource-Asymmetric Smart Environments

With the rapid developments of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, the security of sensitive data has attracted more and more attention for many resource-asymmetric smart environments, such as smart home, smart agriculture and so on. The resource-asymmetry environment refers to the uneven distribution of resources on different devices side, which is specifically manifested as gateway side is resource-rich, user side and device side are resource-restricted. Hence, a secure and practical authentication key establishment scheme for such smart environments is urgently needed. Recently many researchers have designed authentication and key establishment schemes for security purpose, however most of them cannot consider the excess of gateway resources and guarantee the anonymity of user, and further, they are not suitable for resource-asymmetric smart environments because they are not lightweight enough in user side and smart device side. Due to the fact that Rabin cryptosystem has the large difference in time-consuming between encryption and decryption, it is extremely suitable for constructing authentication and key establishment scheme for resource-asymmetric smart environments. So, a new practical authentication and key establishment scheme based on the Rabin cryptosystem for resource-asymmetric smart environments is proposed, which can make better use of the advantages of abundant gateway resources and realize the lightweight operations on device side and user side, and at the same time can provide user anonymity. With Proverif and BAN logic, we can prove that our solution not only provides anonymity, but also satisfies all defined security features. Simultaneously, compared with latest similar protocols in computation cost and communication overhead, the results show that our scheme is more effective. Hence, our design has more attraction for authentication and key establishment scheme in resource-asymmetric smart environments.

A Blockchain-Assisted Lightweight Anonymous Authentication Scheme for Medical Services in Internet of Medical Things

Internet of medical things (IoMT) enable physicians to provide precise care on the Internet for registered patients anywhere, bringing convenience to people’s everyday life. Considering the importance of patient’s privacy in IoMT, data security between patients and medical servers should be protected. Therefore, the authentication of identity and the agreement of a shared secret key are particularly important. In this work, we propose a lightweight anonymous authentication scheme between patients and medical servers in IoMT. We combine blockchain technology with biometric technology in order to form a shared session secret key. It can protect the privacy of patients through mutual authentication between patients and servers. Afterwards, the formal analysis of BAN logic shows that our scheme is secure. Non-formal analysis shows that our scheme achieves designed security objectives. Finally, comprehensive comparative experiments show that our proposed scheme achieves a better performance in both computation and communication efficiency.

Lightweight anonymous authentication protocol for resource-constrained smart home devices based on elliptic curve cryptography

The communication channel between the smart home devices and the remote users is susceptible to numerous privacy and security compromise attacks. To address these issues, many authentication protocols have been developed. However, majority of these security schemes have vulnerabilities that may still be exploited to wreck havoc in smart homes. For instance, protocols based on low entropy passwords can be broken by polynomial time adversaries. Apart from security and privacy challenges, efficiency of the entire authentication process is another challenge that needs to be solved. To this end, most of the conventional smart home authentication protocols incur extensive storage, computation as well as communication overheads which are unsuitable for resource limited smart home devices. In this paper, an anonymous lightweight protocol is developed, based on one-way hashing and elliptic curve point multiplication operations. Formal verification of this protocol is executed using ProVerif while its informal security analysis demonstrates its robustness against majority of the smart home privacy and security attacks. In terms of operational efficiency, comparative analysis is carried out which shows that it incurs relatively low computation, storage and communication overheads.

Lightweight Anonymous Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol Based on CoAP of Internet of Things.

To solve the problem regarding the lack of a lightweight and secure authentication and key agreement protocol in the Constrained Application Protocol of the Internet of Things environment, we explore the security flaws and applicability problems in the current related research. Then, we propose a new lightweight authentication and key agreement protocol based on the CoAP framework. The scheme adopts shared secret and elliptic curve public key technology, which ensures the anonymity of the communicators and provides strong security and anti-attack capacity. In terms of security analysis, the Dolev–Yao Adversary model and a security model checking analysis method based on CPN Tools are improved, in order to verify the correctness and security of the proposed scheme. Compared with other schemes, regarding communication overhead, computational cost, and security, the proposed scheme provides a robust and comprehensive security guarantee, although it is not the lightest.

LAAP: Lightweight Anonymous Authentication Protocol for IoT Edge Devices Based on Elliptic Curve

The massive heterogeneous devices and open channels of the Internet of Things (IoT) lead to low efficiency and privacy leakage in the authentication process, which brings great challenges to identity authentication. This paper focuses on the anonymous authentication between the IoT edge device and the cloud server. In this work, we first propose a novel lightweight anonymous authentication protocol (LAAP) to meet security and efficiency requirements. Especially, the proposed protocol uses dynamic pseudonyms to prevent the traceable attacks caused by fixed identity identification and also uses symmetric encryption to optimize the server’s search for anonymous device information, and the time complexity is reduced from O n to O 1 . Then, the formal security analysis and informal security analysis are provided to prove the security of the proposed protocol. Finally, extensive numerical results indicate that the proposed LAAP protocol is superior to the benchmarks in terms of computing overhead and communication overhead, while the storage overhead is consistent with the lowest level among other protocols.

Lightweight anonymous authentication and key agreement protocols for mobile edge computing

Lightweight anonymous authentication and key agreement protocols for mobile edge computing

A Lightweight and Practical Anonymous Authentication Protocol Based on Bit-Self-Test PUF

Physical unclonable function (PUF), a cryptographic primitive, has recently been used in protocol design because it can ensure a tamper-evident feature. In many PUF-based protocol schemes, helper data algorithms (HDA) or fuzzy extractors (FE) are used to generate strong keys from unreliable PUF responses. However, these methods inevitably introduce complex error correction techniques, which not only increase the overhead of embedded devices but also pose some security risks. We propose a novel HDA technology, which does not use any high-overhead error correction mechanism, greatly reducing the implementation complexity and execution overhead. The novel HDA exploits the strategy of bit-self-test (BST) and the PUF can extract the robust responses by using the real-time generated reliable flags, and then an entropy extractor is used to generate the reliable and random key with high entropy. Based on this novel HDA, we design a lightweight anonymous authentication protocol. The protocol uses pseudo-random function (PRF) and XOR operation instead of the traditional hash function and symmetric encryption algorithm, which ensures security while reducing the overhead. Moreover, the proposed protocol does not require the server to store a large number of challenge–response pairs (CRPs), which reduces the storage overhead on the server while avoiding the risk of leakage of CRPs. Moreover, the device identity ID is updated during each round of the authentication process, which prevents the device from being tracked and protects the privacy of the device. The implementation and performance analysis of the protocol prototype on a Zynq-7000 SoC XC7Z010 FPGA shows that the proposed scheme solves the problems encountered with existing schemes and has additional security properties.

Eland: An Efficient Lightweight Anonymous Authentication Protocol Applied to Digital Rights Management System

<p>A digital rights management (DRM) system provides the function of packaging raw content into an appropriate distribution form, protection for content temper-proof transmission and circumvention of unauthorized use. The digital rights contents in DRM system improve people’s spiritual quality and create huge market value. However, in the sharing of digital contents, malicious adversaries could bring security and privacy issues even cause infringement of copyright. To solve these problems, valid user identity authentication and secret key distribution to legal users is an efficient method. Nevertheless, the existing authentication schemes for DRM system have problems of security weakness or efficiency to be enhanced. Thereby, we cryptanalyze these protocols’ vulnerabilities and propose a new lightweight anonymous authentication protocol called Eland that can be efficiently applied to DRM system. We compare our protocol with six DRM-related authentication protocols from the aspects of security properties, computation expense and communication cost. Comparisons results indicate that our protocol achieves a well trade-off between security and performance. Specifically, our protocol reduces 37.5% communication cost and satisfies more security requirements than Yu et al.’s scheme.</p> <p> </p>

A Lightweight Anonymous Authentication Protocol for Resource-Constrained Devices in Internet of Things

With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) in recent years, the security of IoT becomes more and more prominent. To protect data privacy and device availability, identity authentication technology has been applied to the IoT environment. However, although scholars have designed a variety of authentication protocols for the IoT environment, the resource costs of these protocols are still expensive for resource-constrained devices. In particular, when the frequent upgrade of computer hardware has led to a gradual increase in the key length of the cryptosystem, IoT devices are hard to keep up with the upgrade speed because of the balance between cost and tasks. Although the storage space has increased in recent years, the computational and communication capabilities are still limited by some physical factors, such as energy, power, and communication link bandwidth. To improve the situation, this article proposes an anonymous authentication protocol suitable for IoT devices with current hardware performance, which is based on elliptic curve and signcryption techniques. Compared to other protocols, our protocol further reduces the communication and computing cost of the client devices while ensuring security requirements. Thus, we formally prove its theoretical security under the random oracle model and use simulation experiments to verify that the protocol can effectively reduce the resource requirements.

A Lightweight Anonymous Authentication and Secure Communication Scheme for Fog Computing Services

Fog-driven IoT architecture located between IoT devices and the centralized cloud infrastructure is introduced to extend computing, storage and network services to the edge of the Internet and therefore resources and services of the fog nodes are available and are closer to the end user and end device for providing mobility, low latency and location awareness. However, the paradigm of fog computing due to its inherited properties from cloud as inherits its security and privacy concerns such as spoofing, message replay, impersonation, man-in-the middle and physical capturing of IoT devices etc. To address these concerns in fog computing services, in this paper, a lightweight anonymous authentication and secure communication scheme is proposed and it only used secure one-way hash function and bitwise XOR operations when cloud, fog and user mutually authenticate each other. After the successful authentication, both fog-based participants can agree on a session key to encrypt the subsequent communication messages. The security can be ensured during authentication process by using the Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and the performance comparisons with existing schemes demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure and highly efficient.

A lightweight anonymous authentication scheme for secure cloud computing services

Cloud computing represents the latest technology that has revolutionized the world of business. It is a promising solution giving companies the possibility of remotely storing their data and accessing services whenever they are needed and at a lower cost. However, outsourcing IT resources also brings risks, especially for sensitive information in terms of security and privacy, since all data and resources stored in the cloud are managed and controlled by cloud service providers. On the other hand, cloud users would like cloud service providers not to know what services being accessed and how often they are using them. Therefore, designing mechanisms to protect privacy is a major challenge. One promising research area is via authentication mechanisms, which has attracted many researchers in this delicate subject. For this, several solutions have been devised and published recently to tackle this problem. Nevertheless, these solutions often suffer from different types of attacks, high computing and communication costs, and the use of complex key management schemes. To address these shortcomings, we propose an approach that ensures the optimal preservation of the privacy of cloud users to protect their personal data including identities. The suggested approach gives the cloud user the ability to access and use the services provided by cloud service providers anonymously without the providers of those services knowing their identity. We demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over several anonymous authentication solutions in terms of computation and communication costs.

An Efficient Lightweight Authentication Scheme With Adaptive Resilience of Asynchronization Attacks for Wireless Sensor Networks

Until now, the pseudonym ID and one-time hash chain as the key technologies solve anonymous and forward secrecy properties, respectively, in lightweight authentication protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) environment. However, both techniques have to face the limitation of asynchronization attack, which will cause the pseudonym ID and one-time hash chain value between participants to be loss of synchronization when the transmitted message is blocked. Most recently, a serial of lightweight anonymous authentication scheme with forward secrecy (LAASFS) have been built to resolve this problem. Unfortunately, they failed to handle this question satisfactorily. Besides, most of them are still vulnerable to smart card loss attack (SCLA). In this article, to address these issues and make more effective, we combine pseudonym ID, one-time hash chain and tag techniques to construct an LAASFS for WSNs environment. The proposed LAASFS can be adaptive resilience of asynchronization attacks. In addition, it is also able to resist a variety of known attacks like SCLA and wrong password login attack. Formal analyses are taken by BAN logic and ProVerif tool to demonstrate the security of properties of our LAASFS. Compared with several previous related schemes, the proposed LAASFS possesses obvious advantages in computation and communication costs.