Lightweight Authentication Protocol Research Articles

Efficient and reliable post-quantum authentication

In this paper we propose a new lightweight authentication protocol which is efficient, reliable and, properly instantiated, suitable for the post-quantum world. It is a two-level protocol, which supports unbounded message transmission. It can be useful in several settings, from the standard sender-receiver setting, to unreliable multicast and broadcast communication in networks with resource-constrained devices. The key ideas underlying our design are mainly three: the hash-chaining method, some techniques used in MAC-based authentication protocols for multicast communication, and the use of the Guy Fawkes signatures. To our knowledge, our protocol is the first one that solves the unbounded number of message transmission issue in unreliable settings. It does not lose efficiency and introduces only a constant-size overhead in message transmission, compared to solutions assuming a bounded number of message transmissions. We rigorously model the adversarial setting and show that our protocol satisfies the definition, leveraging on standard assumptions. Apart from the technical contribution, along the line, we also point out the relevance of ideas and techniques developed in the past in the area of efficient authentication, in order to provide new authentication schemes, ready for the post-quantum world.

SPCL: A Smart Access Control System That Supports Blockchain

The access control system is a critical element in intelligent buildings. In this paper, we present SPCL, an innovative access control system designed to facilitate building entry through the use of mobile phones. Our system aims to provide a secure and convenient solution for building access, capitalizing on the widespread availability and capabilities of mobile devices. Additionally, we propose a lightweight authentication protocol to enhance security. The performance of the protocol is measured for different curves at different frequencies, proving that the protocol is more suitable for door lock systems than the benchmark protocol. In addition, we investigated the security and usability of SPCL. Finally, a comparison of the security of human-lock interfaces for smart locks and blockchain-based payment methods are discussed.

A Lightweight Authentication Protocol for a Blockchain-Based Off-Chain Medical Data Access in Multi-server Environment

A Lightweight Authentication Protocol for a Blockchain-Based Off-Chain Medical Data Access in Multi-server Environment

Provably secured and lightweight authenticated encryption protocol in machine-to-machine communication in industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 and the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) aim to create a platform for data-driven decision-making through machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, often facilitated by the 6LoWPAN standard. However, as a resource-constrained device, 6LoWPAN raises security and privacy concerns for M2M communications, necessitating efficient and lightweight authentication and key establishment (AKE) protocols. Existing AKE protocols relying on asymmetric and symmetric cryptographic keys are susceptible to attacks and entail significant storage, communication, and computation overheads. This study examines a scheme called SLAP to uncover vulnerabilities and challenges in AKE-based M2M deployments in IIoT, including traceability, denial of service (DoS), perfect forward secrecy (PFS), and ephemeral secret leakage (ESL) attacks. Therefore, a privacy-preserving, secure, and lightweight authenticated encryption protocol called provably secure, lightweight, authenticated encryption (PSLAE) is proposed to address these issues. This approach includes hash operations, XOR operations, and authenticated encryption primitives for lightweight and secure mechanisms. It uses a one-time alias identity and fresh parameters to ensure privacy and protection against traceability and DoS, PFS, and ESL attacks. PSLAE undergoes rigorous informal and formal verification through SVO logic and Scyther, demonstrating resilience against the extended Canetti–Krawczyk and Dolev–Yao threat models. Moreover, it provides a lightweight, secure, efficient, and reduced storage, communication, and computation overhead compared with related works for AKE-based M2M in IIoT.

Enabling Data Sharing Through Data Trusts in LEO Satellite Internet

Due to the advantages of low latency, small propagation loss, and global coverage, LEO satellite network becomes a cost-effective long-distance communication solution for IoT devices in remote areas. Nevertheless, the LEO satellite IoT devices deployed for specific tasks are idle most of the time, raising the obvious question for future research: how to effectively share these idle sensing resources. Fortunately, data trusts emerge as a promising strategy to leverage the idle sensing resources. However, the data trust model faces privacy and security challenges in LEO satellite IoT scenarios to achieve trusted data trading. Therefore, this paper proposes a blockchainenabled data trust model and a trusted data trading scheme for device providers, data trustees, and general users. Furthermore, exploiting the homomorphic encryption technology, we realize the fine-grained data query and device match in the premise of privacy protection for device providers and general users. Lastly, considering the openness of satellite-terrestrial communication links and the limited computing power of LEO satellite IoT devices, we design a non-interactive lightweight authentication protocol based on zero-knowledge proof. The simulation results verify the feasibility, effectiveness, and security performance of the proposed data sharing for LEO satellite IoT.

A Lightweight Authentication Protocol Against Modeling Attacks Based on a Novel LFSR-APUF

A Lightweight Authentication Protocol Against Modeling Attacks Based on a Novel LFSR-APUF

Privacy in Smart Homes with Remote User Authenticated Key Establishment Protocol

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a set of devices that contain electronic software, sensors, and actuators and exchange information using the Internet or network. Because of multiple applications, the number of IoT devices and sensors is increasing daily. Therefore, the traditional addressing security protocols cannot guarantee performance in all scenarios. The most crucial factor is the requirement of a unique addressing and secure scheme that addresses each smart IoT device or application and ensures secure communication. Therefore, robust and lightweight authentication protocols are crucial to ensuring security in smart home IoT (SH-IoT) networks. The proposed scheme provides a remote authentication protocol for the secure exchange of information between the user and the smart home IoT network. Informal and formal security analyses using the ROR model are presented in this work. The presented scheme is validated using the AVISPA tool.

Comments on “V2G-Auth: Lightweight Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for V2G Environment Leveraging Physically Unclonable Functions”

Comments on “V2G-Auth: Lightweight Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for V2G Environment Leveraging Physically Unclonable Functions”

Blockchain-Based Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Next-Generation Trustworthy Internet of Vehicles Communication

Blockchain-Based Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Next-Generation Trustworthy Internet of Vehicles Communication

PSLAPS-IoD: A Provable Secure and Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Securing Internet-of-Drones (IoD) Environment

PSLAPS-IoD: A Provable Secure and Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Securing Internet-of-Drones (IoD) Environment

Secure and scalable data aggregation techniques for healthcare monitoring in WSN

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are crucial in the healthcare field as they allow for the immediate monitoring and collection of data from medical sensors. The growing incorporation of WSN in healthcare requires the creation of authentication protocols that are both strong and energy-efficient. This study presents Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Cloud-based Health-care Systems (LAPCHS) using BLAKE2 designed specifically for WSN in medical settings for secure and scalable data aggregation. The proposed method tackles the difficulties presented by limited resources in sensor nodes, with the goal of achieving a careful equilibrium between strong security and effective energy usage. LAPCHS utilizes innovative techniques to improve the energy efficiency in WSN. The system employs the BLAKE2 cryptographic hash algorithm to establish robust mutual authentication and key agreement between the tag and the cloud server. The protocol is characterized by its low weight and high efficiency, rendering it appropriate for deployment in medical sensor networks with limited resources, which minimizes the need for global key distribution and decreases communication overhead. The proposed method is useful to meet the distinct needs of medical sensor networks, where energy preservation is of utmost importance to ensure extended device scalability.  The findings demonstrate that LAPCHS surpasses current approaches in terms of energy efficiency and latency, while simultaneously upholding a robust level of security. The protocol’s novel strategy for managing encryption keys and selecting cryptographic algorithms makes it a promising solution for securing medical sensor networks while maintaining energy sustainability. This study makes a valuable contribution to the developing field of WSN security by proposing a practical solution for ensuring strong and energy-efficient authentication in healthcare applications.

Secure and lightweight authentication protocol for anonymous data access in cloud assisted IoT system

Secure and lightweight authentication protocol for anonymous data access in cloud assisted IoT system

ILAPU-Q: An Improved Lightweight Authentication Protocol for IoT Based on U-Quark Hash Function

Background: In the last decades, the development of Internet activities has been significantly accelerated, particularly with the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). Heterogeneous devices in the IoT can seamlessly and feasibly inter-connect with each other without human interaction. Due to this revolution, many applications have been adopted in the arena of smart healthcare, e-commerce, environmental and habitat monitoring, etc. In order to promote and facilitate people's standards of living around the world. However, these unbounded applications bring more challenges to the storage capabilities of devices, and their security and privacy preservation. Moreover, security issues suffer from weak authentication protocols. Methods: To address these issues, suitable and secure lightweight mutual authentication schemes based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) are required for the approval of Identity Management (IDM) of devices in the IoT. In this paper, we will propose an improved mutual authentication scheme based on ECC, coupled with a relevant seminal work considered as a reference in the field. This scheme is combined with U-Quark, a lightweight hash function, to guarantee the security needed in the IoT environment. Results: We will compare our amended protocol with a seminal scheme as an established reference in terms of computation cost, storage cost, and executing CPU time to demonstrate that our version can ensure the most favorable performance during the authentication process. Conclusion: Finally, our proposed mutual authentication scheme has demonstrated its effectiveness in enhancing the security of IoT devices when compared to the seminal work in the same computational environment.

Retracted: TC-PSLAP: Temporal Credential-Based Provably Secure and Lightweight Authentication Protocol for IoT-Enabled Drone Environments

Retracted: TC-PSLAP: Temporal Credential-Based Provably Secure and Lightweight Authentication Protocol for IoT-Enabled Drone Environments

Simple, secure and lightweight authentication protocol with session-key generation for IIoT device in IIoT networks

Simple, secure and lightweight authentication protocol with session-key generation for IIoT device in IIoT networks

A privacy preserving four-factor authentication protocol for internet of medical things

Medical applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) have gained significant attention, especially in the context of monitoring health-related information for elderly individuals living alone and patients receiving home-based care, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. These applications offer immense convenience and contribute to the reduction of infection risk. Consequently, safeguarding the privacy of patient data has become increasingly vital. However, the resource limitations inherent to IoT present challenges in implementing complex algorithms. Numerous researchers have proposed authentication schemes based on three factors: passwords, biometric features, and smart cards. While three-factor authentication protocols are generally more secure than two-factor ones, recent studies have unveiled vulnerabilities in existing protocols designed for IoT environments, particularly concerning sensor node capture attack and smart card stolen attack. Only a few protocols provide reliable solutions to address these issues. To tackle this challenge, we propose a lightweight authentication protocol that introduces the Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) as the fourth factor, enhancing the security and privacy of the system. By integrating PUF technology into servers and embedding it into the integrated circuit chips of sensors, our protocol is specifically designed to thwart attacks like sensor node capture and smart card stolen. We validate the security of our proposed protocol using formal BAN logic and ProVerif simulator tool, demonstrating its capability to provide secure mutual authentication. Moreover, through informal analysis, we illustrate that our scheme can withstand multiple attacks. Furthermore, our proposed protocol outperforms existing protocols in terms of computational cost, storage cost, communication cost, and security requirements.

Provably secure and lightweight three-factor authentication scheme for industrial medical CPS

Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is a multidimensional complex system that integrates computing, network, and physical environment, which is widely used to promote the upgrading of industrial production and technology. Recently, the application of industrial CPS in the medical field has attracted the attention of scholars and medical experts. Medical CPS can establish a perfect medical network to help doctors monitor patients’ conditions in real-time and make treatments. However, how to design a provably secure and lightweight authentication protocol for industrial medical CPS is a challenge. Very recently, Qi et al. proposed an authentication protocol for industrial medical CPS based on the chaotic map, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) biometric technique is used in the protocol to resist password guessing attack and smart card lost attack. However, we find that their protocol is still vulnerable to identity guessing attack, user impersonation attack, trace attack, desynchronization attack, and has no perfect forward secrecy. Therefore, we propose a security-enhanced and lightweight authentication protocol for industrial medical CPS. In the protocol, a dynamic temporary identity strategy is designed to protect anonymity and privacy, which enables the updating of temporary identities while resisting desynchronization attacks. The protocol is proved secure through formal security proof in random oracle model. Meanwhile, compared with the related protocols, our protocol is superior in security and cost to meet the lightweight requirements in medical scenarios.

PRLAP-IoD: A PUF-based Robust and Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Internet of Drones

In recent years, the industry and research have cast great attention to the Internet of Drones (IoD), which is becoming progressively popular since it can bring a great convenience to various application scenarios, such as national map exploration, public safety monitoring and automated military applications. In these scenarios, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) (called drones) will be used to collect private information. Due to the fact that the private information are very sensitive, and drones working in public places easily suffer from physical capture or tampering attacks, the primary concern is that this information could be collected by adversaries or unauthorized users. In addition, as resource-constrained devices, drones are mostly equipped with small memory and have limited computing power. Therefore, how to ensure robust security as much as possible while achieving lightweight computing and communication costs has become an urgent problem to be solved in this field. In this paper, we propose A PUF-based Robust and Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Drone-Gateway and Drone-Drone Communication (PRLAP-IoD) to address these issues. Both formal security validation using conventional tools (ROR Model and AVISPA) and other informal security analysis clearly demonstrate that PRLAP-IoD can not only provide physical security, but also defend against a variety of known attacks. Finally, compared with the recent Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) schemes, PRLAP-IoD can attain a delicate balance between computation cost and communication cost in IoD environment.

An efficient authentication protocol for smart grid communication based on on-chip-error-correcting physical unclonable function

Security has become a main concern for the smart grid to move from research and development to industry. Central to this security paradigm is the concept of resistance to threats, whether emanating from an active adversary seeking to disrupt operations or a passive entity covertly intercepting sensitive data. In this dynamic landscape, smart meters (SMs) stand as the sentinels at the edge of the grid, silently gathering and transmitting invaluable data. Yet, this very placement often leaves them vulnerable in unprotected areas, underscoring the paramount importance of physical security in the smart grid. It is here that Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have emerged as a formidable ally. These unique constructs serve as guardians of physical security, leveraging the inherent unpredictability of manufacturing processes to create cryptographic keys. PUFs, however, are not without their own conundrums, primarily in the realm of reliability. This challenge has prevented their widespread integration into cryptographic applications. Fuzzy extractors have been considered as a solution to solve the reliability problem of PUFs, albeit at the cost of imposing significant computational burdens. To that end, we first propose an on-chip-error-correcting (OCEC) PUF that efficiently generates stable digits for the authentication process. Afterward, we introduce a lightweight authentication protocol between the SMs and neighborhood gateway (NG) based on the proposed PUF. The provable security analysis shows that not only the proposed protocol can stand secure in the Canetti–Krawczyk (CK) adversary model but also provides additional security features. Also, the performance evaluation demonstrates the significant improvement of the proposed scheme in comparison with the state-of-the-art.

Secure and Lightweight Authentication Protocol Using PUF for the IoT-based Wireless Sensor Network

The wireless sensor network (WSN) has been gaining popularity for automation and performance improvement in different IoT-based applications. The resource-constrained nature and operating environment of IoT make the devices highly vulnerable to different attacks. However, the Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) helps to implement secure and lightweight authentication protocols for IoT. In this context, few computation-intensive authentication protocols are found in the literature that have addressed secure IoT communication in WSN. Besides, these protocols depend on the local storage of PUF-CRP, which is susceptible to security attacks. This work proposes a lightweight and secure authentication protocol for the IoT devices in WSN. A PUF and its machine learning (ML)–based soft model is integrated to ensure secure authentication and lightweight computation in WSN. PUF prevents physical attacks while carrying much less hardware fingerprints, and the ML-based PUF provides the desired resiliency against PUF identity-based attacks by eliminating the requirement of CRP-based storage. The proposed mechanism delivers two-way authentication while nullifying the attacks on IoT. The proposed protocol is implemented on Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA and Raspberry Pi for testability and performance evaluation. Experiment results and analysis signify its low-cost computations and lightweight features desired for IoT.