Lightweight Authentication Scheme Research Articles

Lightweight Privacy Preserving Scheme for IoT based Smart Home

Background: The Internet of Things (IoT) is the interconnection of physical devices, controllers, sensors and actuators that monitor and share data to another end. In a smart home network, users can remotely access and control home appliances/devices via wireless channels. Due to the increasing demand for smart IoT devices, secure communication also becomes the biggest challenge. Hence, a lightweight authentication scheme is required to secure these devices and maintain user privacy. The protocol proposed is secure against different kinds of attacks and as well as is efficient. Methods: The proposed protocol offers mutual authentication using shared session key establishment. The shared session key is established between the smart device and the home gateway, ensuring that the communication between the smart devices, home gateway, and the user is secure and no third party can access the information shared. Results: Informal and formal analysis of the proposed scheme is done using the AVISPA tool. Finally, the results of the proposed scheme also compare with existing security schemes in terms of computation and communication performance cost. The results show that the proposed scheme is more efficient and robust against different types of attacks than the existing protocols. Conclusion: In the upcoming years, there will be a dedicated network system built inside the home so that the user can have access to the home from anywhere. The proposed scheme offers secure communication between the user, the smart home, and different smart devices. The proposed protocol makes sure that security and privacy are maintained since the smart devices lack computation power which makes them vulnerable to different attacks.

MAG-PUFs: Authenticating IoT devices via electromagnetic physical unclonable functions and deep learning

The challenge of authenticating Internet of Things (IoT) devices, particularly in low-cost deployments with constrained nodes that struggle with dynamic re-keying solutions, renders these devices susceptible to various attacks. This paper introduces a robust alternative mitigation strategy based on Physical-Layer Authentication (PLA), which leverages the intrinsic physical layer characteristics of IoT devices. These unique imperfections, stemming from the manufacturing process of IoT electronic integrated circuits (ICs), are difficult to replicate or falsify and vary with each function executed by the IoT device. We propose a novel lightweight authentication scheme, MAG-PUFs, that uses the unintentional Electromagnetic (EM) emissions from IoT devices as Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). MAG-PUFs operate by collecting these unintentional EM emissions during the execution of pre-defined reference functions by the IoT devices. The authentication is achieved by matching these emissions with profiles recorded at the time of enrollment, using state-of-the-art Deep Learning (DL) approaches such as Neural Networks (NN) and Autoencoders. Notably, MAG-PUFs offer compelling advantages: (i) it preserves privacy, as it does not require direct access to the IoT devices; and, (ii) it provides unique flexibility, permitting the selection of numerous and varied reference functions. We rigorously evaluated MAG-PUFs using 25 Arduino devices and a diverse set of 325 reference function classes. Employing a DL framework, we achieved a minimum authentication F1-Score of 0.99. Furthermore, the scheme’s efficacy in detecting impostor EM emissions was also affirmed, achieving a minimum F1-Score of 0.99. We also compared our solution to other solutions in the literature, showing its remarkable performance. Finally, we discussed code obfuscation techniques and the impact of Radio Frequency (RF) interference on the IoT authentication process.

“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.

IoMT-BADT: A blockchain-envisioned secure architecture with a lightweight authentication scheme for the Digital Twin environment in the Internet of Medical Things

IoMT-BADT: A blockchain-envisioned secure architecture with a lightweight authentication scheme for the Digital Twin environment in the Internet of Medical Things

A Secure Authentication Protocol Supporting Efficient Handover for UAV

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly pivotal in operations such as flood rescue, wildfire surveillance, and covert military endeavors, with their integration into the Internet of Things (IoT) networks broadening the scope of services they provide. Amidst this expansion, security concerns for UAVs have come to the forefront, particularly in open communication environments where they face authentication challenges and risks of sensitive data, including location information, being exposed to unauthorized parties. To address these issues, we propose a secure and lightweight authentication scheme that combines the use of anonymity mechanisms and Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). Specifically, we employ pseudo- and temporary identities to maintain the anonymity of UAVs, while also utilizing PUF technology to strengthen the security of Ground Station Servers (GSSs) against physical threats. Rigorous validation through ProVerif and the Random Oracle (ROR) Model indicates our scheme’s superior performance over existing protocols in terms of both efficiency and security.

Development of a provably secure and privacy-preserving lightweight authentication scheme for roaming services in global mobility network

The accelerated development of Internet of Things services surfaced the way for providing uninterrupted and adaptable smart mobility services for mobile clients to communicate without any zone or time constraints. The global mobility network is an appropriate contender to be adopted as a communication platform to offer roaming services for swift data exchange and fast movement of mobile users in smart mobility. Nevertheless, the confidentiality and secrecy of the exchanged messages have become major concerns due to the insecure nature of the public communication channel. Additionally, it is worth monitoring that enhanced security measures must not increase the burden on limited-powered, small computationally efficient mobile devices. To fulfill these purposes, multiple authentication and key agreement protocols in the context of roaming services have been proposed in recent days. This research demonstrates that most of the previous authentication schemes for the GLOMONET environment have failed to achieve the aforesaid secrecy goals. To satisfy the purposes, this article has proposed a mutual authentication and session key negotiation scheme for roaming services that resists all security susceptibilities and provides essential requirements like anonymity with minimized computation and communication overhead. To support our claim, the security of the proposed scheme is formally verified using the well-known random oracle model and aProVerif simulation tool. Moreover, the implementation of the protocol using the broadly acknowledged NS-2 simulation tool visualizes the practical efficiency of the protocol.

A provably secure and practical end-to-end authentication scheme for tactile Industrial Internet of Things

In the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), haptic control of machines or robots can be managed remotely. However, with the emergence of Tactile Industrial Internet of Things (TIIoT), the transmission of haptic data over public channels has raised security and privacy concerns. In such an environment, mutual authentication between haptic users and remotely controlled entities is crucial to prevent illegal control by adversaries. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end authentication scheme, SecTIIoT, to establish secure communication between haptic users and remote IoT devices. The scheme addresses security issues by using lightweight hash cryptographic primitives and employs a useful piggyback strategy to improve authentication efficiency. We demonstrate that SecTIIoT is resilient to various known attacks with formal security proofs and informal security analysis. Furthermore, our detailed performance analysis shows that SecTIIoT outperforms existing lightweight authentication schemes as it provides more security features while reducing computation and communication costs.

IoT Cloud-based Telecare Medical Healthcare System with Lightweight Authentication Scheme

IoT Cloud-based Telecare Medical Healthcare System with Lightweight Authentication Scheme

Provably Secure Lightweight Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for Cloud-Based IoT Environments.

A paradigm that combines cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) allows for more impressive services to be provided to users while addressing storage and computational resource issues in the IoT environments. This cloud-based IoT environment has been used in various industries, including public services, for quite some time, and has been researched in academia. However, various security issues can arise during the communication between IoT devices and cloud servers, because communication between devices occurs in open channels. Moreover, issues such as theft of a user's IoT device or extraction of key parameters from the user's device in a remote location can arise. Researchers interested in these issues have proposed lightweight mutual authentication key agreement protocols that are safe and suitable for IoT environments. Recently, a lightweight authentication scheme between IoT devices and cloud servers has been presented. However, we found out their scheme had various security vulnerabilities, vulnerable to insider, impersonation, verification table leakage, and privileged insider attacks, and did not provide users with untraceability. To address these flaws, we propose a provably secure lightweight authentication scheme. The proposed scheme uses the user's biometric information and the cloud server's secret key to prevent the exposure of key parameters. Additionally, it ensures low computational costs for providing users with real-time and fast services using only exclusive OR operations and hash functions in the IoT environments. To analyze the safety of the proposed scheme, we use informal security analysis, Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and a Real-or-Random (RoR) model. The analysis results confirm that our scheme is secure against insider attacks, impersonation attacks, stolen verifier attacks, and so on; furthermore, it provides additional security elements. Simultaneously, it has been verified to possess enhanced communication costs, and total bit size has been shortened to 3776 bits, which is improved by almost 6% compared to Wu et al.'s scheme. Therefore, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme is suitable for cloud-based IoT environments.

An efficient lightweight authentication scheme for dew‐assisted IoT networks

SummaryThe dew computing is currently considered as one of the promising technology, due to its ability to give data access in the absence of internet. However, dew computing also brings new challenges, particularly security and privacy issues. In dew computing paradigm, authentication and key agreement pose substantial challenges that must be taken into account. In this context, the present work is to provide a secure authentication scheme for Internet of Things and dew server based on elliptic curve cryptography. Moreover, the performance evaluation of proposed scheme has been assessed in terms of communication and computation cost, which shows the proposed scheme outperforms than existing related schemes. The proposed scheme has also been compared with the related schemes in terms of various security features such as location privacy, anonymity, forward secrecy, mutual authentication, key agreement, forgery attack, replay attack, denial of service attack and replay attack. Furthermore, the formal security evaluation has been verified by automated validation internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) under on‐the‐fly model‐checker (OFMC) and constraint logic based attack searcher (CL‐AtSE) backends. The OFMC backend analyzed 228 visited nodes with four plies using search time of 0.24 s. The CL‐AtSE analyzed three states with translation time of 0.12 s. The OFMC and CL‐AtSE backends have not identified any attack trace. Therefore, the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is safe against the security threats.

Lightweight authentication scheme based on Elliptic Curve El Gamal

ABSTRACT Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a promising cryptosystem as it presents the ideal choice for implementing public-key cryptography in resource-limited devices, such as those found in envisioned Internet of Things applications, e.g. wireless sensors. Elliptic Curve ElGamal (ECEG) is a renowned member of the ECC family. However, it requires encoding the message before encryption and decoding it after decryption. To better improve the processing time and to avoid sharing a lookup table, we propose, in this document, a new method that exchanges encoding parameters and authenticates endpoints at the same time. So, our new protocol ensures the authentication of communication parties and integrity of ephemeral encoding parameters. The robustness of our solution is proven by the Scyther tool. Experimental tests have been carried out, and the performance of the new methods is provided and compared with RSA and related work. Security and performance analysis show that our new scheme has achieved improved functionality and higher security while maintaining low computational.

Lightweight Authentication Scheme for Healthcare With Robustness to Desynchronization Attacks

Remote healthcare monitoring systems are gaining a lot of interest as they enable doctors to use public channels to get real-time data from the sensors placed in/on the patient’s body. This necessitates the implementation of a robust authentication scheme to ensure secure communication between trusted healthcare providers and sensors which are usually low in resources. To address these issues, in 2021, Masud et al. presented a lightweight anonymous user authentication scheme for securely obtaining patient’s real-time data. Their protocol is considered practical for deployment on sensor nodes as it only utilizes hash functions and does not require any public key cryptography. In this work, we demonstrate how their protocol loses synchronization when a message is blocked/jammed and how in some scenarios, the protocol is exposed to the risk of session key disclosure and cannot ensure forward secrecy. To overcome these threats, we propose, a Lightweight mutual Authentication Protocol that provides Robustness to Desynchronization attacks. The proposed scheme uses a one-way hash chain technique to ensure forward secrecy and enable resynchronization between the protocol entities in the event of a desynchronization attack. also achieves user and sensor node anonymity, thus ensuring privacy of the communicating entities. With the demonstration of both formal and informal analysis, the proposed protocol is ensured to withstand the identified attacks in Masud et al.’s scheme. The comparative analysis in terms of security and performance with relevant protocols indicates that the proposed protocol ensures higher security with considerably low computation and communication overheads, making it suitable for practical implementation in a lightweight healthcare environment.

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.

Lightweight Security for IoT

With the ever-increasing demand for IoT Devices which enable all objects to connect and exchange information in applications such as healthcare applications, Industry 4.0, smart cities and smart homes, etc. IoT devices play a crucial role in our day-to-day life like homes, offices, healthcare, wearable, and agriculture. With the development of IoT devices, securing device-to-device communication has attracted more and more attention and we need to ensure the privacy and security of data amongst these IoT devices. User authentication has emerged as a major security concern while connecting IoT devices and the cloud. Many authentication schemes like mutual authentication, group authentication have been proposed to ensure only authenticated users and with very high confidence we can rely on the decision-making process. Symmetric key based as well as Asymmetric key-based solutions have been proposed but due to the resource constraint nature of the IoT devices designing lightweight, robust, provably secure authentication schemes is a big challenge. This paper discusses the various authentication techniques designed for low-powered IoT devices and proposes a lightweight authentication scheme for IoT.

A puf-based three-party authentication key establishment scheme for fog-enabled smart home

With the rise of Internet of Things (IoT), the smart home is another emerging concept and application of IoT, where security and private data of devices are important. In this paper, fog computing is applied to the smart home environment, where fog can provide many smart features and services to the smart home. Fog computing has many advantages, such as low latency and real-time interaction. However, when fog computing is combined with smart home, it also faces some security threats: first, some fog nodes and smart home devices are deployed in public places, vulnerable to damage or theft by attackers, not considered fully trusted, and vulnerable to device loss/theft attacks, impersonation attacks, and message tampering attacks, etc. These threats can lead to adversaries controlling devices in the smart home or modifying messages to make smart home devices execute wrong commands, causing irreparable damage; Second, the smart home system should have good real-time interaction, and the authentication process using the low latency feature of fog computing should not be involved by the cloud. Considering these, it is necessary to design a secure and effective fog-enabled smart home authentication system that is secure against various known attacks, especially when the fog node is not fully trusted or the smart home device is captured as well. Finally, the authentication scheme should also be lightweight due to the limited resources of many smart home devices. To address these issues, this paper proposes a lightweight authentication scheme for the fog-enabled smart home system. It also employs a physical unclonable function to achieve mutual authentication among three parties: smart home devices, fog nodes and users. Formal security analysis under the Real-Or-Random model shows that this scheme is provably secure. And informal security analysis shows that our scheme is robust against various known attacks. At the same time, the proposed scheme requires less computation cost (8.239 ms) and is approximately 40% to 390% faster than existing related schemes. Although the communication cost is slightly higher (4512 bits), it is reasonable because the proposed scheme implements fog/gateway node compromised attack that has not been achieved by any other existing related schemes.

Lightweight and Anonymous Group Authentication Scheme Based on PUF in the Smart Grid

<p>As a new generation of electricity system, smart grid significantly improves electricity services’ efficiency, reliability, and sustainability. The smart meters, which are the essential terminals, help establish two-way communication between users and electricity providers. While enjoying the convenience of smart meters, users face many challenges. On the one hand, malicious adversaries could attack the smart meters and thus steal the users’ privacy. On the other hand, the computational overhead of electricity data verification is high for lightweight smart meters. To address above issues, a lightweight authentication and group key management scheme is proposed. In the proposed scheme, the physical properties of the Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) are exploited to defend against external attacks from adversaries. Moreover, the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) is used to broadcast the updated group keys for the legitimate smart meters in the community. In addition, the aggregated signature is utilized to reduce the overhead of the data verification. Finally, the Random Oracle Model (ROM) is used to demonstrate that the proposed scheme meets many security requirements. Performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is more suitable for smart grid compared to previous schemes.</p> <p> </p>

An AI-Enabled Hybrid Lightweight Authentication Scheme for Intelligent IoMT Based Cyber-Physical Systems

In the era of smart healthcare, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) based Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) plays an important role, while accessing, monitoring, assessing, and prescribing patients ubiquitously. Efficient authentication and secure data transmission are the influential impediments of these networks to be addressed to maintain credence amidst clients, healthcare specialists, pharmacologists, and other associated entities. To address the authentication and data privacy issues in smart healthcare, in this paper, we proposed a hybrid lightweight authentication scheme leveraging supervised machine learning (SML) technique followed by Cryptographic Parameter Based Encryption and Decryption (CPBE&D) scheme to ensure the validation of legal patient wearable devices with secure transmission over the wireless communication channel. To achieve better results, we enabled the decentralized authentication of legitimate patient wearable devices to minimize computation cost, authentication time, and communication overhead with the help of SML technique to predicate and forward authentication attributes of patient wearable devices to the next concerned trusted authority, when it is shifted from region to another region. Simulation upshots of the SML and CPBE&D scheme exhibit extraordinary security features with cost-effective validation of legal patient wearable devices accompanied by worthwhile communication functionalities compared with the predecessor work.

A Provably Secure,Privacy-Preserving Lightweight Authentication Scheme for Peer-to-Peer Communication in Healthcare Systems based on Internet of Medical Things

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a novel paradigm that plays a significant role in healthcare applications. The Patient’s healthcare information is gathered, and remotely monitored through these IoMT systems. Hence, patients will get proper medical care and other emergency services to enhance survival and control morbidity. However, the patient’s data which is transferred between the devices through an insecure channel should be prevented against security threats and attacks. Therefore, secure authentication and key management schemes play an important part in IoMT communications. On the other hand, while considering the resource-constrained devices used in IoMT systems it is necessary to propose lightweight authentication schemes. In this paper, we have proposed a secure lightweight authentication scheme (LAS) for IoMT based healthcare systems. According to LAS, all the devices have to be registered and should approved by a central authority but in the authentication and communication phases, the devices can establish peer-to-peer communication without the intervention of a central authority. Furthermore, the privacy of the communicating parties is preserved by implementing hash based pseudo-identification method. In this paper, we have done the formal security analysis using BAN logic, the ROR model, and the Scyther tool. The informal security analysis is also shown proof of the resilience capabilities of LAS on various other well-known threats and attacks. Moreover, the proposed LAS is implemented using NS3 simulator to analyze its network performance such as End-to-End delay, Packet Loss Rate, and throughput. Lastly, the performance of the proposed scheme is also evaluated in terms of computational and communication costs. As per the result, the proposed LAS outperformed well when compared with other lightweight authentication schemes.

On the Efficiency of a Lightweight Authentication and Privacy Preservation Scheme for MQTT

The Internet of Things (IoT) deployment in emerging markets has increased dramatically, making security a prominent issue in IoT communication. Several protocols are available for IoT communication; among them, Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is pervasive in intelligent applications. However, MQTT is designed for resource-constrained IoT devices and, by default, does not have a security scheme, necessitating an additional security scheme to overcome its weaknesses. The security vulnerabilities in MQTT inherently lead to overhead and poor communication performance. Adding a lightweight security framework for MQTT is essential to overcome these problems in a resource-constrained environment. The conventional MQTT security schemes present a single trusted scheme and perform attribute verification and key generation, which tend to be a bottleneck at the server and pave the way for various security attacks. In addition to that, using the same secret key for an extended period and a flawed key revocation system can affect the security of MQTT. To address these issues, we propose an Improved Ciphertext Policy-Attribute-Based Encryption (ICP-ABE) integrated with a lightweight symmetric encryption scheme, PRESENT, to improve the security of MQTT. In this work, the PRESENT algorithm enables the secure sharing of blind keys among clients. We evaluated a previously proposed ICP-ABE scheme from the perspective of energy consumption and communication overhead. Furthermore, we evaluated the efficiency of the scheme using provable security and formal methods. The simulation results showed that the proposed scheme consumes less energy in standard and attack scenarios than the simple PRESENT, Key Schedule Algorithm (KSA)-PRESENT Secure Message Queue Telemetry Transport (SMQTT), and ECC-RSA frameworks, with a topology of 30 nodes. In general, the proposed lightweight security framework for MQTT addresses the vulnerabilities of MQTT and ensures secure communication in a resource-constrained environment, making it a promising solution for IoT applications in emerging markets.

An Anonymous Authentication Scheme Based on Chinese Residue Theorem in Wireless Body Area Networks

Considering the resource limitations of low-cost wireless sensors, there is a growing inclination to utilize cryptographic primitives that are optimized for efficiency, such as symmetric key encryption/decryption and hash functions, when designing authentication schemes. However, designing a lightweight authentication scheme that can meet various security requirements poses a significant challenge. In recent years, numerous lightweight authentication schemes have been proposed in order to address these security needs. Nevertheless, recent research has revealed that many of these schemes exhibit security vulnerabilities and design deficiencies, including challenges related to asynchronization and impractical gateway-node search operations. Due to the inadequate security of existing schemes, this study introduces a novel privacy-preserving authentication scheme that aims to provide adaptive resilience against desynchronization attacks in wireless body area networks (WBANs). The proposed scheme utilizes lightweight cryptographic modules to optimize efficiency. To ensure user anonymity, the Chinese Remainder Theorem technique is employed, whereas forward secrecy and resistance to desynchronization attacks are achieved through the use of one-way hash chains and serial numbers, respectively. Through extensive analysis and comparisons, the proposed scheme is demonstrated to strike a fine balance between security and efficiency.