Lightweight Cryptographic Primitives Research Articles

A Lightweight Three-Factor Anonymous Authentication Scheme With Privacy Protection for Personalized Healthcare Applications

Security and privacy issues in wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) have attracted lots of attention in both academia and industry due to the sensitiveness of medical system. In the past decade, extensive research has been carried out on these security issues, but no single study exists that addresses them adequately, especially for some important security properties, such as user anonymity and forward secrecy. As a step towards this direction, in this paper, the authors propose a lightweight three-factor anonymous authentication scheme with forward secrecy for personalized healthcare applications using only the lightweight cryptographic primitives. The proposed scheme adopts pseudonym identity technique to protect users' real identities and employs one-way hash chain technique to ensure forward secrecy. Analysis and comparison results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can not only reduce execution time by 34% as compared with the most effective related schemes, but also achieve more security and functional features.

An efficient mutual authentication and key agreement scheme without password for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are usually deployed in hostile or unattended areas, and users need to obtain real-time data from WSNs. The data collected by sensor nodes are usually relatively private and sensitive, so users must pass the identity authentication before obtaining the information perceived by sensor nodes. In order to enhance the security of wireless sensor networks and prevent illegal users from accessing sensor nodes, this paper designs an efficient and secure identity authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks. The proposed protocol makes full use of the advantages of lightweight cryptographic primitives such as physical unclonable function, one-way hash function and bitwise exclusive operation. Moreover, users only need to use biometrics (such as fingerprints, iris) to access the remote systems and do not need to rely on any password, which avoids the trouble of memorizing and losing password. To prove the scheme’s security, the well-known formal security proof with random oracle model and traditional heuristic discussion are given. Additionally, the performance comparison results show that our scheme has less communication overhead and computation complexity, and is effective for the resource constrained sensor devices in WSNs.

A Comprehensive Survey on Cryptography Evaluation in Mobile (MANETs)

With the rapid development in network technology new network types based on wireless communication have emerged. A large family of wireless communication networks is the Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). While MANETs mobile devices should be able to connect with each other at any time and place, the vulnerabilities of MANET structure also introduce a wide range of attacks and present new challenges for the design of security mechanism ranging from developing and implementing lightweight cryptographic primitives to designing and analyzing secure protocols. Numerous security solutions and key management schemes such as symmetric and asymmetric cryptography have been used to support MANET environment. This paper conducted survey to gain a quick knowledge of security design demand and cryptography solutions to secure MANET. This survey focused on security schemas and case studies of cryptography techniques on Ad Hoc networks. Finally, conclusions are discussed.

Hardware Implementation of Secure Lightweight Cryptographic Designs for IoT Applications

The recent expansion of the Internet of Things is creating a new world of smart devices in which security implications are very significant. Besides the claimed security level, the IoT devices are usually featured with constrained resources, such as low computation capability, low memory, and limited battery. Lightweight cryptographic primitives are proposed in the context of IoT while considering the trade-off between security guarantee and good performance. In this paper, we present optimized hardware, lightweight cryptographic designs, of 32-bit datapath, LED 64/128, SIMON 64/128, and SIMECK 64/128 algorithms, for constrained devices. Our proposed designs are investigated on Spartan-3, Spartan-6, and Zynq-7000 FPGA platforms in terms of area, speed, efficiency, and power consumption. The proposed designs achieved a high throughput up to 891.99 Mbps, 838.95 Mbps, and 210.13 Mbps for SIMECK 64/128, SIMON 64/128, and LED 64/128 on Zynq-7000, respectively. A deep comparison between our three proposed designs is elaborated on different FPGA families for adequate FPGAs-based application deployment. Test results and security analysis show that not only can our proposed designs achieve good encryption results with high performance and a low reduced cost but also they are secure enough to resist statistical attacks.

A Lightweight Authentication Scheme for V2G Communications: A PUF-Based Approach Ensuring Cyber/Physical Security and Identity/Location Privacy

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology has become a promising concept for the near future smart grid eco-system. V2G improves smart grid resiliency by enabling two-way communication and electricity flows while reducing the greenhouse gases emission. V2G practicality and stability is strongly based on the exchanged data between electrical vehicles (EVs) and the grid server (GS). However, using communication protocols to exchange vital information leads grid to being vulnerable against various types of attack. To prevent the well-known attacks in V2G network, this paper proposes a privacy-aware authentication scheme that ensures data integrity, confidentiality, users’ identity and location privacy, mutual authentication, and physical security based on physical unclonable function (PUF). Furthermore, the performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art, since EVs only use lightweight cryptographic primitives for every protocol execution.

QuickN: Practical and Secure Nearest Neighbor Search on Encrypted Large-Scale Data

In this article, we propose a scheme, named QuickN, which can efficiently and securely enable nearest neighbor search over encrypted data on untrusted clouds. Specifically, we modify the search algorithm of nearest neighbors in tree structures (e.g., R-trees), such that the modified algorithm adapts to lightweight cryptographic primitives (e.g., Order-Preserving Encryption) without affecting the original faster-than-linear search complexity. Moreover, we propose an optimized algorithm on top of our modified search algorithm, where it can significantly save communication overheads of a client without introducing any additional information leakage. We devise an approximate algorithm to <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math></inline-formula> -nearest neighbor search to improve search efficiency by taking a tradeoff in the completeness of search results. In addition, we also demonstrate our design only leaks minimal privacy against advanced inference attacks. Our experimental results on Amazon EC2 show that our algorithms are extremely practical over massive datasets.

Editing-Enabled Signatures: A New Tool for Editing Authenticated Data

Data authentication primarily serves as a tool to achieve data integrity and source authentication. However, traditional data authentication does not fit well where an intermediate entity (editor) is required to modify the authenticated data provided by the source/data owner before sending the data to other recipients. To ask the data owner for authenticating each modified data can lead to higher communication overhead. In this article, we introduce the notion of editing-enabled signatures where the data owner can choose any set of modification operations applicable on the data and still can restrict any possibly untrusted editor to authenticate the data modified using an operation from this set only . Moreover, the editor does not need to interact with the data owner in order to authenticate the data every time it is modified. We construct an editing-enabled signature (EES) scheme that derives its efficiency from mostly lightweight cryptographic primitives. We formalize the security model for editing-enabled signatures and analyze the security of our EES scheme. Editing-enabled signatures can find numerous applications that involve generic editing tasks and privacy-preserving operations. We demonstrate how our EES scheme can be applied in two privacy-preserving applications.

Lightweight Cryptographic for Securing Constrained Resource IoT Devices

Internet of Things IoT become a recent concept of communication technologies and a novel computing paradigm. The idea is to connect a variety of objects or things (e.g., RFID tags, NFC tags, sensors, etc.), which can interact and exchange data with each other anywhere and everywhere over the internet. With the evolution of IoT, the volume of data interchanged among connecting IoT devices is increasing at a remarkable scale due to the increase in number of the connected objects. Most of IoT devices are constrained devices and low resources that handling confidential and sensitive data. Therefore, using conventional cryptographic methods are unsuitable due to many issues and challenges like limited computational power, memory space, energy resources, performance cost, and security requirement. For that, lightweight cryptographic primitives (LWC) have been introduced. Many kinds of research continue moving forward to find a suitable algorithm that meets the specific demands of the IoT application. This paper provides an overview of the LWC primitives for IoT environment and presents various LWC algorithms based on their key dimension, block size, structures and number of rounds. We examine also the security viewpoint for the constrained IoT environment focusing on the relevant research challenges, difficulties and solutions. Finally, we proposed a secure scheme for improving the constrained IoT environment and conclude by discussing the open issues.

Lightweight Cryptography: A Solution to Secure IoT

In Internet of Things (IoT), the massive connectivity of devices and enormous data on the air have made information susceptible to different type of attacks. Cryptographic algorithms are used to provide confidentiality and maintain the integrity of the information. But small size, limited computational capability, limited memory, and power resources of the devices make it difficult to use the resource intensive traditional cryptographic algorithms for information security. In this scenario it becomes impertinent to develop lightweight security schemes for IoT. A thorough study on the lightweight cryptography as a solution to the security problem of resource-constrained devices in IoT has been presented in this work. This paper is a comprehensive attempt to provide an in-depth and state of the art survey of available lightweight cryptographic primitives till 2019. In this paper 21 lightweight block ciphers, 19 lightweight stream ciphers, 9 lightweight hash functions and 5 variants of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) has been discussed i.e. in total 54 LWC primitives are compared in their respective classes. The comparison of the ciphers has been carried out in terms of chip area, energy and power, hardware and software efficiency, throughput, latency and figure of merit (FoM). Based on the findings it can be observed that AES and ECC are the most suitable for used lightweight cryptographic primitives. Several open research problems in the field of lightweight cryptography have also been identified.

A Secure Biometrics and PUFs-Based Authentication Scheme With Key Agreement For Multi-Server Environments

The emergence of multi-server authentication key protocol schemes provides a viable environment for users to easily access the services of multiple legitimate servers through a single registration. Biometric identification technology has the characteristics of forgery difficulty, duplication difficulty and guess difficulty, etc. Therefore, it is an indispensable authentication technology in smart card-based user authentication protocol. There are many shortcomings in the existing schemes based on biometrics, including leakages of biometrics information, smart card theft attack, lack of user anonymity, user impersonation attack, server impersonation, and so on. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a new user authentication and key agreement scheme in the multi-server environment. To some extent, we not only are able to guarantee the communication security between the user and the servers, but also ensure the physical security of the smart card and biometrics information. In this respect, we use lightweight cryptographic primitives, such as Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), Fuzzy extractor and One-way hash functions, and so on. The proposed scheme can effectively protect user's anonymity without the use of password and provide mutual authentication and key agreement in the multi-server environment. Subsequently, we used informal analysis, Burrows-Abadi-Needham Logic (BAN-Logic) proof, and a widely accepted Real-Or-Random model to prove the security and robustness of proposed scheme. Finally, our authentication protocol can protect the security of communication.

A Secure Remote Mutual Authentication Scheme Based on Chaotic Map for Underwater Acoustic Networks

Underwater acoustic networks (UANs) have emerged as a new wireless sensor network structure widely used in many applications. Sensor nodes are usually placed in a hostile and unattended underwater environment to gather information with limited resource. Since the underwater information is sensitive and special, only authenticated users have rights to get the information. The existing secure resource-constrained authentication schemes are not inapplicable for underwater acoustic networks, so a lightweight authentication scheme is the primarily task in underwater acoustic networks. In this paper, we present a chaotic maps remote user authentication and key agreement scheme for underwater acoustic networks based on the DLP and DHP, in which only authenticated users have rights to obtain the information. The proposed scheme applies the lightweight cryptographic primitives, such as one-way hash function and chaotic maps to accomplish mutual authentication and key agreement for underwater acoustic networks. The security of the proposed scheme is certified by applying the BAN logic and Random Oracle Model. Security analysis shows that our proposed scheme is safe and can meet ten security requirements and seven security goals. Performance analysis shows that our proposed scheme is more efficient compared with other resource-constrained schemes.

Authenticated Encryption using Lightweight Cryptographic Primitives for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) transmits sensitive data from physical environment to digital medium. Thus, security is essential to transmit these vulnerable data. Authenticated Encryption aim to provide security in WSN with integrity, confidentiality, and authentication of data transmitted. Block cipher modes of operations provide different cipher text for identical plain text which further enhances the security. Sensor nodes have its own operational constraint which makes security algorithm to be light in terms of area and low power consumption. In this paper novel architecture of authenticated encryption of lightweight symmetric cipher PRESENT and lightweight hash function SPONGENT in OFB mode is proposed. Proposed design is evaluated in terms of Gate Equivalent (GE), operating frequency and power consumption using Cadence Genus® tool using 180 nm technology library.

An Efficient Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for Energy Internet-Based Vehicle-to-Grid Communication

The energy Internet (EI) represents a new electric grid infrastructure that uses computing and communication to transform legacy power grids into systems that support open innovation. EI provides bidirectional communication for analysis and improvement of energy usage between service providers and customers. To ensure a secure, reliable, and efficient operation, the EI should be protected from cyber attacks. Thus, secure and efficient key establishment is an important issue for this Internet-based smart grid environment. In this paper, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving authentication scheme for EI-based vehicle-to-grid communication using lightweight cryptographic primitives such as one-way non-collision hash functions. In our proposed scheme, a customer can securely access services provided by the service provider using a symmetric key established between them. Detailed security and performance analysis of our proposed scheme are presented to show that it is resilient against many security attacks, cost effective in computation and communication, and provides an efficient solution for the EI.

Cryptanalysis and Improvement of a Privacy-Preserving Three-Factor Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are of prominent use in unmanned surveillance applications. This peculiar trait of WSNs is actually the underlying technology of various applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) such as smart homes, smart cities, smart shopping complexes, smart traffic, smart health, and much more. Over time, WSNs have evolved as a strong base for laying the foundations of IoT infrastructure. In order to address the scenario in which a user wants to access the real-time data directly from the sensor node in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), Das recently proposed an anonymity-preserving three-factor authentication protocol. Das’s protocol is suitable for resource-constrained sensor nodes because it only uses lightweight cryptographic primitives such as hash functions and symmetric encryption schemes as building blocks. Das’s protocol is claimed to be secure against different known attacks by providing formal security proof and security verification using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool. However, we find that Das’s protocol has the following security loopholes: (1) By using a captured sensor node, an adversary can impersonate a legal user to the gateway node, impersonate other sensor nodes to deceive the user, and the adversary can also decrypt all the cipher-texts of the user; (2) the gateway node has a heavy computational cost due to user anonymity and thus the protocol is vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks. We overcome the shortcomings of Das’s protocol and propose an improved protocol. We also prove the security of the proposed protocol in the random oracle model. Compared with the other related protocols, the improved protocol enjoys better functionality without much enhancement in the computation and communication costs. Consequently, it is more suitable for applications in WSNs

An Improved Outlier Detection Mechanism for Hierarchical Key Management in Hierarchical Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs)

The purpose of this paper is to present an outlier detection mechanism for hierarchical key management which utilizes hybrid (public and private) key management scheme for implementing lightweight cryptographic primitives in hierarchical MANETs. Further, a comparative analysis of key management schemes is to be performed for identifying an efficient key management scheme for hierarchical MANETs. In key management methods, public and private group key management schemes are integrated at local level (subgroup) and global level (network). These key management schemes uses various topologies for minimizing communicational and computational costs. After implementing an efficient key management scheme, outliers in network are identified using packet analysis at key generation, key distribution, message transmission and key re-generation phases. It is observed that Teo and Tan key management approach with shamir’s threshold key distribution mechanism is an efficient approach key management scheme for group authentication and hierarchical key management. Further, a minimum improvement of 9.7% and 0.91%, and maximum improvements of 25.3% and 87.7% are observed for Packet Delivery Rate (APDR) and Average Throughput (AT) respectively in a network of 1000 nodes. The proposed method requires four sequential analysis of outlier detection schemes at different layers of MANET protocol stack because single scheme per layer is not efficient in identifying outliers in proposed network. The proposed key management method is useful for MANETs in group authentication and implementation of lightweight cryptographic primitives with secure key. Further, outlier detection mechanism can be extended for identifying various active and passive attacks.

Lightweight and Physically Secure Anonymous Mutual Authentication Protocol for Real-Time Data Access in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Industrial wireless sensor network (IWSN) is an emerging class of a generalized WSN having constraints of energy consumption, coverage, connectivity, and security. However, security and privacy is one of the major challenges in IWSN as the nodes are connected to Internet and usually located in an unattended environment with minimum human interventions. In IWSN, there is a fundamental requirement for a user to access the real-time information directly from the designated sensor nodes. This task demands to have a user authentication protocol. To satisfy this requirement, this paper proposes a lightweight and privacy-preserving mutual user authentication protocol in which only the user with a trusted device has the right to access the IWSN. Therefore, in the proposed scheme, we considered the physical layer security of the sensor nodes. We show that the proposed scheme ensures security even if a sensor node is captured by an adversary. The proposed protocol uses the lightweight cryptographic primitives, such as one way cryptographic hash function, physically unclonable function, and bitwise exclusive operations. Security and performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is secure, and is efficient for the resource-constrained sensing devices in IWSN.

Privacy-Aware Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Secure Smart Grid Communication

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are one of the underpinning platforms of smart grids, facilitating efficient grid management and operation, optimization of resource utilization, as well as enabling new products, features, and services. However, this interconnection of grid technology with ICT leads to various security challenges in the power grid. One such concern is the tampering of usage data from smart meters which may result not only in incorrect billing, but also in incorrect decisions related to demand and supply management. In addition to network based cyber attacks, smart meters are also susceptible to physical attacks since they are installed in customer premises without hardware protection mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy-aware authenticated key agreement scheme which can not only ensure secure communication between smart meters and the service providers, but also the physical security of smart meters. In this regard, we utilize the lightweight cryptographic primitives such as physically uncloneable functions and one-way hash function, etc. Hence, the proposed scheme is even suitable for the resource constrained smart meters.

LAAP: Lightweight anonymous authentication protocol for D2D-Aided fog computing paradigm

Fog computing is a new paradigm that extends cloud computing and services to the edge of the network. Although it has several distinct characteristics, however, the conventional fog computing model does not support some of the imperative features such as D2D communications, which can be useful for several critical IoT applications and services. Besides, fog computing faces numerous new security and privacy challenges apart from those inherited from cloud computing, however, security issues in fog computing have not been addressed properly. In this article, first we introduce a new privacy-preserving security architecture for fog computing model with the cooperative D2D communication support, which can be useful for various IoT applications. Subsequently, based on the underlying foundation of our proposed security architecture we design three lightweight anonymous authentication protocols (LAAPs) to support three distinct circumstances in D2D-Aided fog computing. In this regard, we utilize the lightweight cryptographic primitives like one-way function and EXCLUSIVE-OR operations, which will cause limited computational overhead for the resource limited edge devices.

A reliable PUF in a dual function SRAM

The Internet of Things (IoTs) employs resource-constrained sensor nodes for sensing and processing data that require robust, lightweight cryptographic primitives. The SRAM Physical Unclonable Function (SRAM-PUF) is a potential candidate for secure key generation. An SRAM-PUF is able to generate random and unique cryptographic keys based on start-up values by exploiting intrinsic manufacturing process variations. The reuse of the available on-chip SRAM memory in a system as a PUF might achieve useful cost efficiency. However, as CMOS technology scales down, aging-induced Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) becomes more pronounced resulting in asymmetric degradation of memory bit cells after prolonged storage of the same bit values. This causes unreliable start-up values for an SRAM-PUF. In this paper, the on-chip memory in the ARM architecture has been used as a case study to investigate reliability in an SRAM-PUF. We show that the bit probability in a 32-bit ARM instruction cache has a predictable pattern and hence predictable aging. Therefore, we propose using an instruction cache as a PUF to save silicon area. Furthermore, we propose a bit selection technique to mitigate the NBTI effect. We show that this technique can reduce the predicted bit error in an SRAM-PUF from 14.18% to 5.58% over 5 years. Consequently, as the bit error reduces, the area overhead of the error-correction circuitry is about 6 × smaller compared to that without a bit selection technique.

Lightweight and Secure Three-Factor Authentication Scheme for Remote Patient Monitoring Using On-Body Wireless Networks

On-body wireless networks (oBWNs) play a crucial role in improving the ubiquitous healthcare services. Using oBWNs, the vital physiological information of the patient can be gathered from the wearable sensor nodes and accessed by the authorized user like the health professional or the doctor. Since the open nature of wireless communication and the sensitivity of physiological information, secure communication has always been the vital issue in oBWNs-based systems. In recent years, several authentication schemes have been proposed for remote patient monitoring. However, most of these schemes are so susceptible to security threats and not suitable for practical use. Specifically, all these schemes using lightweight cryptographic primitives fail to provide forward secrecy and suffer from the desynchronization attack. To overcome the historical security problems, in this paper, we present a lightweight and secure three-factor authentication scheme for remote patient monitoring using oBWNs. The proposed scheme adopts one-time hash chain technique to ensure forward secrecy, and the pseudonym identity method is employed to provide user anonymity and resist against desynchronization attack. The formal and informal security analyses demonstrate that the proposed scheme not only overcomes the security weaknesses in previous schemes but also provides more excellent security and functional features. The comparisons with six state-of-the-art schemes indicate that the proposed scheme is practical with acceptable computational and communication efficiency.