Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol Research Articles

VAuth: Robust Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol Preserving User’s Anonymity for VANET With FPGA Implementation

VAuth: Robust Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol Preserving User’s Anonymity for VANET With FPGA Implementation

A PUF secured lightweight mutual authentication protocol for multi-UAV networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles, initially developed for military use, have evolved to play vital roles in civilian applications including photography, agriculture, disaster management, and delivery services. Their agility, precision, and ad-hoc formation make them indispensable, particularly in time-sensitive tasks such as search-and-rescue missions. However, the widespread use of UAVs has raised security concerns, including unauthorized access, cyberattacks, and physical threats. In addition, the dynamic nature of these networks provides adversaries with opportunities to exploit node failures leading to potential data breaches. To address these risks, implementing robust security measures such as authentication, encryption, physical security, and proactive monitoring is essential even amidst the inherent resource limitations faced by UAVs. This paper proposes a lightweight authentication and key agreement protocol for multi-UAV networks, incorporating physically unclonable technology for securing the data sent over the network. The protocol also addresses security risks during UAV failures and the unauthorized access to data. The scheme has been validated using the Scyther simulation tool, with the PUF implemented on the Xilinx FPGA platform. An informal security analysis is also presented that demonstrates its adherence to security requirements. Additionally, the performance of the proposed scheme is compared with state-of-the-art approaches by evaluating network latency in terms of computational and communication costs, affirming its effectiveness in resource-constrained applications.

Retracted: Renovated XTEA Encoder Architecture-Based Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol for RFID and Green Wireless Sensor Network Applications

Retracted: Renovated XTEA Encoder Architecture-Based Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol for RFID and Green Wireless Sensor Network Applications

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.

$$\chi$$perbp: a cloud-based lightweight mutual authentication protocol

$$\chi$$perbp: a cloud-based lightweight mutual authentication protocol

An Efficient Lightweight Mutual Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol for Roaming Vehicle

An Efficient Lightweight Mutual Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol for Roaming Vehicle

A provably secure and lightweight mutual authentication protocol in fog-enabled social Internet of vehicles

The Internet of vehicles technology has developed rapidly in recent years and has become increasingly important. The social Internet of vehicles provides better resources and services for the development of the Internet of vehicles and provides better experience for users. However, there are still many security problems in social vehicle networking environments. Once the vehicle is networked, the biggest problem is data security according to the three levels of data collection, intelligent analysis, and decision control of the Internet of vehicles. Recently, Wu et al. proposed a lightweight vehicle social network security authentication protocol based on fog nodes. They claimed that their security authentication protocol could resist various attacks. However, we found that their authentication protocols are vulnerable to internal attacks, smart card theft attacks, and lack perfect forward security. In this study, we propose a new protocol to overcome these limitations. Finally, security and performance analyses show that our protocol perfectly overcomes these limitations and exhibits excellent performance and efficiency.

A Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol for IoT

A Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol for IoT

Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Secure Communication Establishment in Vehicle-to-Grid Environment With FPGA Implementation

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology enables bidirectional energy flow between the electric vehicle and power grid thereby making the electric vehicle as a virtual power plant. This seamless exchange of energy flow is possible only when the entities involved communicate wirelessly in a secured manner. In order to ensure privacy-preserving in the V2G communication, development of a novel key establishment protocol is an active area of research. This article presents a lightweight mutual authentication and key establishment protocol for secure V2G communication among the electric vehicle user, charging station, and utility service provider. The correctness of the proposed protocol is verified using the formal method BAN logic, and many of its security threats are analyzed informally. Further, the protocol is compared for its security and efficiency with the related protocols in the literature under various aspects, and the comparison results show that our protocol outshines the others. The functional correctness of the protocol is also verified in Xilinx Zynq-7000 series FPGA board so that it can be deployed in any real-time applications.

Renovated XTEA Encoder Architecture-Based Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol for RFID and Green Wireless Sensor Network Applications

Wireless sensor networks find applications everywhere in day to day activities right from attendance entry systems to healthcare monitoring systems. The evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) as the Internet of Everything (IoET) makes the wireless sensor network omnipresent and increases the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for the proper identification of devices and sensor nodes which are mostly battery operated. As technology evolves, security threats also increase rapidly. This mandates a strong and energy-efficient green solution. This work attempted to address these issues by effectively deploying the lightweight encryption scheme called Extended Tiny Encryption Algorithm (XTEA). Though the XTEA is lightweight and famous, it is commonly known for various attacks. Our work patches the security threats in the XTEA by applying domain-specific customization, random number utilization, and undisclosed key renewal techniques. Two custom Renovated XTEA Mutual Authentication Protocol (RXMAP) encoder architectures, namely, RXMAP-1 and RXMAP-2, are proposed based on the replacement of accurate computational blocks with approximate blocks. The proposed RXMAP protocol is evaluated for its computational and storage overhead and verified against various security threats using BAN logic formal verification and informal verification. The proposed encoder architectures are simulated for functional verification, and ASIC implementation is done with a 132 nm process node. ASIC implementation results show that the proposed designs RXMAP-1 and RXMAP-2 occupy 53.11% and 53.31% lesser area compared to XTEA I and 52.97% and 53.18% lesser area compared to XTEA II implementation. The total power consumed by the proposed encoder architectures RXMAP-1 and RXMAP-2 is 68.76% and 71.64% lesser than XTEA II implementation, respectively, while maintaining the equal throughput.

Lightweight and Anonymous Mutual Authentication Protocol for Edge IoT Nodes with Physical Unclonable Function

Internet of Things (IoT) has been widely used in many fields, bringing great convenience to people’s traditional work and life. IoT generates tremendous amounts of data at the edge of network. However, the security of data transmission is facing severe challenges. In particular, edge IoT nodes cannot run complex encryption operations due to their limited computing and storage resources. Therefore, edge IoT nodes are more susceptible to various security attacks. To this end, a lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement protocol is proposed to achieve the security of IoT nodes’ communication. The protocol uses the reverse fuzzy extractor to acclimatize to the noisy environment and introduces the supplementary subprotocol to enhance resistance to the desynchronization attack. It uses only lightweight cryptographic operations, such as hash function, XORs, and PUF. It only stores one pseudo-identity. The protocol is proven to be secure by rigid security analysis based on improved BAN logic. Performance analysis shows the proposed protocol has more comprehensive functions and incurs lower computation and communication cost when compared with similar protocols.

Correction to: A group key-based lightweight Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement (MAKA) protocol for multi-server environment

Correction to: A group key-based lightweight Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement (MAKA) protocol for multi-server environment

A group key-based lightweight Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement (MAKA) protocol for multi-server environment

A group key-based lightweight Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement (MAKA) protocol for multi-server environment

CoMSeC++: PUF-based secured light-weight mutual authentication protocol for Drone-enabled WSN

An unattended environment like a disputed area, a battlefield, or a dense forest area is an environment that is completely inaccessible. Hence, certain kinds of activities that may occur in such an environment would be difficult to notice, which actually is required to be known. Therefore, sensors could be mounted in those places so that the essential data could be gathered. In this paper, we are considering an unattended environment with sensors mounted at certain spots from which the data could be collected through mobile device which actually is an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or say, Drone. We have first designed a suitable architecture for the same and designed a light-weight protocol to establish a secure communication among devices and the cloud via the relocatable drone. Our protocol also utilizes the benefits of Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) to generate, which is used to encrypt the message in communication. The well-popular Scyther simulator has been used to simulate the protocol and the results shows that the protocol is completely protected against leakage of private information. Considering the hardness problem of hash function and PUF, the informal analysis also confirms the high-level security protection against known attacks. The protocol is not only better in terms of security strength, but it also achieves better performance when compared to existing competitive works.

PSL-MAAKA: Provably Secure and Lightweight Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Fully Public Channels in Internet of Medical Things

Designing efficient and secure mutual authentication and key agreement (MAAKA) protocols for Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has been shown to be challenging, mainly due to the different security and privacy requirements in complex settings. Existing schemes generally are subject to a number of limitations, ranging from performance to security issues. In this article, we introduce a provably secure and lightweight MAAKA (PSL-MAAKA) protocol for fully public channels in IoMT. First, the proposed scheme is lightweight since the major operations in the stage of authentication and key agreement are hash operation and XOR operation, respectively. Second, this article proves the security of the presented protocol taking the advantage of the random oracle model. Next, this article gives that security requirements in IoMT could be satisfied through our presented MAAKA protocol. Finally, we demonstrate that it enjoys optimal performance than other competing schemes, in terms of communication overhead, computation overhead, and storage overhead.

WSN-SLAP: Secure and Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are widely used to provide users with convenient services such as health-care, and smart home. To provide convenient services, sensor nodes in WSN environments collect and send the sensing data to the gateway. However, it can suffer from serious security issues because susceptible messages are exchanged through an insecure channel. Therefore, secure authentication protocols are necessary to prevent security flaws in WSN. In 2020, Moghadam et al. suggested an efficient authentication and key agreement scheme in WSN. Unfortunately, we discover that Moghadam et al.’s scheme cannot prevent insider and session-specific random number leakage attacks. We also prove that Moghadam et al.’s scheme does not ensure perfect forward secrecy. To prevent security vulnerabilities of Moghadam et al.’s scheme, we propose a secure and lightweight mutual authentication protocol for WSNs (WSN-SLAP). WSN-SLAP has the resistance from various security drawbacks, and provides perfect forward secrecy and mutual authentication. We prove the security of WSN-SLAP by using Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, Real-or-Random (ROR) model, and Automated Verification of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation. In addition, we evaluate the performance of WSN-SLAP compared with existing related protocols. We demonstrate that WSN-SLAP is more secure and suitable than previous protocols for WSN environments.

A lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement protocol for remote surgery application in Tactile Internet environment

The emergence of the fifth generation (5G) networks has revolutionized the cyberspace due to its ultra-low latency, huge capacity, higher data rate, and more reliable connections. One of such technological innovations is Tactile Internet which means remotely transmitting a physical sense of touch. Tactile Internet supports a number of realtime interaction applications such as augmented reality, virtual reality, gaming, smart grid, and ehealthcare. In the context of ehealthcare, Tactile Internet allows a surgeon to remotely operate a patient by implementing some control actions via a robotic system and receiving a haptic feedback. Although, the ultimate goal of this auspicious technology is to safe human lives, the aim may be jeopardized if proper security measures are not implemented. Any unauthorized access to the robotic system may lead to wrong surgical procedures that can cause havoc or even result to death. To this end, we develop an ultraefficient mutual authentication and key agreement protocol for Tactile Internet-assisted remote surgery application. The protocol is designed using a few cryptographic hash function and exclusive-OR operations. The security of the proposed protocol is demonstrated formally using Real-Or-Random (ROR) model, formal security verification using Automated Verification of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) toolkit and the generally-acknowledged Burrows–Abadi–Nedham (BAN) Logic, and information security analysis to corroborate the results of the formal security analyses. The functionality comparison and numerical analysis show the superiority of the proposed protocol over the state-of-the-art schemes. The experimental simulation reveals that the protocol is very efficient and suitable for practical deployment.

Secure Device-to-Device communications for 5G enabled Internet of Things applications

Smart cities are developed to optimize operations across the city such as waste and traffic management, water supply management, criminal tracking, and pollution monitoring, etc. Smart cities are formed by the interconnection of various Internet of Things (IoT) devices for collecting the data from objects and humans to perform necessary actions. But the challenge lies in the exchange of enormous information in real-time to drive smart city applications. Therefore, smart city applications make use of Device-to-Device (D2D) communications which provides higher bandwidth and lower latency in message exchanges. D2D communications do not need any infrastructure for communication and hence are cost and time effective. However, this advantage becomes a threat as no third party is involved to verify the authenticity of the devices before exchange of real information. Consequently, a reliable authentication mechanism is required to address the security issues in WiFi (wireless fidelity) Direct communication. In this paper, we propose a secure and lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement protocol for WiFi Direct. The principle of the protocol is based upon a commit/open pair and Diffie Hellman key exchange algorithm. It is observed from the simulations that the proposed protocol successfully authenticates the D2D devices in the WiFi Direct environment. Investigation through formal security analysis revealed the strong resistivity of the proposed protocol against the prominent attacks in the WiFi Direct environment. The comparative analysis demonstrates the reliability of the suggested protocol over the traditional one. The proposed protocol eliminates the occurrence of the denial of service (DoS) and man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks in the discovery and key agreement phase, respectively. The proposed protocol can be easily integrated into the devices enabled with WiFi Direct and can offer a wide security package.

An Ultra-Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol Based on LPN Problem with Distance Fraud Resistant

RFID tags are one of the main enablers of the internet of things. All objects have to be equipped with an electronic product code such as RFID tags. Because of minimizing the price, RFID environments are resource-scarce, then designing ultra-lightweight authentication protocols is of great importance. Many ultra-lightweight authentication protocols such as HB family protocols are proposed. One of the most important threats against HB family protocols is a type of man-in-the-middle attack called GRS. Also, in the real world, IoT requires mutual authentication that traditional HB protocols do not support it. Besides, misconceptions about reader-tag distance could create problems in several applications especially in contactless systems such as access control and electronic payment systems, which could be damaged by distance-based frauds. In the present work, we have proposed a novel distance bounding protocol based on HB family protocols with four major characteristics: (1) it can resist terrorist, mafia, and distance fraud attacks; (2) it is a lightweight mutual authentication protocol capable of being used in low-cost IoT equipment such as NFC and RFID; (3) it employs a hard problem that be post-quantum resistant, and (4) it identifies and solves the weaknesses of HB protocols including GRS attacks. The proposed protocol has also been shown to be able to address the known weaknesses and attacks in distance frauds and HB family protocols.

Efficient Authentication Protocol for Continuous Monitoring in Medical Sensor Networks

Currently, continuous monitoring on patients with the help of small devices (or sensors), is easy for doctors/nurses to check patients. Due to privacy issues, data collected from devices should be protected. Thus, a lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement protocol is required among doctors/nurses, trusted servers, sensors and patients. In this paper, we provide a secure protocol which could support continuous monitoring on patients. Firstly, user's biometrics will be used to verify users by means of continuous monitoring of physiological data (e.g., ECG signals) in which verification of the patient identity. This could prevent device theft attacks. In addition, dynamic identity is taken to provide user anonymity and mitigate against user traceability. Later, we provide informal and formal security analysis to prove that our protocol can establish a session key between the user and sensor after successfully mutually authentication. Performance analysis proved our scheme to be competitive in comparison to existing schemes relative to the added security benefits it provides.