Lightweight Mutual Authentication Research Articles

All-silicon multidimensionally-encoded optical physical unclonable functions for integrated circuit anti-counterfeiting

Integrated circuit anti-counterfeiting based on optical physical unclonable functions (PUFs) plays a crucial role in guaranteeing secure identification and authentication for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. While considerable efforts have been devoted to exploring optical PUFs, two critical challenges remain: incompatibility with the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology and limited information entropy. Here, we demonstrate all-silicon multidimensionally-encoded optical PUFs fabricated by integrating silicon (Si) metasurface and erbium-doped Si quantum dots (Er-Si QDs) with a CMOS-compatible procedure. Five in-situ optical responses have been manifested within a single pixel, rendering an ultrahigh information entropy of 2.32 bits/pixel. The position-dependent optical responses originate from the position-dependent radiation field and Purcell effect. Our evaluation highlights their potential in IoT security through advanced metrics like bit uniformity, similarity, intra- and inter-Hamming distance, false-acceptance and rejection rates, and encoding capacity. We finally demonstrate the implementation of efficient lightweight mutual authentication protocols for IoT applications by using the all-Si multidimensionally-encoded optical PUFs.

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.

A practical and UC-secure decentralized key management and authentication scheme based on blockchain for VNDN

In Vehicular Named Data Networking (VNDN), most of the existing key management mechanisms still rely on the hierarchical key trust model or the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), in which the centralized certificate authority is used as a Trusted Third Party (TTP) to provide a signature for the user?s public key. Thus, the TTP becomes vulnerable to attacks and maybe there exists a singlepoint failure problem. In addition, the in-network caching in the VNDN may incur a threat to the system and make it is vulnerable to the DoS attack caused by Interest flooding aimed at the Content-Store. To tackle these security issues, we firstly propose an efficient decentralized key management solution based on blockchain for VNDN. Secondly, based on the proposed key management scheme, a lightweight mutual authentication scheme and a key agreement protocol for V2X are respectively proposed in this paper. Finally, we analyze the security attributes of our solutions in the Universally Composable (UC) framework. Our analysis results show that our novel schemes can meet the security requirements of our solutions. In addition, our experimental results show our new schemes have highly efficient, lower computation and communication costs than other related schemes.

Physical-Unclonable-Function-Based Lightweight Three-Factor Authentication for Multiserver Architectures

To support more complex and robust online services, enterprise-class applications prefer to interconnect multiple servers as the pedestal to enhance the system’s interoperability. However, the multiserver architecture always struggles to reconcile the trade-off between convenience and security, leaving users exposed to a variety of network attack threats. Existing security authentication schemes based on the Chebyshev Chaotic Map for multiserver architectures cannot provide three-factor (including password, biometric feature, and smart card) security. Therefore, we propose a novel Physical-Unclonable-Function-based Lightweight Three-Factor Authentication (PUF-LTA) scheme, which can achieve three-factor security. The PUF-LTA scheme mainly includes two components: (1) PUF-assisted registration and (2) lightweight mutual authentication with one-time interaction. During the PUF-assisted registration process, to defend against side-channel attacks on smart cards, the login credentials of users are XORed with the unique identifier generated by the PUF so that the adversary cannot obtain these secret login credentials. During the lightweight mutual authentication process, we combine the Chebyshev polynomial map and symmetric encryption/decryption to negotiate the session key between users and servers, which only needs one interaction. The security performance of PUF-LTA is theoretically proved by leveraging the random oracle model. In contrast with relevant multiserver authentication schemes, PUF-LTA is more efficient and suitable for resource-constrained multiserver environments because it can ensure secure three-factor authentication and support flexible biometrics and password updates with less computation cost.

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

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.

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.

T2S-MAKEP and T2T-MAKEP: A PUF-based Mutual Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol for IoT devices

Nowadays, more constrained devices are becoming connected, building an extensive Internet of Things (IoT) network, but suffering from many security issues. In particular, authentication has become a severe research challenge for IoT systems. Furthermore, confidentiality, integrity, and availability are considered the core underpinnings of information security in general. Unfortunately, deploying conventional authentication protocols for IoT devices in practice is challenging for two main reasons. First, IoT devices have limited memory capacity, processing power, and energy resources. Second, these protocols store secret keys in the IoT devices’ volatile memory, making them vulnerable to physical attacks. Luckily, Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) has emerged as promising low-cost security primitive. A PUF eliminates the need to store secret keys in device memory, making it a potential alternative to deploying more secure and low-cost authentication protocol schemes for IoT systems. Thing-to-Thing (T2T) or direct connection between IoT devices represents a promising technique to enable things to communicate directly without the need for a trusted third party. This paper proposes two novel lightweight Mutual Authentication and Key Exchange Protocols (MAKEP) for IoT devices using PUF. The first scheme, called T2S-MAKEP, ensures secure communication for Thing-to-Server (T2S). The second, called T2T-MAKEP, allows two endpoints of resource-constrained IoT devices, each with an embedded PUF circuit, to communicate securely. Both proposed protocols, T2T-MAKEP and T2S-MAKEP, allow for robust authentication without storing any information on the device’s memory and simultaneously establish the session key exchange. Our proposed protocols have been verified and validated using the automatic security analysis checker, Verifpal.

SLMAS: A Secure and Light Weight Mutual Authentication Scheme for the Smart Wheelchair

The modern innovation called the Internet of Things (IoT) empowers individuals to connect to anybody and anything at any point, wherever. The application of the IoT in smart cities concerning smart healthcare management can improve patient welfare, user acceptance, the standard of living, and accurate illness monitoring. Powered wheelchairs (PW) with sensors, computers, and other connected assistive technologies are called smart wheelchairs. Smart wheelchairs with sensing abilities are intended to offer universal connectivity using cloud and edge computing technology. Numerous outstanding people were impacted by paralyzing phenomena, including Stephen Hawking and Max Brito. The issue of legitimacy is one of the most important difficulties in e-health applications, because of how sensitive the technology is, and this needs to be appropriately handled. To safeguard the data transport, usage, and interchange between sensor nodes/smart wheelchairs and servers, e-health applications require an authentication method. As all conversations use wireless channels, e-health apps are exposed to various vulnerabilities. Additionally, the IoT has limited computational and power capacity limitations. To combat the various security risks, the present research offers a user authentication technique that is efficient and ensures anonymity. The suggested method creates a safe connection for the authorized entity and forbids unauthorized entities from accessing the Internet of Things sensor nodes. The suggested approach has lower communication and computation overheads than the traditional techniques, making it more effective. In addition, the security verification of the presented protocol is scrutinized through AVISPA. The proposed scheme, on average, requires only 12.4% more computation cost to execute. Compared to the existing approaches, the suggested protocol’s extra computational cost can be compensated for by its enhanced security, while the suggested method’s communication cost is 46.3% smaller.

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

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

Secure authentication protocol for home area network in smart grid-based smart cities

The Internet of Things (IoT) allows better solutions for managing challenges such as reliability and power quality in a smart grid environment. It also assists in adopting smart grid measures in smart city development. A smart meter in the smart grid environment must securely access services from a service provider via public channels. An adversary can pose several security vulnerabilities as the communication occurs through a public channel. Various researchers recently conducted several research types to determine the most challenging problems with the smart grid. The security features like integrity, authentication, and confidentiality are indispensable requirements of the smart grid environment. On the other hand, different objects like smart meters in the smart grid environment are resource-constrained, posing in designing lightweight security protocols. Hence, we propose a lightweight mutual authentication scheme to offer surveillance to smart meters in smart grid infrastructure. We analyze the suggested protocol against well-known security threats. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the protocol to illustrate its efficiency.

A secure lightweight mutual authentication scheme in Social Industrial IoT environment

A secure lightweight mutual authentication scheme in Social Industrial IoT environment

PACM: Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme With on-Chain Certificate Management for VANETs

Privacy-preserving authentication is designed to protect vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) from illegitimate users and fake messages while maintaining the privacy of legitimate users’ identities. However, existing authentication schemes have disadvantages such as non-transparent certificate issuance and revocation, high identity authentication and certificate revocation overhead. In this paper, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving authentication scheme with on-chain certificate management (PACM) in VANETs, where the service manager (SM) of each domain serves as a node of the blockchain to build a distributed system. Specifically, based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and exclusive-OR operations, we achieve secure and lightweight mutual authentication between vehicles and roadside units (RSUs) by regularly updated pseudonyms. Then, we adopt the blockchain to record the issuance and revocation of all certificates, which makes SM’s activities transparent. Moreover, we introduce the counting garbled bloom filter (CGBF) to enable fast query and revocation of certificates. Besides, we design a non-forgeable and non-repudiable billing mechanism based on the hash chain technology. Security analysis and experimental results show that PACM achieves stronger security with less overhead.

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

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

Provably Secure PUF-Based Lightweight Mutual Authentication Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are used in modern medical service environments for the convenience of patients and medical professionals. Owing to the recent COVID-19 pandemic and an aging society, WBANs are attracting attention. In a WBAN environment, the patient has a sensor node attached to him/her that collects patient status information, such as blood pressure, blood glucose, and pulse; this information is simultaneously transmitted to his/her respective medical professional through a gateway. The medical professional receives and checks the patient’s status information and provides a diagnosis. However, sensitive information, including the patient’s personal and status data, are transmitted via a public channel, causing security concerns. If an adversary intercepts this information, it could threaten the patient’s well-being. Therefore, a secure authentication scheme is essential for WBAN environments. Recently, Chen et al. proposed a two-factor authentication scheme for WBANs. However, we found out Chen et al.’s scheme is vulnerable to a privileged insider, physical cloning, verification leakage, impersonation, and session key disclosure attacks. We also propose a secure physical-unclonable-function (PUF)-based lightweight mutual authentication scheme for WBANs. Through informal security analysis, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme using biometrics and the PUF is safe against various security attacks. In addition, we verify the security features of our scheme through formal security analyses using Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, the real-or-random (RoR) model, and the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA). Furthermore, we evaluate the security features, communication costs, and computational costs of our proposed scheme and compare them with those of other related schemes. Consequently, our scheme is more suitable for WBAN environments than the other related schemes.

Lightweight Mutual Authentication for Healthcare IoT

“Smart medical” applications refer to the fusion of technology and medicine that connects all linked sensor equipment with the patients, including those that measure physiological signals, such as blood pressure, pulse, and ECG. In addition, these physiological signal data are highly private and should be safely protected. It takes much longer to complete authentication processes in the traditional way, either based on public key infrastructure or attribute-based encryption, which is a burden for IoT devices. Hence, on the basis of attribute-based encryption, we propose lightweight authentication to shorten the time spent on authentication. Moreover, we use the patients’ data and timestamps as seeds to generate random numbers for authentication. The experiments show that the lightweight authentication using Xeon E3-1230 computer is about 4.45 times faster than complete authentication and 5.8 times faster than complete authentication when using Raspberry Pi. Our proposal significantly improves the disadvantages of IoT devices that lack computing power.

Reliable PUF-based mutual authentication protocol for UAVs towards multi-domain environment

With the widespread application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the discussion about the various security and privacy issues of UAVs have never stopped. Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is inherently unclonable and tamper-proof, many authentication and key agreement protocols based on PUF for UAVs have been proposed in the past. But they can only be suitable for mutual authentication between a single ground station and multiple UAVs. Not only does this centralized authentication method have a single point of failure, but also cannot adapt to the increasing demand for UAV authentication in multi-domain settings. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight mutual authentication scheme based on PUF which is resistant to well-known attacks such as node tampering attacks, and cloning attacks, etc. Furthermore, we realized cross-domain authentication for UAVs, ensuring secure and efficient communication for UAVs in different domains. We have demonstrated the correctness of our scheme in detail, and carried out experimental analysis. The results show that our scheme is sufficiently secure and effective, and is suitable for UAVs in a multi-domain environment.

A lightweight mutual and transitive authentication mechanism for IoT network

IoT devices are typically authenticated directly by gateways present in the network. However, in large and complex IoT systems like the smart city or smart industry which consist of thousands of connected devices, it may not be always feasible to be directly connected to the gateway while it may be possible to be connected to another device. Therefore, already authenticated devices should facilitate the new device to get authenticated by the gateway. To address this issue, the existing protocols use multiple authentication protocols based on different cryptography techniques, which are difficult to implement and manage in resource constrained IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a Transitive device authentication protocol based on the Chebyshev polynomial. The transitive authentication protocol utilizes the session key established in the mutual authentication between the intermediate device and gateway. Both the mutual authentication and transitive authentication protocols are relying on the same preregistration and authentication mechanism. To ensure the security of the proposed authentication protocol, detailed security analysis is carried out, and the secure session key establishment is verified using the BAN logic. Moreover, the proposed protocol is tested against crucial attacks in the Scyther tool. These formal analyses and Scyther attack simulation show that the proposed protocol is capable of withstanding critical attacks. Finally, to verify the efficiency, the protocol implementation is experimentally compared with similar approaches studied in the literature. The results show that the proposed protocol offers better performance, providing significantly lower response time, handshake duration, memory utilization, and energy consumption.

Performance analysis of 5GMAKA: lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for 5G network

Performance analysis of 5GMAKA: lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for 5G network

Lightweight Mutual Authentication Scheme Enabled by Stateless Blockchain for UAV Networks

The UAV network composed of resource-constrained lightweight UAV swarms can efficiently accomplish mission with time critical requirements in dynamic and complex environments. However, the trusted authentication of network nodes poses a huge challenge due to its own resource constraints, the lack of trusted centralized support, frequent joining or departure of UAVs to or from the network, and the presence of cyber-attacks. In this paper, we propose a stateless blockchain based on triple aggregatable subvector commitment and present a dynamic proof of trust authorization consensus mechanism with a periodic random selection of authorized nodes to guarantee the trustworthiness of mutual authentication of UAV nodes. Our proposed triple vector authentication solution solves several of the challenges mentioned above very well. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our blockchain-based authentication scheme enjoins significant advantages over the four schemes currently available for UAV network authentication in terms of single authentication latency, speed of energy consumption, average computational cost, and end-to-end latency.