Lightweight Secure Authentication Research Articles

Lightweight Secure Authentication Scheme to thwart Unauthorized Edge Datacenters in Fog Computing

Lightweight Secure Authentication Scheme to thwart Unauthorized Edge Datacenters in Fog Computing

Lightweight secure authentication protocol for automatic dependent surveillance broadcast system

Lightweight secure authentication protocol for automatic dependent surveillance broadcast system

Improved RSA dynamic cryptographic accumulator-based anonymous batch authentication scheme for Internet of Vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) provides various services to vehicles through information sharing to ensure road safety and improve traffic efficiency. However, malicious attackers can challenge the privacy and security systems of the IoV by conducting security attacks. Currently, many schemes use bilinear pairing or elliptic curves to construct authentication systems, ensuring anonymity of vehicle identities and message security. However, these schemes suffer drawbacks such as low computational efficiency and high communication overhead in highly dynamic IoV. Therefore, we propose a new efficient certificateless message authentication scheme. The proposed scheme constructs a lightweight security authentication protocol by improving the RSA dynamic accumulator and combining it with non-interactive discrete logarithm zero-knowledge proofs. In addition, our scheme eliminates the need for bilinear pairing operations, thereby reducing computational overhead. Simultaneously, it enables real-time tracking and revocation of malicious vehicle identities. Security analysis shows that our scheme can be reduced to a secure S-RSA assumption under the random oracle model, meeting various security requirements of the IoV. Performance analysis shows that our scheme diminishes not only the computational overhead but also the communication overhead.

Lightweight secure authentication and key agreement technique for smart grid

Lightweight secure authentication and key agreement technique for smart grid

A Novel Authentication Protocol for IoT-Enabled Devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) is composed of a large number of miniaturized devices interconnected through the Internet. These devices, equipped with sensing, computing, and communication capabilities, can be used to remotely control the environment or the monitored infrastructure. However, IoT devices usually only have limited resources, and thus designing a lightweight security authentication protocol for them is a challenge. This article proposes an identity authentication protocol between embedded devices and server. The protocol uses the elliptic curve encryption algorithm and realizes the anonymity of the device by hashing their IDs and prevents the server from replay attacks by adding security attributes timestamp. We prove the security of the protocol and its resistance to security attacks and also formally verify it using the AVISPA tool. In addition, through experimental comparison with existing protocols, we demonstrate the performance superiority of the proposed protocol.

A lightweight secure authentication approach based on stream ciphering for RFID-based Internet of Things

In this paper, a new lightweight RFID-based authentication approach is proposed that uses stream ciphering techniques to preserve privacy between legitimate components. The proposed approach uses various key-stream generators such as And2LFSR, Geffe, and majority-based to eliminate the inherent linearity of LFSRs and construct a non-linear Pseudo-Random Number Generators (PRNG). The informal security analysis indicates that the proposed approach provides forward security and resists eavesdropping, tag tracking, replay, cloning, and DoS attacks. Moreover, simulations conducted through Cooja tool illustrate the effect of generator polynomial degree and proposed combinational generators on BER. The BER of communications has been evaluated in different quantities of (Eb/N0), ranged between 1 and 10, using the proposed generators along with different error control techniques. In addition, evaluations indicate that the proposed approach outperforms in terms of computational cost, storage spaces, and communication cost. Furthermore, statistical analysis proves resistance of the proposed approach to guessing attacks.

Security of an RFID Based Authentication Protocol with Bitwise Operations for Supply Chain

Due to the stringent computational capabilities of low-cost RFID tags, several lightweight secure authentication protocols have been proposed for an RFID-based supply chain using bitwise operations. In this paper, we study the vulnerabilities associated with bitwise operations by doing cryptanalysis of a secure lightweight authentication protocol for RFID tags. The bitwise operations like rotation and XOR show that the protocol is vulnerable to tag, reader, and supply chain node impersonation attacks. We find that the major cause of the vulnerability is bitwise operations and suggest using the physically unclonable functions rather than bitwise operations to secure such lightweight protocols. We provide formal analysis using AVISPA tool and show that protocol is vulnerable to various attacks.

A distributed identity‐based authentication scheme for internet of things devices using permissioned blockchain system

AbstractThe Internet of Things (IoT) has become a significant technology on the internet with its widespread adoption in almost every place we could think of, like homes, hospitals, industries, companies, and so on. This adoption in virtually every device had made them smart, thereby reducing the human intervention to handle them. These devices become smart by gathering the sensed information and communicating with other devices or servers to take the appropriate decisions based on acquired data. However, these devices are deployed in batches with default usernames and passwords, making them vulnerable to attacks as seen in recent pasts like the Mirai botnet attack. Most of the attacks could have been avoided if these devices were equipped with a decent lightweight secure authentication scheme. One of the most common authentication procedures is using traditional public key infrastructure (PKI), which suffers from a single point of failure. Moreover, the complex procedures of PKI make them unfit for low‐powered IoT devices. Identity‐based cryptography (IBC), a lightweight cryptosystem, could be a good fit for these devices. But, even IBC suffers from a single point of failure and key escrow problem because of the private key generator (PKG). Blockchain has proved its mettle in eliminating a single point of failure with its robust distributed ledger technology. This article presents a novel authentication scheme for IoT devices based on identity‐based cryptography using a blockchain network. Blockchain is used as a distributed PKG, eliminating a single point of failure and key escrow problem of PKGs. Further, the proposed work is implemented in Hyperledger Fabric, which is an open‐source blockchain platform that efficiently performs the addition, updating, and deletions operation for effective authentication and communication of IoT devices.

Lightweight Payload Encryption-Based Authentication Scheme for Advanced Metering Infrastructure Sensor Networks.

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects billions of sensors to share and collect data at any time and place. The Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is one of the most important IoT applications. IoT supports AMI to collect data from smart sensors, analyse and measure abnormalities in the energy consumption pattern of sensors. However, two-way communication in distributed sensors is sensitive and tends towards security and privacy issues. Before deploying distributed sensors, data confidentiality and privacy and message authentication for sensor devices and control messages are the major security requirements. Several authentications and encryption protocols have been developed to provide confidentiality and integrity. However, many sensors in distributed systems, resource constraint smart sensors, and adaptability of IoT communication protocols in sensors necessitate designing an efficient and lightweight security authentication scheme. This paper proposes a Payload Encryption-based Optimisation Scheme for lightweight authentication (PEOS) on distributed sensors. The PEOS integrates and optimises important features of Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) in Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) architecture instead of implementing the DTLS in a separate channel. The proposed work designs a payload encryption scheme and an Optimised Advanced Encryption Standard (OP-AES). The PEOS modifies the DTLS handshaking and retransmission processes in PEOS using payload encryption and NACK messages, respectively. It also removes the duplicate features of the protocol version and sequence number without impacting the performance of CoAP. Moreover, the PEOS attempts to improve the CoAP over distributed sensors in the aspect of optimised AES operations, such as parallel execution of S-boxes in SubBytes and delayed Mixcolumns. The efficiency of PEOS authentication is evaluated on Conitki OS using the Cooja simulator for lightweight security and authentication. The proposed scheme attains better throughput while minimising the message size overhead by 9% and 23% than the existing payload-based mutual authentication PbMA and basic DTLS/CoAP scheme in random network topologies with less than 50 nodes.

Anonymous and lightweight secure authentication protocol for mobile Agent system

Recently mobile agent technology used in intelligent systems, cloud computing and IOT. However using mobile agents in distributed environment makes them facing several security threats. In this paper, we propose a lightweight authentication protocol to overcome the security problem, and to provide a secure and anonymous mobile agent system. Our protocol is based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and fulfill all security requirements. For the validation of our security protocol, we used Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool using HLPSL language. Furthermore, we used Java Agent Development Framework (JADE) to implement and simulate the proposed scheme. Finally, the paper presents the security analysis and comparison with well-known and significant related protocols in secure communication.

Lightweight Secure Authentication and Key Distribution Scheme for Vehicular Cloud Computing

A vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is the basic block in building an intelligent transportation system that improves the traffic flow and makes needed information conveniently accessible. VANET depends on a dense exchange of sensed data between vehicles and Road Side Units (RSUs). A large amount of sensed data requires a huge computation and storage capabilities, which is provided by the vehicular cloud computing (VCC). However, the security problems of data confidentiality, access control, vehicles’ authentication, and conductors’ privacy in VCC are issues that need to be solved. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to ensure VCC security and privacy. We use Pseudo-ID instead of vehicles’ real ID to provide conductors’ privacy, Identifier-Based Signature mechanism is used to guarantee vehicles’ authentication, and Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) algorithm is used for key distribution. Our liGhtweight secURe AutheNticaTion and keY distribution scheme for vehicular cloud computing (GUARANTY) ensures a secure keys distribution to minimize the encryption and decryption computation cost. Vehicles use a symmetrical cryptography in their communication. We analyze the security of our algorithm using AVISPA tool. We use this tool to simulate insiders and outsiders attacks. We evaluate our algorithm’s performance in terms of computation delay and reception rate.

A lightweight SM2-based security authentication scheme for smart grids

With the increasing openness of smart grids, a large quantity of power terminals will be widely applied in systems of smart grids by various access modes (wired, wireless, satellite). In order to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the data and the security of the communications between power terminals and the smart grid intranet, a lightweight security authentication and key agreement scheme is proposed in this article. The scheme provides mutual authentication based on the SM2 algorithm and key agreement which can prevent various attacks. Furthermore experimental evaluation and comparative analysis is conducted to indicate that the proposed scheme can resist many types of attacks with lower amounts of total computational resources and lower communications bandwidth. The analysis shows that the proposed scheme is suitable for smart grid.

An efficient lightweight authentication scheme for human‐centered industrial Internet of Things

SummaryInternet of Things (IoT) specifies a transparent and coherent integration of assorted and composite nodes. Unification of these nodes with large resources and servers has brought advancement in technology for industrial and government services. The industrial IoT (IIoT), with smart nodes, enhance the development and manufacturing of industrial process, which is on demand now. However, the security concern is substantial, and it is required to control to perform prosperous assimilation of IIoT. Authentication of these smart nodes and establishing mutual trust among them is essential to keep vulnerabilities and potential risks out. Hence, this paper presents an efficient lightweight secure authentication protocol from the perspective of human‐centered IIoT. This proposed scheme assumes a registration center which simply generates public and secret information for a node when it initially joins the network. Once registration is done, the registration center is not needed anymore, and advanced processes like mutual authentication, secure key exchange, and communications are independently done by nodes involved. Furthermore, we show that this scheme can reduce exponential computations and computational overhead and resolves various possible attacks.

Provably privacy analysis and improvements of the lightweight RFID authentication protocols

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems authenticate products as well as people without any physical contact. Using RFID systems is an inevitable part of recent identifying and shopping affairs. However, RFID systems have huge hardware limitations in tags side because of their need to be as cheap as possible and in access for vast number of products. Moreover, The identity of the tag owners has to be anonymous and secure from the attackers actions. These critical necessities have made researchers to concentrate on designing lightweight secure authentication protocols. In this paper, four new designed lightweight RFID authentication protocols are analyzed. Security and privacy of each protocol is analyzed, and the weaknesses are proved, discussed and modified. We demonstrate that none of them provide even weak privacy level. Each protocol is improved through a solution to overcome the weaknesses and provide at least the weak privacy. All of the privacy and security analysis are done in the Vaudenay model. Also, we propose a new lightweight protocol which uses the pros of the considered protocols and provides weak privacy level. Moreover, some comprehensive methods are proposed to provide weak privacy in the lightweight authentication protocols.

A Lightweight Mutual Authentication Scheme for Power Edge Computing System

Because of heavy cost, using of the traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) authentication schemes is limited for the energy-constrained intelligent devices such as the power edge computing system, in which lightweight secure authentication schemes are urgent needed. In this paper, we propose a lightweight mutual authentication scheme supported by the edge computing, which is a novel cross-layer secure authentication program with asymmetric resources. The novel scheme combines lightweight symmetric cipher and physical-layer Channel State Information (CSI) to provide two-way authentication between terminals and edge devices. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the access authentication latency compared with the traditional PKI authentication scheme.

Composable Secure Roaming Authentication Protocol for Cloud-assisted Body Sensor Networks

The cloud-assisted Body Sensor Networks (BSN) often has an architecture of Multi-hop Wireless Networks (MWN) model, in which both the body sensors and the users must be secure to protect the whole infrastructure. Unfortunately, both the information providers and the users are movable and resource-constrained in communication and computation. Thus some new security problems are proposed, such as the light weight-secure authentication caused by limited resource, re-authentication in foreign zone caused by mobility, and composablilty security caused by heterogeneity between the transmission subnet, many BSN subnets. We propose a Random Roaming Authentication Protocol (RanRAP) for BSNs with these cloud-assisted infrastructure. We test the composable security at an AP/cluster head/gateway node by using strand spaces theory, and analyze the performance of RanRAP protocol in both the theoretical analysis and experiment simulations. It was shown that RanRAP has some advantages of composable security, computation and communication overheads over some related protocols.

Lightweight security authentication protocol for radio frequency identification

With regard to the security vulnerabilities of the existing Radio Frequency Identification(RFID) authentication protocols,a new lightweight security protocol for RFID was proposed.The formal proof of the correctness of the proposed authentication protocol was given based on GNY logic.The proposed scheme adopted the method of reader dual-authentication and key refreshing during reader pre-authentication phase,which achieved the anti-desynchronization requirement by adding flag Tm of malicious attacks into the tag.The protocol solved the security and privacy problems of poor scalability,location tracking due to failure of renewing the key of tag,and Denial of Service(DoS) resulting from illegal updating inner keys of tag/server in the existed schemes.It efficiently resisted several possible attacks including replay,tag/reader impersonation,traffic analysis,location tracking and desynchronization.The analytical results show that the proposed protocol is of low-cost,good security and limited computational complexity,which fits for RFID system when the tags number is large.

A Dynamic Secure Access Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks Using Usage Control and Agent Technology

Secure access is one of the key concerns of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In WSNs, because there are many dynamically mutable attributes, continuous access decisions and dynamic attribute updates should be important properties of access control. In addition, WSNs need low-complexity authentication protocols because of the constrained resources. However, the authentication protocols of most current security access schemes have relatively high complexity. More importantly, the access control models of existing schemes cannot provide attribute mutability and continuous decisions dynamically. To address above issues, we propose a dynamic secure access mechanism for WSNs. Firstly, we design a lightweight secure authentication protocol and dynamic access control based on security token and usage control (UCON), respectively. Then, the agent technology is adopted to implement the proposed secure access scheme. Secondly, we analyze the probability of the dynamic attribute update and decisions. Thirdly, we implement an instance of UCON. The implementation results indicate the feasibility of using UCON in WSNs. Finally, by evaluating and comparing with current schemes, the authentication protocol in our scheme presents several advantages including the low expenses in calculation, storage and communication. To our best knowledge, this paper is the first to realize next generation dynamic access control with attribute mutability and continuous decisions in WSNs.