Login Phase Research Articles

Driving a key generation strategy with training-based optimization to provide safe and effective authentication using data sharing approach in IoT healthcare

Blockchain technology offers a solution to the interoperability issues that currently plague health information systems (BT). Additionally, blockchain technology provides the cutting-edge standard that ensures the safe exchange of computerized health data among healthcare providers, institutions, people, and medical specialists. Recently, both businesses and academics recognized the Internet of Things (IoT) as one of the top study fields. Nevertheless, a significant issue in IoT healthcare across several product domains is the secrecy of patient health data transmission. For secure and effective authentication with data sharing strategy in IoT healthcare, a method called Driving Training Based Optimization (DTBO) Key generation is presented to address these issues. The entities involved in the proposed DTBO_Key generation technique are the user, owner, authenticating minor, blockchain, and IoT server. The suggested technique consists of seven stages: initialization, registration phase, key creation, login phase, data protection, authentication process, and verification phase. A minimum memory consumption of 2.983 MB, a computation cost of 28.008%, and an accuracy of 0.9 were attained using the proposed method.

A Three-Factor-Based Authentication Scheme of 5G Wireless Sensor Networks for IoT System

Internet of Things (IoT) is an expanding technology that facilitate physical devices to inter-connect each other over a public channel. Moreover, the security of the next-generation wireless mobile communication technology, namely 5G with IoT, has been a field of much interest among researchers in the last several years. Previously, Sharif et al. had suggested an IoTbased lightweight three-party authentication scheme proclaiming a secured scheme against different threats. However, it was found that the scheme could not achieve user anonymity and guarantee session key security. Additionally, the scheme fails to provide proper authentication in the login phase, and it s unable to update a new password in the password change phase. Thus, we propose an improved three-factor-based data transmission authentication scheme (TDTAS) to address the weaknesses. The formal security analysis has been proved using the Real-or-Random (RoR) model. The informal security analysis demonstrates that the scheme is secure against several known attacks and achieves more security features. In addition, the comparison of the work with other related schemes demonstrates the proposed scheme has less communicational and storage costs.

A secure and efficient authentication and multimedia data sharing approach in IoT-healthcare

ABSTRACT Currently, healthcare services are encountering challenges, particularly in developing countries wherein remote areas encounter a lack of highly developed hospitals and doctors. IoT devices produce enormous security-sensitive data; therefore, device security is considered an important concept. The main aim of this work is to formulate a secure key generation process in the data-sharing approach by exploiting the Rider Horse Herd Optimization Algorithm (RHHO). Here, eight phases, like the initialization phase, registration phase, key generation phase, login phase, data protection phase, authentication phase, verification phase, and data decryption phase are exploited for secure and efficient authentication and multimedia data sharing. The proposed RHHO model is the integration of the Rider Optimization Algorithm (ROA) and Horse herd Optimization Algorithm (HOA). The proposed RHHO model achieved enhanced performance with a computation cost of 0.235, an accuracy of 0.935and memory usage of 2.425 MB.

Secure communication using multilevel authentication strategy in Internet of Drones

SummaryThe Internet of Drones (IoD) is a layered network or platform that controls and coordinates the drones. The unmanned aerial vehicles also called as drones are objects that utilized in Internet of Things (IoT) smart devices. The security is the major problem in the architecture for IoD. Hence, a multilevel authentication method is devised in this article to enable secure communication in IoD. The analysis of security is depending on four stages, such as pre‐deployment, user registration, login phase, and authentication phase. The drones are registered in the IoD infrastructure in the pre‐deployment phase. Then, the users registration with the drone is done in user registration phase, which is executed to register the users with the drone for accessing the information in real‐time via the user. Then, the user communicates with the server is done in the login phase, and at last, the authentication of drones, servers, and the users are done in authentication phase to offer secured communication. The devised approach attains the maximum performance with a delay, throughput, and packet loss of 0.099 s, 62.855 bps, and 2.52012 s, respectively.

A Hybrid Graphical Password Technique for Mobile Data Security Based on Direction

Mobile Security has exponentially increased data sensitivitydue to the users upsurge in mobile devices. People are utilizing smartphones as the substitute for desktop or laptop systems, from which they access, download, upload, modify, create, and share their files. Every data has become crucial as and when exposed to other platforms via smartphone. Therefore, all smartphones require security from malicious users. Forthcoming mobile devices will have hybrid graphical passwords as prospects for customer authentication. Users can easily interact with their devices through mixed authentication techniques on mobiles by safely entering the graphical passwords. This paper focuses on Character Set and Direction (CSD) technique developed on the android application for mobiles, which takes a character set and a unique direction as a graphical password for its input method. The significant advantage of the proposed technique is that; it is user-friendly, lightweight, has an extraordinary input/output modality, and has a custom-built mobile application prototype for the Registration and Login Phase. Developed a mobile application for Character set and Direction with four standard directions to construct a unique password scheme and investigate its security, memorability, and graphical user interface. The results are highly encouraging as this technique can be a highly secured authentication technique and high user memorability, and increased usability.

Lightweight Key Management Scheme Using Fuzzy Extractor for Wireless Mobile Sensor Network

The mature design of wireless mobile sensor network makes it to be used in vast verities of applications including from home used to the security surveillance. All such types of applications based on wireless mobile sensor network are generally using real time data, most of them are interested in real time communication directly from cluster head of cluster instead of a base station in cluster network. This would be possible if an external user allows to directly access real time data from the cluster head in cluster wireless mobile sensor network instead of accessing data from base station. But this leads to a serious security breach and degrades the performance of any security protocol available in this domain. Most existing schemes for authentication and cluster key management for external users, exchange a number of messages between cluster head and base station to allow external to access real time data from the base station instead of cluster head. This increase communication cost and delay in such real time access information. To handle this critical issue in cluster wireless mobile sensor network, we propose a lightweight authentication and key management scheme using a fuzzy extractor. In this scheme, any external user can access data directly from the cluster head of any cluster without the involvement of the base station. The proposed scheme only uses the one-way hash functions and bitwise XOR operations, apart from the fuzzy extractor method for the user biometric verification at the login phase. The presented scheme supports scalability for an increasing number of nodes using polynomials. The proposed scheme increases the life-time of the network by decreasing the key pool size.

AN EFFICIENT AND SECURED GRAPHICAL AUTHENTICATION SYSTEM

Authentication through the use of passwords usually allow users to access resources in a computer or automated installations. However, remembering such passwords is often a problem for most users due to complex nature of most stong password. As a viable alternative, graphical passwords were introduced to complement the security problems in this method of authentication. Therefore, this papr proposes the concept of a graphical password authentication system using hybrid approach. This approach that allows users to identity a number of images during the registration process and then requested to draw a pattern on each image in a pre-defined order to complete the system approach. This process is represented via a three-stage scheme which consists of the Registration phase, the Login phase and the Authentication phase (RLA). The evaluation was carried out using the comparative study that involves generation of secure graphical password. This methodology is often refered to as Educating Users to Generate Secure Graphical Password Secrets (EUSGPAS). The evaluation involved 200 purposively selected participants who were made to use the new system over six weeks. Experimental results of ESGAS and EUSGPAS indicated a mean success rate of 100%, 97%, 100% and 99%, 96%, 98.9% with a mean completion time of 29.71s and 30.89s respectively. These results indicated the merits of the proposed method over the EUSGPAS approach.

Cryptanalysis and design flaws of anonymous ECC based self-certified key distribution scheme for smart grid

The smart grid (SG) is seen as a possible solution to the energy crises and carbon emissions. The power consumption data is collected through SG communication in order to optimize energy usage. Security problems in smart grid communications on the other hand continue to be virtual concerns. Various key agreement and authentication systems have recently been proposed in the context of SG communication in order to protect the users privacy and provide secure communication. Mood and Nikooghadam published a paper entitled Anonymous ECC-Based Self-Certified Key Distribution Scheme for Smart Grid in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics [https://doi.org/10.1109/TIE.2018.2807383]. In this proposed work, we analyze Mood and Nikooghadam protocol and found security flaws such as the inability to protect anonymity, fails user traceability, DoS attack, insider attack, no updating the identity and keys and no login phase. Thus, Mood and Nikooghadam protocol is not convenient for smart grid communication. Further, we provide suggested improvement for Mood and Nikooghadam framework.

Corrections to “A Mutual Authentication Scheme for Secure Fog Computing Service Handover in Vehicular Network Environment”

In the above article [1] , there is an inconsistency in defining the equation $HV$ in the login phase and mutual authentication phase as shown in Figs. 3 and 5, respectively. In the Cloud Server $CS$ of Fig. 3, $HV$ is equal to $h\left(RV_{i} \oplus CID_{i} \| HS\right)$ in which $RV_{i} \oplus CID_{i}$ is equal to $h\left(VID_{i}\right)$ as described in Fig. 2 and $HS=h\left(S_{i, t}^{\prime}\right)$ as shown in the previous line of equation $HV=h\left(RV_{i} \oplus CID_{i} \| HS\right)$ . Then, in the User $U_{i}$ of Fig. 3, $V K_{x}=h\left(VID_{i}^{*} \| h\left(S_{i, t}^{\prime}\right)\right) \oplus K_{x}^{\prime}$ in which the value of $V K_{x}$ is equal to $HV \oplus K_{x}$ as derived in the Vehicle $V_{i}$ of Fig. 5. However, the $HV$ in the previous $V K_{x}$ of Fig. 3 is wrong, as the consequence, it should be $V K_{x}=h\left(h\left(VID_{i}^{*}\right) \| h\left(S_{i, t}^{\prime}\right)\right) \oplus K_{x}^{\prime}$ in order to make it consistent with the previous definition of $HV$ in the Cloud Server $CS$ of Fig. 3. Therefore, the $HV^{\prime}= h\left(VID_{i} \| HS^{\prime}\right)$ in the Vehicle $V_{i}$ of Fig. 5 should be modified into $HV^{\prime}=h\left(h\left(VID_{i}\right) \| HS^{\prime}\right)$ .

When Scents Help Me Remember My Password

Current authentication processes overwhelmingly rely on audiovisual data, comprising images, text or audio. However, the use of olfactory data (scents) has remained unexploited in the authentication process, notwithstanding their verified potential to act as cues for information recall. Accordingly, in this paper, a new authentication process is proposed in which olfactory media are used as cues in the login phase. To this end, PassSmell , a proof of concept authentication application, is developed in which words and olfactory media act as passwords and olfactory passwords, respectively. In order to evaluate the potential of PassSmell, two different versions were developed, namely one which was olfactory-enhanced and another which did not employ olfactory media. Forty-two participants were invited to take part in the experiment, evenly split into a control and experimental group. For assessment purposes, we recorded the time taken to logon as well as the number of failed/successful login attempts; we also asked users to complete a Quality of Experience (QoE) questionnaire. In terms of time taken, a significant difference was found between the experimental and the control groups, as determined by an independent sample t-test. Similar results were found with respect to average scores and the number of successful attempts. Regarding user QoE, having olfactory media with words influenced the users positively, emphasizing the potential of using this kind of authentication application in the future.

An enhanced authentication scheme for Internet of Things and cloud based on elliptic curve cryptography

SummaryAuthentication plays a fundamental role in achieving security over unreliable channels. Authentication is a technique that lets an entity verify the identity of other communicating entities. There are a plethora of authentication schemes available in recent times. A short time ago, Kumari et al. offered an authentication protocol using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for Internet of Things (IoT) and professed that their design defends various security attacks. We examined Kumari et al.'s scheme and detected some loopholes like (1) inefficient login phase, (2) inefficient authentication phase, (3) known session‐specific temporary information attack, (4) denial‐of‐service (DoS) attack, and (5) lack of password changing phase. To eradicate all these flaws, we present an enhanced authentication protocol utilizing ECC for deployment in the field of IoT using cloud servers. This protocol uses hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) cookies to authenticate clients. The developed protocol provides various security features and able to counter various security attacks. The security analysis validates that the extended scheme is potent. We simulate our protocol in Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool that evaluates the safety of the scheme in the presence of an adversary. We compare the proposed scheme with some similar schemes in respect of computation cost, estimated time, storage cost, communication cost, and security features.

An enhancement of ECC-based session initiation protocol

Session initiation protocol (SIP) is the most prominent signalling scheme for controlling, establishing, maintaining and terminating communications on the internet. Many researchers are working to create strong protocols for secure communication using SIP. Tu et al. (2014) proposed an improved authentication protocol for session initiation protocol. They show that their scheme can resist a number of security attacks. However, we find that their protocol suffers from inefficient login phase, inefficient password update phase, impersonation attack and unable to keep the user anonymity. To make all these types of attacks ineffective, we present a very efficient scheme for SIP. Security investigation of the proposed scheme shows that our scheme can make all the shortcomings of Tu et al.'s scheme as ineffective.

A Provably Secure Two-Factor Authentication Scheme for USB Storage Devices

Universal Serial Bus (USB) is widely used, for example to facilitate hot-swapping and plug-and-play. However, USB ports can be exploited by an adversary to extract private or personal data from the connected devices. Hence, a number of organizations and workplaces have prohibited their employees from using USB devices, and there have been efforts to design secure USB storage device schemes to more effectively resist different known security attacks. However, designing such schemes is challenging. For example, in this article we revisit the Wei et al.’s scheme, and demonstrate that it is vulnerable to attacks such as password guessing and user impersonation. We also explain that the scheme does not verify the correctness of user’s input in the login phase, which is another design flaw. Then, we present an improved scheme and prove it secure in the random oracle model.

Using the Spanish national identity card in social networks

Abstract The distinctive security features of the Spanish electronic national identity card, known as Documento Nacional de Identidad electrónico, allow us to propose the usage of this cryptographic smart card in an authentication framework that can be used during the registration and login phases of internet services where the validation of the user’s age and real identity are key elements, as it is the case for example of the so-called social networks. Using this mechanism with NFC-capable devices, the identity and age of the potential user can be determined, allowing or denying the access to the service based on that information.

An efficient hash-based authenticated key agreement scheme for multi-server architecture resilient to key compromise impersonation

During the past decade, rapid advances in wireless communication technologies have made it possible for users to access desired services using hand-held devices. Service providers have hosted multiple servers to ensure seamless online services to end-users. To ensure the security of this online communication, researchers have proposed several multi-server authentication schemes incorporating various cryptographic primitives. Due to the low power and computational capacities of mobile devices, the hash-based multi-server authenticated key agreement schemes with offline Registration Server (RS) are the most efficient choice. Recently, Kumar-Om presented such a scheme and proved its security against all renowned attacks. However, we find that their scheme bears an incorrect login phase, and is unsafe to the trace attack, the Session-Specific Temporary Information Attack (SSTIA), and the Key Compromise Impersonation Attack (KCIA). In fact, all of the existing multi-server authentication schemes (hash-based with offline RS) do not withstand KCIA. To deal with this situation, we propose an improved hash-based multi-server authentication scheme (with offline RS). We analyze the security of the proposed scheme under the random oracle model and use the ‘‘Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications’’ (AVISPA) tool. The comparative analysis of communication overhead and computational complexity metrics shows the efficiency of the proposed scheme.

AN ENHANCED USER AUTHENTICATION FRAMEWORK IN CLOUD COMPUTING

Recently, there are several studies have proposed user authentication frameworks to defend against different types of attacks such as phishing, replay attack, man in the middle attack and denial of service attack, etc. Most of these frameworks consist of three main phases, which are the registration phase, login phase, and authentication phase. Most of them have the changing password process as an additional activity. Many problems have been noticed in the performance of these frameworks. For example, the registration phase is valunerable to internal attack such as SYN flood attack. In this work, we aim to propose a robust user authentication framework that overcomes the previous framework shortages. The proposed framework provides many security aspects such as remote authentication, mutual authentication, session key establishment, to mention a few. Besides, to ensure the security through all phases of this framework, we add a new phase called a Service Access Authentication Phase (SAAP).This phase is resposable of the internal verification .

Cryptanalysis and Countermeasure of “An Efficient NTRU-based Authentication Protocol in IoT Environment”

A quantum computer is a paradigm of information processing that can show remarkable possibilities of exponentially improved information processing. However, this paradigm could disrupt the current cryptosystem, which is called quantum computing attacks, by calculating factoring problem and discrete logarithm problem. Recently, NTRU is applied to various security systems, because it provides security against to provide secu-rity against quantum computing attacks. Furthermore, NTRU provides similar security level and efficient computation time of encryption/decryption compared to traditional PKC. In 2018, Jeong et al. proposed an user authentication and key distribution scheme using NTRU. They claimed that their scheme provides various security properties and secure against quantum comput-ing attacks. In this paper, we demonstrate that their scheme has security pitfalls and incorrectness in login and authentication phase. We also suggest countermeasures to fix the incorrectness and provide security against various attacks.

An Enhanced Lightweight IoT-based Authentication Scheme in Cloud Computing Circumstances.

With the rapid deployment of the Internet of Things and cloud computing, it is necessary to enhance authentication protocols to reduce attacks and security vulnerabilities which affect the correct performance of applications. In 2019 a new lightweight IoT-based authentication scheme in cloud computing circumstances was proposed. According to the authors, their protocol is secure and resists very well-known attacks. However, when we evaluated the protocol we found some security vulnerabilities and drawbacks, making the scheme insecure. Therefore, we propose a new version considering login, mutual authentication and key agreement phases to enhance the security. Moreover, we include a sub-phase called evidence of connection attempt which provides proof about the participation of the user and the server. The new scheme achieves the security requirements and resists very well-known attacks, improving previous works. In addition, the performance evaluation demonstrates that the new scheme requires less communication-cost than previous authentication protocols during the registration and login phases.

Recent advances in cloud data centers toward fog data centers

In recent years, we have witnessed tremendous advances in cloud data centers (CDCs) from the point of view of the communication layer. A recent report from Cisco Systems Inc demonstrates that CDCs, which are distributed across many geographical locations, will dominate the global data center traffic flow for the foreseeable future. Their importance is highlighted by a top-line projection from this forecast that by 2019, more than four-fifths of total data center traffic will be Cloud traffic. The geographical diversity of the computing resources in CDCs provides several benefits, such as high availability, effective disaster recovery, uniform access to users in different regions, and access to different energy sources. Although Cloud technology is currently predominant, it is essential to leverage new agile software technologies, agile processes, and agile applications near to both the edge and the users; hence, the concept of Fog has been developed. Fog computing (FC) has emerged as an alternative to traditional Cloud computing to support geographically distributed latency-sensitive and QoS-aware IoT applications while reducing the burden on data centers used in traditional Cloud computing. In particular, FC with features that can support heterogeneity and real-time applications (eg, low latency, location awareness, and the capacity to process a large number of nodes with wireless access) is an attractive solution for delay- and resource-constrained large-scale applications. The distinguishing feature of the FC paradigm is that a set of Fog nodes (FNs) spreads communication and computing resources over the wireless access network to provide resource augmentation to resource-limited and energy-limited wireless (possibly mobile) devices. The joint management of Fog and Internet of Technology (IoT) paradigms can reduce the energy consumption and operating costs of state-of-the-art Fog-based data centers (FDCs). An FDC is dedicated to supervising the transmission, distribution, and communication of FC. As a vital component of the Internet of Everything (IoE) environment, an FDC is capable of filtering and processing a considerable amount of incoming data on edge devices, by making the data processing architecture distributed and thereby scalable. An FDC therefore provides a platform for filtering and analyzing the data generated by sensors utilizing the resources of FNs. Increasing interest is emerging in FDCs and CDCs that allow the delivery of various kinds of agile services and applications over telecommunication networks and the Internet, including resource provisioning, data streaming/transcoding, analysis of high-definition videos across the edge of the network, IoE application analysis, etc. Motivated by these issues, this special section solicits original research and practical contributions that advance the use of CDCs/FDCs in new technologies such as IoT, edge networks, and industries. Results obtained from simulations are validated in terms of their boundaries by experiments or analytical results. The main objectives of this special issue are to provide a discussion forum for people interested in Cloud and Fog networking and to present new models, adaptive tools, and applications specifically designed for distributed and parallel on-demand requests received from (mobile) users and Cloud applications. These papers presented in this special issue provide insights in fields related to Cloud and Fog/edge architecture, including parallel processing of Cloudlets/Foglets, the presentation of new emerging models, performance evaluation and improvements, and developments in Cloud/Fog applications. We hope that readers can benefit from the insights in these papers, and contribute to these rapidly growing areas. This special issue contains research papers addressing the state-of-the-art technologies related to Cloud and Fog networks and their computing components. The set of accepted papers is organized under the following key themes: models/architectures, performance improvements, and emulated applications. There are several developments in Cloud/Fog models that allow for adaptive and efficient resource allocation and task scheduling, securing of data and Cloud/edge networks and satisfying the network key performance indicators (KPI) such as minimizing the delay, energy, power of the network, and bandwidth usage and maximizing the throughput, feedback on request, coverage, and routing of on-demand Cloud application requests. Tajiki et al1 introduce a new traffic engineering architecture for MPLS-OpenFlow hybrid networks, and mathematically formulate two optimization problems. In the first problem, they formalize the problem of re-configuration of LSPs in MPLS networks when a central controller is used as the path computational element. In the second problem, this paper concentrates on the issue of low-level resource re-allocation of the tasks scattered across such a network, while targeting the traffic traversing from the edge node and addressing the KPI, for example, using link utilization and path length with optimal and heuristic methods. Another work describes the provision of computing services without deploying appropriate infrastructure. In this architecture, the authors solve the problem of constrained computing resources at the edge nodes,2 and present an algorithm to tackle two-dimensional spatial data query transmission between the edge nodes. They also present statistical data on moving objects, satisfying the differential privacy preserving model and guaranteeing that the count query of the moving object's position data satisfies differential privacy. They experimentally analyze the data availability and the operating efficiency of the algorithm using real datasets. Fog technology may incorporate software-defined networking (SDN) networks. FNs are connected with virtualized SDN-enabled switches, which run on servers or in data centers at the edge of the access network. The remaining non-trivial challenge in such a system is to find a way to recover from failures. This is classified as an NP problem involving real-time routing in the case of failure in the network, with limited processing and link capacity. Fortunately, the authors address this issue in another work, in which they present a new failure recovery scheme that provides service function chaining in SDN-based networks.3 They formulate the corresponding problem in the form of integer linear programming (ILP), and introduce a fast heuristic algorithm to solve the optimization problem to make the solution scalable. They then present their methodology and a solution concerning the average probability of failure in the selected paths, link utilization, and server utilization with various network topologies and shapes. The last paper in this category is an IoT architecture model that is based on the SDN paradigm applied in Cloud networking.4 The authors utilize the flexibility offered by SDNs, which can be used to allow a large number of IoT devices from various heterogeneous networks to communicate with each other reliably and securely. In their architecture, called CENSOR, new network services can be easily integrated with the underlying communication system. In terms of validation, they show the feasibility of deployment and present an analysis of security and the limitations of CENSOR with the help of a smart city use case, which also defines its benefits and challenges. We believe that this paper neatly reflects how on-the-fly architecture can be applied in real Cloud and Fog scenarios. Other categories of approaches concentrate on improving the performance of contemporary networking systems such as Cloud computing and IoT, and how these can be integrated with the new tier of data analysis in the network, such as edge and Fog applications. These groups of methods describe several cutting-edge heuristic/meta-heuristic or joint solutions for tackling open issues such as minimizing task delays and maximizing throughput and network performance. As an example, Rehman et al5 present a new scheduling algorithm based on the genetic algorithm (GA), called the multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA), to optimize the multiple objectives in cloud networking. MOGA decreases the makespan of a workflow by making scheduling decisions meet user-imposed constraints in terms of deadlines and budgets. This method addresses the conflicting interests of the Cloud stakeholders for optimization and provides a solution that not only minimizes the makespan to meet budget and deadline constraints but also provides an energy-efficient solution using dynamic voltage frequency scaling. Another critical problem that must be addressed in a Cloud network is preserving data security between the network entities. Data sharing requires mutual assurance between from-end and back-end entities. Intermediate nodes also play a crucial role in data integrity and safety. A flow control mechanism (FCM) is an efficient and widely used methodology that can be used to control the sharing of data in this type of network. In the work of Khurshid et al,6 the authors tackle this important problem and present a prototype for an FCM called CamFlow that controls the existence of data files in plaintext in an IoT device network that is connected to Cloud networks. CamFlow adds security features for data transfer to the Cloud service provider, enabling information flow control policies to regulate data flow to and from customers and within the cloud. It adds a security assurance to the connection between the device and the Cloud system (ie, the login phase) and adopts an encryption method involving hash AES that controls the ciphertext transferred between the entities in a Cloud network. The authors also use a Petri net to formally validate the novelty of their mechanism, and evaluate the request execution time on both the server and device sides of the network, in different phases of the connection. Another important issue is that the performance validation of Cloud and Fog technology provides real-time delay-tolerant secure processing of the shared information in cloud brokers. In the work of Khalid et al,7 the authors use E-Poll as a Fog-aware election commission. E-Poll offers an intelligent way to identify, which data can be processed in close-proximity Fog networks, and which should be sent to the cloud for bulk processing. The authors categorize their model and solution using various storage priorities. They emulate their model and solution at different Cloud hops (ie, nodes) and evaluate the delay for this processing between server-client connections. They also simulate their method in a Cloud system to provide efficient and reliable services to clients by adding intelligence at the level of a Fog device, and analyze the failed attempts and time taken to complete the tasks. E-Poll is used to study the fog-device connections in a simple voting system application and to explain the Fog device hit ratio and average time comparison between the Cloud client and the E-Poll system. Fog technology allows existing applications to provide fewer latency services for heterogeneous users. Hence, from a psychological point of view, it is crucial to process the new perceptions of users while applying their applications in the existence of Fog technology. To do this, Haghparast et al8 propose a new concept called Fog learning, with the aim of addressing critical thinking as a problematic issue in the academic area of the Cloud network. The distributed approach as an intrinsic characteristic of FC facilitates its usage anywhere, anytime, and realizes the vision of low-latency communications for existing mobile applications, thus fostering critical thinking. The authors validate the effectiveness of their emulated model using the software usability measurement inventory for several case studies, using a sample t-test that is adapted to determine strong and weak critical thinking skills and a one-way repeated measure ANOVA to find more detailed information. They use the Friedman and McNemar test methods to evaluate their analysis for various ISP models that are connected to an FN in the Cloud system. In another paper, the authors address the restriction of resources by applying an effective and efficient approach that allows the system to choose the best nodes, create the Fog, and manage resources.9 The authors adopt a multi-criteria decision-making model that can help the existing systems to select the best nodes to overcome resource constraints in the Fog. This paper uses the resources of other smart objects in the vicinity of the primary actuator to overcome resource constraints, network traffic issues, and latency in IoT systems. They validate the communication cost based on the ratio of successful packet delivery and the productivity of the model in terms of the rate of completed tasks. The guest editors of this special issue wish to express their sincere gratitude to all of the authors who submitted their papers to this special issue. We are also grateful to the Reviewing Committee for the hard work and the feedback provided to the authors, which are essential in further enhancing the papers. Finally, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to Professor Geoffrey Fox, the Editor in Chief, for providing us with this unique opportunity to present our works in the international journal of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience.

A New Secure Passwordless Multi-Server Modified Authenticated Master-Key Agreement Scheme Based on Hardware-Software and Iriscode Identifiers Through SSL/TLS Protocol for E-learning and Similar Web-based Services

There is a growing concern about systems security and how to organize it. This is because the internet which is the backbone of all systems is regarded as unsafe. Also, the internet transmits all connection transactions in the E-learning and similar web-based systems and as a result, intruders and attackers by abusing security holes can compromise the system. The E-learning and other similar systems should be safe against threats and manipulation by intruders and should protect the privacy of users. The purpose of this paper is to provide an authentication model based on hardware, software and iriscode identifiers through the SSL/TLS protocol, in order to significantly improve the security and privacy level, while at the same time, maintain the system performance at an acceptable level. There are major differences between our model and other similar works, such as: no need to password in registration and login phase, using of iriscode identifier, isolation of users profiles based on hardware and software identifiers of relying party, enhancing master secret key exchange phase in the SSL/TLS protocol, no need to password change phase, strong performance in comparison with other approaches because of using SHA-3 function and removing password change phase, capability of providing authentication services over large networks and internet. Also according to conducted studies and tests, the mentioned solution can significantly improve the system security, as well as maintain its function at an acceptable level. Therefore the proposed model easily can be used for immunize E-learning and similar web-based systems that works through internet. The proposed model improves the 32.50% security and 63.58% execution time in comparison to average of five newest methods.