Message Tampering Research Articles

Lightweight Hash-Based Authentication Protocol for Smart Grids.

Smart grids integrate information and communications technology into the processes of electricity production, transportation, and consumption, thereby enabling interactions between power suppliers and consumers to increase the efficiency of the power grid. To achieve this, smart meters (SMs) are installed in households or buildings to measure electricity usage and allow power suppliers or consumers to monitor and manage it in real time. However, SMs require a secure service to address malicious attacks during memory protection and communication processes and a lightweight communication protocol suitable for devices with computational and communication constraints. This paper proposes an authentication protocol based on a one-way hash function to address these issues. This protocol includes message authentication functions to address message tampering and uses a changing encryption key for secure communication during each transmission. The security and performance analysis of this protocol shows that it can address existing attacks and provides 105,281.67% better computational efficiency than previous methods.

Blockchain-enabled authentication framework for Maritime Transportation System empowered by 6G-IoT

In recent years, Maritime Transportation Systems (MTS) have experienced significant advancements through the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technology. The introduction of 6G mobile networks has further expanded possibilities by offering enhanced communication services and additional functionalities such as processing, caching, sensing, and control for a wide array of IoT devices. Despite these technological advancements, the integration of IoT and 6G has introduced new risks and challenges in terms of safety and reliability. The involvement of various maritime stakeholders in scheduling and managing marine transportation exacerbates these challenges. Moreover, the MTS has encountered escalating security and privacy concerns with unauthorized data access and message tampering pose significant vulnerabilities in the 6G-IoT-enabled MTS environment. Therefore, a shared and controlled access mechanism that cannot be manipulated or tampered with by unauthorized parties is also an essential requirement in MTS. To address these issues, this paper presents an authentication framework leveraging blockchain technology, specifically designed for 6G-IoT-enabled MTS. The objective is to handle real-time data using decentralized peer-to-peer cloud servers with minimal latency, all while addressing security and privacy concerns specific to MTS. This integration also serves to mitigate various security threats. The protocol’s security and privacy are verified through rigorous evaluations, including the ROR model, Scyther tool, and informal security analysis. A simulation of the proposed protocol using MIRACL is conducted, offering a comprehensive assessment of its computational costs and security features when compared to existing protocols, demonstrating its superior security and efficiency.

V2XCom: Lightweight and secure message dissemination scheme for Internet of vehicles

AbstractSmart cities provide a sustainable transport ecosystem to connect smart vehicles through sensors and networking units. Internet‐of‐vehicles (IoV) is vital in disseminating various messages, including road safety, exact location sharing, road accidents and blocks, collision warning, driver assistance, network congestion, or toll payment among vehicle‐to‐anything (V2X) units. Due to the mission‐critical nature of the IoV ecosystem, it requires reliable, lightweight, and real‐time communication for vehicle‐to‐vehicle (V2V) and V2X units. However, due to the availability of insecure wireless channels, an adversary can perform several security attacks such as replay, password guessing, masquerade, trace, message tampering, Man‐in‐the‐middle attack (MIMA), and plain‐text attacks in an IoV environment which may lead to potential disruptions. Motivated by the aforementioned facts, we propose a V2XCom, a lightweight and secure message dissemination scheme for the IoV network using low‐cost cryptographic SHA‐256, XoR operation, and concatenation. We performed security verification of V2XCom using the Scyther and AVISPA tools. Moreover, security proofs are provided for an informal security analysis of the proposed scheme. We have done a comparative analysis of a V2XCom with recent dissemination schemes in the IoV ecosystem concerning security features, communication latency, computational cost, and energy usage.

Simulating MIMT Attackers' Strategies in VANET to Secure ITS in Smart Cities via Multiverse Optimization-based Hybrid Routing Approach

The connection between moving vehicles and stationary Road Side Units is made possible by VANET technology, which is an essential component of Intelligent Transportation Systems. Vanet based intelligent transportation system (ITS) security is major issue in present days. MIMT Attackers' Strategies are taken into account to test the security of VANET based ITS system in present research paper. The major objective of research paper is to evaluate the potential of security model in case of different type of message dropping and delay attack. It is observed that there is probability of message delay, message drop, and message tampering attack in VANET based ITS system. Due to such attacks there is huge impact on content delivery ratio, packet delay and dropping. Thus proposed hybrid routing approach that is considering Multi-verse optimization has been used to simulate the Quantifying MIMT attacks. In present research, Vanet security in case of intelligent transportation system in smart cities has been considered.

Hash Function Design Based on Hybrid Five-Neighborhood Cellular Automata and Sponge Functions

In today’s world of pervasive computing, all the devices have become smart. The need for securing these devices becomes a need of the hour. The traditional cryptographic algorithms will not be ideal for small devices, and this opens a new area of cryptography named lightweight cryptography, which focuses on the implementation of cryptographic algorithms in resource-constrained devices without compromise in security. Cryptographic hash functions enable detection of message tampering by adversaries. This paper proposes a lightweight hash function that makes use of sponge functions and higher radii hybrid cellular automata (CAs). The proposed hash function shows good cryptographic properties as well as collision resistance and serves as an ideal hash function for lightweight applications.

A puf-based three-party authentication key establishment scheme for fog-enabled smart home

With the rise of Internet of Things (IoT), the smart home is another emerging concept and application of IoT, where security and private data of devices are important. In this paper, fog computing is applied to the smart home environment, where fog can provide many smart features and services to the smart home. Fog computing has many advantages, such as low latency and real-time interaction. However, when fog computing is combined with smart home, it also faces some security threats: first, some fog nodes and smart home devices are deployed in public places, vulnerable to damage or theft by attackers, not considered fully trusted, and vulnerable to device loss/theft attacks, impersonation attacks, and message tampering attacks, etc. These threats can lead to adversaries controlling devices in the smart home or modifying messages to make smart home devices execute wrong commands, causing irreparable damage; Second, the smart home system should have good real-time interaction, and the authentication process using the low latency feature of fog computing should not be involved by the cloud. Considering these, it is necessary to design a secure and effective fog-enabled smart home authentication system that is secure against various known attacks, especially when the fog node is not fully trusted or the smart home device is captured as well. Finally, the authentication scheme should also be lightweight due to the limited resources of many smart home devices. To address these issues, this paper proposes a lightweight authentication scheme for the fog-enabled smart home system. It also employs a physical unclonable function to achieve mutual authentication among three parties: smart home devices, fog nodes and users. Formal security analysis under the Real-Or-Random model shows that this scheme is provably secure. And informal security analysis shows that our scheme is robust against various known attacks. At the same time, the proposed scheme requires less computation cost (8.239 ms) and is approximately 40% to 390% faster than existing related schemes. Although the communication cost is slightly higher (4512 bits), it is reasonable because the proposed scheme implements fog/gateway node compromised attack that has not been achieved by any other existing related schemes.

An Efficient and Reliable Blockchain-based Trust Management Model for Electricity Trading Terminal

<p>A safe and reliable terminal environment is crucial to ensure the security of the electricity trading system. The existing terminal security system based on identity authentication and access control has internal threats that are difficult to solve. For example, multiple internal malicious nodes cause broadcast message tampering attacks and malicious packet loss, resulting in message dissemination failure. Existing blockchain-based trust management systems are good for addressing insider threats, but suffer from low efficiency. In order to solve the internal threat problem of the electric electricity trading system, from the perspective of trust evaluation and trust management of the terminal environment, an efficient and reliable blockchain-based electric trading terminal (ERBTM) trust management model is proposed. First of all, we collect a variety of trust factors to evaluate the credibility of the terminal, which solves the problem of accuracy in the process of trust assessment; secondly, we improve the speed of storing trust values on the chain and ensure the robustness of the system by improving the consensus algorithm; Finally, we designed the structure of the block that stores the trust value to ensure that the trust value is not tampered with. The experimental results show that, compared with similar methods, the ERBTM model can effectively deal with the endogenous security threats of terminals in the electricity trading environment, and has significant advantages in terms of efficiency and reliability. </p> <p> </p>

An Unconditionally Secured Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for Smart Metering Infrastructure in Smart Grid

Industry 4.0 allows faster data accessibility, improved performance, fault identification, and remote control of machines within any smart factory. Due to the massive generation of delay-sensitive data, this system demands a robust security mechanism against security threats. In order to mitigate such potential attacks and provide security-free services, this article proposes an edge-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme based on quantum key distribution protocol for secure authentication and secure communication within smart grid infrastructure. Apart from guaranteeing security against threats such as node impersonation, message tampering, and repudiation, the scheme also defends man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks, etc. We validate the proposed protocol through a simulation study. The result indicates that it performs reasonably well and enables unconditional security for the data exchanged between entities of smart grid infrastructure.

An Improved Lightweight PUF–PKI Digital Certificate Authentication Scheme for the Internet of Things

Prosanta and Biplab presented a lightweight two-factor authentication scheme for the Internet of Things (IoT) devices based on the physical unclonable function (PUF). Their presented scheme was based on the fuzzy extractor and analyzed various security reasonings, such as mutual authentication, session key agreement, privacy and protection against impersonation, message tampering, and replay attacks. In this article, we present sufficient security analysis to demonstrate that the scheme has various security and privacy issues in its setup and authentication phases. We propose a highly secure and robust authentication protocol based on a public key infrastructure (PKI) digital certificate based on two certificate authorities (CAs) for cloud IoT systems. The proposed authentication method is verified and validated using the Tamarin prover and supported with a detailed security and performance analysis discussion. The scheme security and privacy attributes are compared with other IoT authentication schemes. The analysis has proved that the proposed authentication scheme is more secure and highly reliable as compared to the Prosanta and Biplab authentication scheme.

A potential flooding version number attack against RPL based IOT networks

Abstract Routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) has been proposed for power, memory, and processing constrained devices. Owing to their constrained, RPL-based networks are exposed to a wide range of security attacks that mainly include control message tampering. In this paper we propose and study a modified version number attack, based on flooding the network by falsified incremented version numbers. The obtained results show that the modified attack led to an immense increase in the overhead, 1426%, compared with the attack-free case, and an increase of 182 % in the total energy consumption. When it comes to PDR a degradation to 4.7% has been recorded, affecting the reliability of the network. On the other hand, the latency also showed an increase from 0.24 s in the attack-free case to 0.89 s, which is mainly due to the high congestion created by the attack.

An effective communication and computation model based on a hybridgraph-deeplearning approach for SIoT

Social Edge Service (SES) is an emerging mechanism in the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) orchestration for effective user-centric reliable communication and computation. The services are affected by active and/or passive attacks such as replay attacks, message tampering because of sharing the same spectrum, as well as inadequate trust measurement methods among intelligent devices (roadside units, mobile edge devices, servers) during computing and content-sharing. These issues lead to computation and communication overhead of servers and computation nodes. To address this issue, we propose the HybridgrAph-Deep-learning (HAD) approach in two stages for secure communication and computation. First, the Adaptive Trust Weight (ATW) model with relation-based feedback fusion analysis to estimate the fitness-priority of every node based on directed graph theory to detect malicious nodes and reduce computation and communication overhead. Second, a Quotient User-centric Coeval-Learning (QUCL) mechanism to formulate secure channel selection, and Nash equilibrium method for optimizing the communication to share data over edge devices. The simulation results confirm that our proposed approach has achieved effective communication and computation performance, and enhanced Social Edge Services (SES) reliability than state-of-the-art approaches.

A Privacy Preserving Authentication Protocol Using Quantum Computing for V2I Authentication in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Many cryptographic techniques have been proposed to conceive a secure and privacy-oriented vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) for its practical deployment. The security of these techniques requires a common secret key to be shared between the communicating entities or depend upon the premise that some mathematical problems are computationally hard. However, because of the open nature of the wireless medium, the communication cannot be kept confidential and is prone to eavesdropping. Furthermore, with the arrival of quantum computers, these techniques are prone to quantum attacks—the time complexity of the assumed hard problem gets reduced from millions of years to a few seconds. In this paper, we propose a conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme based on a quantum key distribution protocol for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. Our scheme inherits the properties of the quantum key distribution protocol. It does not require a secret authentication key to be transmitted conventionally and is resistant to quantum attacks. Apart from protecting VANETs against generic security threats, including node impersonation, message tampering, and repudiation, our scheme defends VANETs against man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks, etc. Besides, our protocol ensures message unlinkability, vehicle-identity privacy, and vehicle traceability if a vehicle misbehaves. The results obtained from the performance evaluation of our scheme confirm reasonable values of information leakage, key length, bit error probability, etc.

Improving The Performance Of Wireless Sensor Network With Multi Factor Strategies

In the design of wireless sensor network (WSN), packet delivery ratio(PDR) is an import parameter to be maximized. PDR plays an important role for improving the performance of WSN. With the existing schemes, a secure zone-based routing protocol was implemented for life time improvement in WSNs. In multi - hop communication, a new routing criterion was formulated for packet transmission. Security against message tampering, dropping and flooding attacks were incorporated in the routing metric. The approach skipped risky zones as a whole from routing and choose alternative path to route a packet in secured manner with less energy consumption. Though energy conservation and attack resilience are achieved, congestion in WSN is increased and because of it packet delivery ratio is diminished. To address this problem, we propose a solution to improve the packet delivery ratio with a multi factor strategy involving routing, differentiation of flows, flow-based congestion control with retransmission and redundant packet coding. Detailed analysis and simulations are undertaken to evaluate the efficiency of the contemplated work compared to the existing solutions.

A scalable blockchain based trust management in VANET routing protocol

Critical event information dissemination has been proliferating on VANET allowing road safety via connected vehicular communications. Despite the prospect of promising applications in vehicular networks, it faces unresolved challenges that hold the capability to slow down network performance upon deployment, especially in terms of security. Particularly, insider attacks such as Blackhole attacks that are carried out against VANET systems can disrupt the networks’ average performance and prevent communication between vehicles entirely. Many state-of-the-art solutions have been proposed to detect and eliminate such nodes based on reputation systems and broadcast routing. However, if the network consists of multiple malicious nodes, the message dissemination could fail due to broadcast message tampering attack or packet dropping. In this study, we explore to answer the question of “can we improve the insider attacks mitigation in VANET by enhancing the trust in the network system so that the possibility of successful attacks can be reduced?”. To answer this question, in this paper, we present the blockchain-based decentralized trust score framework for the participating nodes to detect and blacklist insider attackers in VANET proactively. We propose a two-level detection system, in which at the first level, neighboring nodes calculate the trust individually. In the second level, a consortium blockchain-based system with authorized Road Side Units (RSUs) as validators, aggregate trust scores for vehicular nodes. Then, based on trust scores reported by the neighboring nodes, the blacklist node tables are dynamically modified. The experimental analysis shows that the proposed system is efficient and scalable in terms of the network’s practical size. Finally, we also present evidence that the proposed system improves the VANET performance by mitigating and blacklisting insider attack launching nodes.

Secure Health Fog: A Novel Framework for Personalized Recommendations Based on Adaptive Model Tuning

The emergence of smart technology has equipped humans with wearables and sensors that collect relevant data related to individuals and their surroundings. In healthcare, the collected data can monitor user emotion, behavior, and activity, which leads to the development of personalized decisions and improves lifestyle. In this paper, we analyzed the existing health fog framework and identified its limitations in terms of security, performance, and accuracy. Based on these limitations, we propose a secure health fog (SHF) framework that collects data from different Internet of Things (IoT) devices and maintains a personalized repository for adaptive model tuning. The adaptive model improves periodically based on user feedback and generates a personalized recommendation. Moreover, the existing IoT devices mostly rely on low-cost and low-power Zigbee technology, which is vulnerable to different attacks, such as device control, eavesdropping, fake device injection, malicious insider, man-in-the-middle, masquerading, message tampering, privacy leakage, and replay attack. Therefore, we propose a Zigbee Secure Health Fog (ZigbeeSHF) protocol, which uses symmetric and public-key cryptography to prevent these attacks. For data migration security, we concatenate the encrypted data with the encrypted digital signature to provide data authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality. To support our claims, we use the automated formal verification tools Scyther and AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications), which evaluate the protocols based on the threat model and exploits the vulnerabilities in different attacking environments. The results of both tools ensure prevention against the mentioned attacks. As a proof of concept, we also evaluate the accuracy and performance of our proposed framework in a smart studio apartment. The result shows that the adaptive model tuned for an individual user is very effective, and the average accuracy of 32.5% is improved after one month. Furthermore, the proposed ZigbeeSHF protocol requires 7.93% and 25.35% more computation time than Zigbee with and without installation code, respectively.

Improving Packet Delivery Ratio in Wireless Sensor Network with Multi Factor Strategies

In the design of wireless sensor network (WSN), packet delivery ratio is an import parameter to be maximized. In existing schemes, a secure zone-based routing protocol was implemented for life time improvement in WSNs. In multi - hop communication, a new routing criterion was formulated for packet transmission. Security against message tampering, dropping and flooding attacks was incorporated in the routing metric. The approach skipped risky zones as a whole from routing and chooses alternative path to route a packet in secured manner with less energy consumption. Though energy conservation and attack resilience are achieved, congestion in WSN is increased and because of it packet delivery ratio is diminished. To address this problem, we propose a solution to improve the packet delivery ratio with a multi factor strategies involving routing, differentiation of flows, flow-based congestion control with retransmission and redundant packet coding. Detailed analysis and simulations are undertaken to evaluate the efficiency of the contemplated work compared to the existing solutions.

Secure Intruder Information Sharing in Wireless Sensor Network for Attack Resilient Routing

Securing the routing process against attacks in wireless sensor network (WSN) is a vital factor to ensure the reliability of the network. In the existing system, a secure attack resilient routing for WSN using zone-based topology is proposed against message drops, message tampering and flooding attacks. The secure attack resilient routing provides a protection against attacks by skipping the routing towards less secure zones. However, the existing work did not consider the detection and isolation of the malicious nodes in the zone based wireless sensor network. To solve this issue, we proposed enhanced attack resilient routing by detecting malicious zones and isolating the malicious nodes. We proposed a three-tire framework by adopting sequential probability test to detect and isolate malicious nodes. Attacker information is shared in a secure manner in the network, so that routing selection decision can be made locally in addition to attack resiliency route selection provided at the sink. Overhearing rate is calculated for all nodes in each zone to detect blackhole attackers. Simulation results shows that the proposed Three Tier Frame work provides more security, reduced network overhead and improved Packet delivery ratio in WSNs by comparing with the existing works.

A Lightweight Authentication Scheme for 6G-IoT Enabled Maritime Transport System

The Sixth-Generation (6G) mobile network has the potential to provide not only traditional communication services but also additional processing, caching, sensing, and control capabilities to a massive number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Meanwhile, a 6G mobile network may provide global coverage and diverse quality-of-service provisioning to the Maritime Transportation System (MTS) when enabled through satellite systems. Although modern MTS has gained significant benefits from Internet of Things (IoT) and 6G technologies, threats and challenges in terms of security and privacy have also been grown substantially. Tracking the location of vessels, GPS spoofing, unauthorized access to data, and message tampering are some of the potential security and privacy vulnerabilities in the 6G-IoT enabled MTS. In this article, we propose a lightweight authentication protocol for a 6G-IoT enabled maritime transportation system to efficiently assist and ensure the security and privacy of maritime transportation systems. To validate the security characteristics, formal security assessment methods are utilized, i.e., Real-Or-Random (ROR) oracle model. The findings of the security analysis show that the proposed scheme is more secure than the existing schemes.

WITHDRAWN: Multi factored secure routing in wireless sensor network for improved packet delivery ratio

Ensuring higher packet delivery ratio is important factor to be considered in design of wireless sensor networks. In the early work [1] on routing protocol for wireless sensor network, security and energy efficiency were considered in a zone network topology. In this a new routing metric was proposed for relay selection in the multi hop routing. The approach secured the packets against message tampering, message dropping, selective message forwarding and message flooding. Unlike previous research on the identification of any node, the routing was based on skipping the suspicious zones and choosing alternative paths. This increased the hop count and congestion at paths. Due to this packet delivery ratio reduced. In the proposed‘ work, we extend that routing protocol for increased packet delivery ratio with a multi factored approach considering multiple factors like service differentiated flows, flow control, redundant packet coding for avoiding retransmissions. The suggested solution is tested in NS2 and compared to current solutions in terms of packet delivery ratio, delay and overhead.

Detection of Replay Attack through Sequence Number Encryption in EDDK based WSNs

Wireless sensor networks can be used to deliver status information to users in real time. The sensor nodes used in wireless sensor networks are arranged by attaching sensors to acquire necessary information, such as vibration, sound, light, and temperature. Since a sensor node is small in size and inexpensive, it is advantageous for monitoring large areas. When a sensor node senses a change in a situation, this event information is wirelessly communicated with other sensor nodes and transmitted to a base station. However, since the sensor nodes used in wireless sensor networks are small and inexpensive, there are restrictions in terms of their battery life, memory, and computing power. An attacker can easily compromise a sensor node and use a compromised node to attempt message tampering and energy consumption attacks. EDDK is a scheme that detects attacks from compromised nodes through key management. EDDK uses a pairwise key and a local cluster key to defend against various attacks in the network. In addition, EDDK protects against replay attacks by using sequence numbers and guarantees message integrity. However, since the sequence number and sensor node ID are not encrypted, they can be used as an attack element. An attacker can attempt a replay attack by manipulating the sequence number through sniffing. A replay attack that occurs in a wireless sensor network consumes sensor node energy and confuses the user. In order to defend against such an attack, we propose a sequence number encryption scheme. The proposed scheme detects new types of replay attacks and shows about 7% energy improvement.