Perfect Forward Security Research Articles

Provably Secure ECC-Based Anonymous Authentication and Key Agreement for IoT

With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), maintaining data confidentiality and protecting user privacy have become increasingly challenging. End devices in the IoT are often deployed in unattended environments and connected to open networks, making them vulnerable to physical tampering and other security attacks. Different authentication key agreement (AKA) schemes have been used in practice; several of them do not cover the necessary security features or are incompatible with resource-constrained end devices. Their security proofs have been performed under the Random-Oracle model. We present an AKA protocol for end devices and servers. The proposal leverages the ECC-based key exchange mechanism and one-way hash function-based message authentication method to achieve mutual authentication, user anonymity, and forward security. A formal security proof of the proposed scheme is performed under the standard model and the eCK model with the elliptic curve encryption computational assumptions, and formal verification is performed with ProVerif. According to the performance comparison, it is revealed that the proposed scheme offers user anonymity, perfect forward security, and mutual authentication, and resists typical attacks such as ephemeral secret leakage attacks, impersonation attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, and key compromise impersonation attacks. Moreover, the proposed scheme has the lowest computational and communication overhead compared to existing schemes.

Cryptanalysis and improvement of an authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks

SummaryThe Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a network which is composed of many sensor nodes. The sensor nodes in WSN are widespread and lightweight which are deployed for environmental or system monitoring. These sensor nodes within the WSNs communicate with one another using wireless lines. WSNs have practical applications in numerous fields such as smart city, medicine, military, agriculture, and so forth. It is easy for an adversary to intercept the network and steal the valuable information. Consequently, these sensor nodes need enhanced security. Recently, Kwon et al have proposed an authentication scheme for WSNs. However, in this paper, we analyze the security of their scheme and discover that their protocol fails to provide perfect forward security and user untraceability. Also their protocol fails to withstand against session specific random number leakage attack, privileged insider attack and password guessing attack. Their protocol uses only two‐factor authentication scheme. In order to overcome the weaknesses of their protocol, we develop a secure three‐factor authentication protocol which is based on symmetric key cryptography. We use ProVerif tool to perform its formal security verification and use random oracle model for its formal security analysis. We also show the correctness of mutual authentication of the proposed scheme using BAN logic. Its informal security analysis indicates that the designed scheme can withstand against various known attacks. In the performance analysis, we show that the proposed scheme offers more security features than the other related schemes and has less communication cost as compared to Kwon et al protocol.

Identity-Based Key Management Scheme for Secure Discussion Group Establishment in DOSNs

Distributed online social network (DOSN) solves the challenges of single-point failure and user data privacy faced by traditional online social network (OSN). Online discussion group, allowing a user to facilitate the communications with other users, is one of the most important components of (D)OSN. Key management is the key technology to ensure the secure establishment of discussion groups in DOSNs. However, the existing key management schemes for secure discussion group establishment in DOSNs cannot meet the requirements of sender non-restriction, receiver controllability, round optimal, certificate freeness simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel key management scheme for secure discussion group establishment in DOSNs. In our scheme, any user could use our key management scheme to initialize a discussion group with a piece of discussion group information. Users who are interested in the group topic contained in the discussion group information can join and leave the discussion group at any time once the discussion group is initialized with one-round communication. Any user/sender can find the users that he/she wants to communicate with by looking up the discussion group information of a discussion group and then send encrypted messages to some or all of the users in the discussion group. Therefore, our scheme achieves sender non-restriction, receiver controllability, round optimal, certificate freeness simultaneously. Security analysis also shows that our scheme achieves confidentiality, authentication, full collusion resistance, known-key security and perfect forward security.

Design and Analysis of a Provable Secure Two-Factor Authentication Protocol for Internet of Things

Because sensor nodes are deployed in public areas, these sensors are easy to capture by adversaries. Once a sensor is stolen, the sensitive information stored in it is likely to be exposed. Accordingly, designing a secure authentication protocol should consider this issue. Sadri et al. recently proposed a two-factor authentication protocol with anonymity for wireless sensor networks. Unfortunately, we found that their protocol had a design flaw in the user and sensor authentication phase. Besides, their protocol can not resist stolen smart card attacks, sensor capture attacks, and user impersonation attacks. In addition, their protocol does not provide perfect forward security. This paper proposes a provably secure authentication to overcome these weaknesses and flaws. By comparing the security and performance of the proposed protocol with other related protocols, we find that our work has reasonable computation overhead and better security.

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

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

A Lightweight and Robust User Authentication Protocol with User Anonymity for IoT-Based Healthcare

With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), the word “intelligent medical care” has increasingly become a major vision. Intelligent medicine adopts the most advanced IoT technology to realize the interaction between patients and people, medical institutions, and medical equipment. However, with the openness of network transmission, the security and privacy of information transmission have become a major problem. Recently, Masud et al. proposed a lightweight anonymous user authentication protocol for IoT medical treatment, claiming that their method can resist various attacks. However, through analysis of the protocol, we observed that their protocol cannot effectively resist privileged internal attacks, sensor node capture attacks, and stolen authentication attacks, and their protocol does not have perfect forward security. Therefore, we propose a new protocol to resolve the security vulnerabilities in Masud’s protocol and remove some redundant parameters, so as to make the protocol more compact and secure. In addition, we evaluate the security and performance of the new protocol and prove that the overall performance of the new protocol is better than that of other related protocols.

A secure cross-domain authentication scheme with perfect forward security and complete anonymity in fog computing

Nowadays, fog computing has become an emerging hot-topic for possessing the same advantages as cloud computing and the lower latency. Nevertheless, there are still many issues in fog computing that worth studying, the most importantly of which are key agreement and user authentication. In order to achieve secure communication among different entities, designing a secure key agreement and user authentication scheme becomes an urgent issue. Although many schemes have been investigated the key agreement and user authentication for cloud computing, these schemes cannot be directly applied to the fog computing due to efficiency and cost. To tackle this problem, we propose a secure and efficient key agreement and user authentication scheme for fog computing. Our scheme can establish secure sessions among different entities, and users can achieve cross-domain access to other fog server. Most importantly, Our scheme satisfies the perfect forward security and the complete anonymity. We prove that our scheme is secure in the random oracle model, and achieve formal security verification through the AVISPA tool. Finally, the performance analysis demonstrates that our scheme tends to be more efficient in comparison with similar schemes.

An Efficient and Provable Multifactor Mutual Authentication Protocol for Multigateway Wireless Sensor Networks

As the most popular way of communication technology at the moment, wireless sensor networks have been widely concerned by academia and industry and plays an important role in military, agriculture, medicine, and other fields. Identity authentication offers the first line of defence to ensure the security communication of wireless sensor networks. Since the sensor nodes are resource-limited in the wireless networks, how to design an efficient and secure protocol is extremely significant. The current authentication protocols have the problem that the sensor nodes need to execute heavy calculation and communication consumption during the authentication process and cannot resist node capture attack, and the protocols also cannot provide perfect forward and backward security and cannot resist replay attack. Multifactor identity authentication protocols can provide a higher rank of security than single-factor and two-factor identity authentication protocols. The multigateway wireless sensor networks’ structure can provide a larger communication coverage area than the single-gateway network structure, so it has become the focus of recent studies. Therefore, we design a novel multifactor authentication protocol for multigateway wireless sensor networks, which only apply the lightweight hash function and are given biometric information to achieve a higher level of security and efficiency and a larger communication coverage area. We separately apply BAN logic, random oracle model, and AVISPA tool to validate the security of our authentication protocol in Case 1 and Case 2. We put forward sixteen evaluation criteria to comprehensively evaluate our authentication protocol. Compared with the related authentication protocols, our authentication protocol is able to achieve higher security and efficiency.

CLORKE-SFS: Certificateless one-round key exchange protocol with strong forward security in limited communication scenarios

Certificateless one-round key exchange (CL-ORKE) protocols enable each participant to share a common key with only one round of communication which greatly saves communication cost. CL-ORKE protocols can be applied to scenarios with limited communication, such as space communication. Although CL-ORKE protocols have been researched for years, lots of them only consider what secrets can be compromised but ignore the time when the secrets have been corrupted. In CL-ORKE protocols, the reveal of the long-term key attacks can be divided into two different attacks according to the time of the long-term key revealed: the attack to weak Forward Security (wFS) and the attack to strong Forward Security (sFS). Many CLKE protocols did not take into account the sFS property or considered sFS as wFS. In this paper, we first propose a new security model for CL-ORKE protocols which considers the sFS property as well as the Ephemeral Key Reveal attack. Then, we give a CL-ORKE protocol which is called CLORKE-SFS. CLORKE-SFS is provably secure under the proposed model provided the Elliptic Curve Computational Diffie-Hellman (ECCDH) and the Bilinear Computational Diffie-Hellman problem (BCDH) assumption hold. The security model and the protocol may give inspiration for constructing one-round key exchange protocols with perfect forward security in certificateless scenarios.

Anonymous and provably secure authentication protocol using self-certified cryptography for wireless sensor networks

The rapid development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has brought great convenience to people’s lives, as well as huge security challenges. Recently, Kaur et al. proposed an improved user authentication protocol for WSNs. However, we find that their protocol cannot provide user untraceability and perfect forward security, and it fails to resist the privileged insider attack because it only uses lightweight cryptographic primitive to ensure the security of the scheme. To overcome the weaknesses in Kaur et al.’s protocol, we propose a secure anonymous authentication with key agreement protocol for WSNs. It uses self-certified public key cryptography to guarantee confidentiality, security and availability in public channels. Additionally, through formal and informal security proofs, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve the expected security properties. By comparing with other related protocols on execution time and communication cost, we find that our protocol is more secure and efficient.

Remotely Access “My” Smart Home in Private: An Anti-Tracking Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme

Smart home is one of the key applications of the Internet of Things (IoT), which allows users to control the smart devices in their houses through the Internet. However, a smart home system also faces severe challenges in terms of privacy and confidentiality when users are allowed to remotely access it. Despite the recent research efforts on authentication schemes to improve the security aspects of a smart home, there are still unsolved problems. On the one hand, most of the existing schemes focus on secure authentication and communication via a trusted third party without taking its privacy leakage into consideration. On the other hand, many protocols enable the users to directly authenticate themselves to a large number of smart devices in the smart home network, which is often inefficient and inconvenient. To cope with these issues, we propose a smart home system model based on Internet services, like if this then that (IFTTT), and design an anti-tracking mutual authentication scheme with a key agreement element in it. Specifically, our scheme introduces an IFTTT home gateway as the control commands' executor and the security guard to allow a user to remotely access a smart home system privately. The proposed scheme employs the elliptic curves' cryptography (ECC) algorithm, nonces, XOR, and cryptographical hash functions to achieve mutual authentication with security features, such as anonymity and perfect forward security. The security analysis and performance comparison results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves secure and private authentication.

A Multi-Server Two-Factor Authentication Scheme with Un-Traceability Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography.

To provide secure communication, the authentication-and-key-agreement scheme plays a vital role in multi-server environments, Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs), etc. This scheme enables users and servers to negotiate for a common session initiation key. Our proposal first analyzes Amin et al.’s authentication scheme based on RSA and proves that it cannot provide perfect forward secrecy and user un-traceability, and is susceptible to offline password guessing attack and key-compromise user impersonation attack. Secondly, we provide that Srinivas et al.’s multi-server authentication scheme is not secured against offline password guessing attack and key-compromise user impersonation attack, and is unable to ensure user un-traceability. To remedy such limitations and improve computational efficiency, we present a multi-server two-factor authentication scheme using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). Subsequently, employing heuristic analysis and Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic (BAN-Logic) proof, it is proven that the presented scheme provides security against all known attacks, and in particular provides user un-traceability and perfect forward security. Finally, appropriate comparisons with prevalent works demonstrate the robustness and feasibility of the presented solution in multi-server environments.

Implicit authentication protocol and self-healing key management for WBANs

In recent years, the rapid development of computer science and technology brings health care into the information era. As a typical representation, wireless body area networks (WBANs) has also promoted the development of medical technology into a higher field. However, collecting data from users seriously affects personal privacy and security, that WBANs needs to overcome. In order to resolve the flaws of the existing secure authentication protocols in WBANs, we propose a lightweight implicit authentication protocol based on the Elliptic Curve Qu-Vantone (ECQV) algorithm. Moreover, we take advantage of the bidirectional key chain to design a group key management protocol between the personal digital assistance (PDA) and each of cluster head sensor nodes. The security and performance analysis show that our protocol can be performed with perfect forward security and backward security in data communication. In addition, the experimental simulation and theoretic analysis show that our protocol is more suitable for WBANs.

A Round-Efficient Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme Based on Extended Chaotic Maps for Group Cloud Meeting.

The security is a critical issue for business purposes. For example, the cloud meeting must consider strong security to maintain the communication privacy. Considering the scenario with cloud meeting, we apply extended chaotic map to present passwordless group authentication key agreement, termed as Passwordless Group Authentication Key Agreement (PL-GAKA). PL-GAKA improves the computation efficiency for the simple group password-based authenticated key agreement (SGPAKE) proposed by Lee et al. in terms of computing the session key. Since the extended chaotic map has equivalent security level to the Diffie–Hellman key exchange scheme applied by SGPAKE, the security of PL-GAKA is not sacrificed when improving the computation efficiency. Moreover, PL-GAKA is a passwordless scheme, so the password maintenance is not necessary. Short-term authentication is considered, hence the communication security is stronger than other protocols by dynamically generating session key in each cloud meeting. In our analysis, we first prove that each meeting member can get the correct information during the meeting. We analyze common security issues for the proposed PL-GAKA in terms of session key security, mutual authentication, perfect forward security, and data integrity. Moreover, we also demonstrate that communicating in PL-GAKA is secure when suffering replay attacks, impersonation attacks, privileged insider attacks, and stolen-verifier attacks. Eventually, an overall comparison is given to show the performance between PL-GAKA, SGPAKE and related solutions.

A new certificateless multiple key agreement scheme

Recently, by changing security requirements of computer networks, many public key schemes are introduced. One major shortcoming of identity-based cryptosystems is key screw. Certificateless public key cryptosystems were introduced to solve this problem. In this paper, a certificateless, public-key, multiple-key-agreement scheme will be offered which has some significant security properties such as perfect forward secrecy, strong security, and zero-knowledge proof. This scheme produces far more shared hidden keys per session in comparison with many existing schemes. In this paper, the security and the efficiency of the proposed scheme will be compared with some well-known current schemes.

A Secure and Efficient Multi-Factor Mutual Certificateless Authentication with Key Agreement Protocol for Mobile Client-Server Environment on ECC without the third-party

Authentication with key agreement (AKA) protocols are implemented to provide identity authentication and session keys for communication entities. In order to reduce the heavy trust reliance on key generator center (KGC) in identity based AKA protocols, a certificateless based AKA (CLAKA) protocol for client-server environment without the third-party (i.e., KGC) is introduced in this paper. The proposed protocol is constructed based on elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) and multi-factor protections (such as password, biometrics, and smart card). Moreover, security proof based on BAN-logic is carried out and shows that our protocol can provide mutual authentication, user anonymity, dynamic identity and perfect forward security, and resist to user impersonation attack, server spoofing attack and privileged insider attack. Meanwhile, security and efficiency analysis shows that our proposed protocol outperforms the previous related ones.

A privacy‐preserving multi‐server authenticated key‐agreement scheme based on Chebyshev chaotic maps

AbstractThe paper presents a password‐based authenticated key‐agreement protocol for multi‐server environments by using Chebyshev chaotic maps. The protocol allows a user to login to different servers via a single password. The proposed scheme has removed the weakness of multi‐server authenticated key‐agreement schemes, which adopt the architecture of two‐level servers. After a user has finished the first login to a service providing server, the control server is not required to be online for the user's subsequent logins. Compared with the related multi‐server authentication schemes, our scheme meets more security requirements, such as mutual authentication, perfect forward security, freedom of password change, scalability of login, resistance to the stolen verifier attacks, resistance to server spoofing attacks, and two‐factor security. Detailed analysis shows that the proposed scheme can resist several kinds of attacks. The proposed scheme is provably secure under the CDH assumption of Chebyshev polynomials in the random oracle model. Furthermore, it offers the user and server with privacy‐preserving, that is, anonymity and untraceability. Any adversary can neither figure out the identities of users or the identities of service providing servers nor link different sessions with a user or a server. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A secure effective dynamic group password-based authenticated key agreement scheme for the integrated EPR information system

With the rapid growth of the Internet, a lot of electronic patient records (EPRs) have been developed for e-medicine systems. The security and privacy issues of EPRs are important for the patients in order to understand how the hospitals control the use of their personal information, such as name, address, e-mail, medical records, etc. of a particular patient. Recently, Lee et al. proposed a simple group password-based authenticated key agreement protocol for the integrated EPR information system (SGPAKE). However, in this paper, we show that Lee et al.’s protocol is vulnerable to the off-line weak password guessing attack and as a result, their scheme does not provide users’ privacy. To withstand this security weakness found in Lee et al.’s scheme, we aim to propose an effective dynamic group password-based authenticated key exchange scheme for the integrated EPR information system, which retains the original merits of Lee et al.’s scheme. Through the informal and formal security analysis, we show that our scheme provides users’ privacy, perfect forward security and known-key security, and also protects online and offline password guessing attacks. Furthermore, our scheme efficiently supports the dynamic group password-based authenticated key agreement for the integrated EPR information system. In addition, we simulate our scheme for the formal security verification using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool and show that our scheme is secure against passive and active attacks.

An Enhanced ID-based Authenticated Multiple Key Agreement Protocol

Authenticated multiple key agreement protocols not only allow participants to agree the multiple session keys within one run of the protocol but also ensure the authenticity of the other party. In 2011, Dehkordi et al. proposed an identity-based authenticated multiple key agreement protocol. In this paper, we demonstrate that Dehkordi et al.’s protocol is vulnerable to impersonation attack. Furthermore, we have found that their protocol cannot provide perfect forward security or mutual security. Then we propose an identity-based multiple key agreement protocol which removes the weaknesses of the Dehkordi et al.’s protocol. Compared with the multiple key agreement protocols in the literature, the proposed protocol is more efficient and holds stronger security. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.42.1.1381

A secure and effective user authentication and privacy preserving protocol with smart cards for wireless communications

In 2012, Li and Lee (C. T. Li and C. C. Lee, “A novel user authentication and privacy preserving scheme with smart cards for wireless communications,” Mathematical and Computer Modelling, vol. 55, nos. 1–2, pp. 35–44, 2012) proposed a novel user authentication and privacy preserving scheme with smart cards for wireless communications. However, in this paper, we show that Li-Lee’s scheme is vulnerable to three security weaknesses: (1) Li-Lee’s scheme fails to achieve strong authentication in login and authentication phases, (2) Li-Lee’s scheme fails to update the user’s password correctly in the password change phase, and (3) Li-Lee’s scheme fails strongly to protect replay attacks. In order to remedy those security flaws in Li-Lee’s scheme, we propose a secure and effective user authentication and privacy preserving scheme with smart cards for wireless communications. We show that our scheme is secure against various known types of attacks, such as user anonymity, perfect forward security, strong replay attack, impersonation and off-line password guessing attacks and parallel session attack, which makes our scheme more secure and practical for mobile wireless networking. Moreover, our scheme works without password table, provides correct password change locally by the mobile user, non-repudiation, user friendliness, fairness in key agreement, and session keys establishment between the mobile user and the foreign agent, between the mobile user and the home agent, and between the foreign agent and the home agent. Further, through the simulation results using the AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool we show that our improved scheme is secure against passive and active attacks.