Privacy-preserving Authentication Research Articles

Lightweight consortium blockchain-enabled secured Vehicular ad Hoc Network using certificateless conditional privacy-preserving authentication mechanism.

Towards the intelligent transportation systems, Location Based Service (LBS) are widely engaged in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) that are becoming as significant application that change the human driving experience in today's world. LBS systems facilitate the users with intelligent services by collecting an accurate location information. Due to the frequent exchange rate of the location information in an open environment, VANETs are inherently susceptible to privacy and security attacks. In past, many schemes have been proposed to ensure the privacy and security of exchanged location information; but fail to deploy in practical VANETs. At the same time, system efficiency is compromised which is another primary requirement of VANETs. Leveraging the semi-decentralized and lightweight nature of consortium blockchain technology, and Certificateless conditional privacy protection scheme to reduce the node authentication overhead, this paper introduces Consortium Blockchain assisted Certificateless Conditional Privacy Protection scheme to address the aforementioned challenges. Additionally, the proposed scheme has ability to develop anonymous regions for a particular time stamp ensuring the location privacy of vehicles. Rigorous security analysis and experiments show the practicality and resilience to various attack models, and achieve ADP 83% with maximum malicious attacks. Comparing with existing state of the art methods, the proposed scheme exhibits the privacy improvement and low computational complexity.

Enhancing the Vehicular Public Key Infrastructure to Develop Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for Vanet by Using PCM and MSS Scheme

This article proposes a security-based authentication as well as efficient certificate management approach for VANET to detect fraudulent nodes with better precision, less latency and overhead. The primary purpose of the developed system is to establish effectual and heftiness of VANET security that lead to the stability of overall network. VANETs are composed of vehicles and Road Side Units (RSUs) assisting with network management and the vehicles connect with one another and RSUs to furnish roadside information and safety solutions. Security is an essential factor in VANETs because the confidentiality of humans (passengers) is paramount; hence, Vehicular Public Key Infrastructure (VPKI) is utilised to offer authentication and safety services in VANETs. The developed structure provides an encrypted VANET transmission infrastructure by utilising the concepts of Merkle Signature Scheme (MSS) and Pseudo-code Certificate Management (PCM) to minimise overhead for communication and latency while ensuring entity authenticity. Messages are authenticated by sender, encoded with a vehicular public key distributed by a PCM-MSS and decrypted by the destination, resulting in every transmission including a certification from a reliable authority. During that verification, the transmitter and receiver of message’s authentication and validation is accomplished. Simulation findings show that the proposed approach improves the reliability of identifying hostile nodes and PDR while reducing authentication delays and overhead.

CHAM-CLAS: A Certificateless Aggregate Signature Scheme with Chameleon Hashing-Based Identity Authentication for VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), which are the backbone of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), facilitate critical data exchanges between vehicles. This necessitates secure transmission, which requires guarantees of message availability, integrity, source authenticity, and user privacy. Moreover, the traceability of network participants is essential as it deters malicious actors and allows lawful authorities to identify message senders for accountability. This introduces a challenge: balancing privacy with traceability. Conditional privacy-preserving authentication (CPPA) schemes are designed to mitigate this conflict. CPPA schemes utilize cryptographic protocols, including certificate-based schemes, group signatures, identity-based schemes, and certificateless schemes. Due to the critical time constraints in VANETs, efficient batch verification techniques are crucial. Combining certificateless schemes with batch verification leads to certificateless aggregate signature (CLAS) schemes. In this paper, cryptanalysis of Xiong’s CLAS scheme revealed its vulnerabilities to partial key replacement and identity replacement attacks, alongside mathematical errors in the batch verification process. Our proposed CLAS scheme remedies these issues by incorporating an identity authentication module that leverages chameleon hashing within elliptic curve cryptography (CHAM-CLAS). The signature and verification modules are also redesigned to address the identified vulnerabilities in Xiong’s scheme. Additionally, we implemented the small exponents test within the batch verification module to achieve Type III security. While this enhances security, it introduces a slight performance trade-off. Our scheme has been subjected to formal security and performance analyses to ensure robustness.

Blockchain-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme using PUF for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) have been the key indispensable module of the future intelligent transportation system. Security and privacy are two essential attributes that protect the safe driving of vehicles. Over the last two decades, numerous conditional privacy-preserving authentication schemes have been presented for the VANET environment. However, existing schemes have various limitations, including security issues, high storage overhead, and frequent interactions. In order to bridge these difficulties, this work combines physically unclonable function and blockchain technology to construct a conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme for the VANET environment. Specifically, we combine physical unclonable function and dynamic pseudonym techniques to generate unique pseudonym IDs dynamically and private keys using physical unclonable function to enhance privacy protection and resist physical attack. To reduce the number of communication rounds during the verification process, we deployed lightweight blockchain nodes to avoid direct communication between the receiver and the blockchain network. The proposed scheme demonstrates resilience against various potential attacks through comprehensive security analysis and proof. Furthermore, performance metrics indicate that our scheme outperforms similar schemes, making it suitable for resource-constrained VANET.

An Efficient RLWE-Based Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme Based on Edge Computing in Industrial Internet of Things

An Efficient RLWE-Based Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme Based on Edge Computing in Industrial Internet of Things

Main Primitive and Cryptography Tools for Authentication in VANET Environment: Literature Review

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) provide the potential to improve transportation efficiency by facilitating the sharing of traffic information among vehicles. Acceptance of VANET depends on communication speed and accuracy as well as privacy protection guaranteeing an individual's safety. Vehicle authentication is necessary to ensure message correctness. This necessitates the implementation of an effective privacy-preserving authentication scheme, as well as the need for both secrecy and timebound delivery of messages. Various privacy-preserving authentication schemes have been suggested to guarantee the integrity of messages in communications. However, most of the schemes are not able to solve issues related to computing costs, communication, security, privacy, threats, and vulnerabilities. In this review, we focus on cryptographic strategies that are suggested to accomplish privacy and authentication, such as identity-based, public key cryptography-based, pseudonym-based, and blockchain-based schemes. We provide a thorough analysis of schemes, including their categorizations, advantages, and drawbacks. The study demonstrates that the majority of current authentication techniques necessitate trusted authorities that lack transparency in their operations. Additionally, authentication process incurs substantial computational and communication overhead, leading to a considerable impact on the timely delivery of messages. More efforts are required to enhance the development of efficient authentication schemes in VANETs.

DCPFS: A Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme with Dual Cuckoo Pseudonym Filters for Vanets

With the increasing frequency of information dissemination and exchange, the attention paid to security and privacy in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is also on the rise. To protect user privacy, many anonymous authentication scheme have been proposed. These schemes assign pseudonyms to vehicles to hide their true identities when communicating with other vehicles or Roadside Units (RSUs). However, existing schemes also face pseudonym issues such as pseudonym abuse, high storage overhead, and low query efficiency. Motivated by this, we propose an RSU-based pseudonym assistance management scheme. In this scheme, RSUs employ dual cuckoo pseudonym filters to manage pseudonyms, effectively improving pseudonym query efficiency, preventing pseudonym abuse, and reducing storage overhead. Additionally, security and performance analyses demonstrate that the proposed protocol offers stronger security features and lower overhead. Besides, our scheme has reduced the generation time of pseudonym to only 0.0039 ms.

CPPA-RORS: A conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme based on revocable one-time ring signature for VANETs

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are a wireless communication system designed to improve driving safety and traffic management, with a focus on enhancing road traffic efficiency and safety. Privacy protection is one of the crucial security challenges for VANETs. However, considering the high mobility of vehicles that frequently transmit delay-intolerant safety and informative messages, two problems exist in some ring signature-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication (CPPA) schemes for VANETs: first, vehicles cannot detect the malicious vehicles when a malicious vehicle signs a message multiple times; and second, the TAs cannot reveal vehicles’ identities when some vehicles engage in illegal activities. To address these concerns, we propose a CPPA scheme based on revocable one-time ring signature (CPPA-RORS) scheme, leveraging the properties of ring signatures. The scheme ensures anonymity of the honest vehicles while providing TAs with the ability to reveal malicious vehicles at any time. We allow one vehicle only can sign one signature on one message, called one-time, to safeguard vehicle privacy with high security. CPPA-RORS scheme provides the formal security model for VANETs, and in particular simultaneously offers message-linkability and mandatory revocability, effectively preventing the double-spending attack (Shrestha et al. 2020) and enabling TAs to revoke the anonymity of any vehicle at any time for further enhancing the security and trustworthiness of the networks. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that CPPA-RORS provides robust security measures and privacy for vehicles in VANETs.

Privacy Preserving Authentication of IoMT in Cloud Computing

INTRODUCTION: The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) blends the healthcare industry with the IoT ecosystem and enables the creation, collection, transmission, and analysis of medical data through IoT networking. IoT networks consist of various healthcare IT systems, healthcare sensors, and healthcare management software. OBJECTIVES: The IoMT breathes new life into the healthcare system by building a network that is intelligent, accessible, integrated, and effective. Privacy-preserving authentication in IoMT is difficult due to the distributed communication environment of heterogeneous IoMT devices. Although there has been numerous research on potential IoMT device authentication methods, there is still more to be done in terms of user authentication to deliver long-term IoMT solutions. However, password handling is one of the big challenges of IoMT. METHODS: In this paper, we present an IoMT-related online password-less authentication technique that is quick, effective, and safe. In order to offer cross-platform functionality, the article includes a simulation of FIDO2/WebAuthn, one of the most recent standards for a password-less authentication mechanism. RESULTS: This makes it easier to secure user credentials and improve them while preserving anonymity. The IoMT device authentication process and registration process delays are also assessed. CONCLUSION: Results and simulations show that the efficacy of the proposed mechanism with quick authentication on cloud servers may be accomplished with the fewest registration and authentication procedures, regardless of device setup.

Privacy-preserving authentication approach for vehicular networks

Vehicle AdHoc networks have an important role in intelligent transport systems that enhance safety in road usage by transmitting real traffic updates in terms of congestion and road accidents. The dynamic nature of the vehicular AdHoc networks make them susceptible to attacks because once malicious users gain access to the network they can transform traffic data. It is essential to protect the vehicular ad hoc network because any attack can cause unwanted harm, to solve this it is important to have an approach that detects malicious vehicles and not give them access to the network. The proposed approach is a privacy preserving authentication approach that authenticates vehicles before they have access to the vehicular network thereby identifying malicious vehicles. The model was executed in docker container that simulates the network in a Linux environment running Ubuntu 20.04. The model enhances privacy by assigning Pseudo IDs to authenticated vehicles and the results demonstrate effectiveness of the solution in that unlike other models it boasts faster authentication and lower computational overhead which is necessary in a vehicular network scenario.

Hybrid cryptography-based scheme with conditional privacy-preserving authentication and memory-based DOS resilience in V2X

To secure Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications, many Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication schemes (CPPA) use symmetric and asymmetric encryption during the authentication process. However, several existing schemes have some security limitations regarding VANET requirements. In many symmetric cryptography-based schemes, the participants are required to share the same keys which could compromise the security of the network in case the key of one participant is compromised, while many asymmetric cryptography-based schemes take much time during the authentication process, and don't address the denial-of-service attack. In this paper, we propose a certificateless scheme that does not require a certificate and prevents the escrow problem. Plus, it uses the elliptic curve cryptography and avoids bilinear pairing and Map-to-Hash functions. We call our scheme Hybrid Cryptography-Based Scheme with a Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication (HCBS-CPPA), as it uses both symmetric and asymmetric cryptography during the authentication process. Our scheme combines the strength of an asymmetric encryption that satisfies non-repudiation, and the strength of a symmetric encryption that allows to perform a lightweight authentication. In addition, we show that our scheme is resilient to memory-based Denial of Service (DOS) attack which occurs when an attacker floods the memory of a receiver with invalid messages. A security proof shows that HCBS-CPPA is secure in the random oracle. Regarding the simulation of our scheme, it turns out that HCBS-CPPA has the best performance when compared with several existing certificateless schemes. Additionally, it requires less execution time during the signing and verification process, as well as less communication overhead when compared to the existing schemes.

BPA: A Novel Blockchain-Based Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for the Internet of Vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) connects an isolated individual on the road to share information, which can improve traffic efficiency. However, the promotion of information sharing brings the critical security issues of identity authentication, followed by privacy protection issues in the authentication process in the IoV. In this study, we designed a blockchain-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme for the IoV (BPA). Our scheme implements zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) to verify the identities of vehicles, which moves the authentication process down to the Roadside Units (RSUs) and achieves decentralized authentication at the edge nodes. Moreover, blockchain technology is utilized to synchronize a consistent ledger across all RSUs for recording and disseminating vehicle authentication states, which enhances the overall authentication process efficiency. We provide a theoretical analysis asserting that the BPA ensures enhanced security and effectively protects the privacy of all participating vehicles. Experimental evaluations confirm that our scheme outperforms existing solutions in terms of the computational and communication overhead.

Multi-TA model-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication protocol for fog-enabled VANET

The rapid growth of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET), fueled by advancements in the Internet-of-Things, cloud computing, Intelligent Transportation Systems, and fog computing, has led to the introduction of fog node-based VANET to serve resource-constrained devices. In the traditional security models of VANET, due to the use of a centralized trusted authority, there is a chance of single-point-of-failure and service unavailable with the increased service access requests. Also, there was one-to-one communication between each roadside unit and trusted authority. This may increase the system complexity and increase the traffic load. To address these issues, a novel authentication protocol for fog-enabled VANET based on multiple trusted authority model is discussed which reduces the chance of service unavailability and single-point-of-failure as the entire traffic load is distributed among multiple sub-trusted authority. Due to the incorporation of fog node, a group of roadside units can be controlled centrally, where trusted authority does not need to perform individual authentication for each roadside unit. The proposed protocol's security is rigorously examined through both informal and formal security analysis. Additionally, the protocol exhibits enhanced security features, as demonstrated in a performance comparison section, showcasing its ability to meet the security and privacy requirements while incurring relatively low communication and computation and storage costs. Thus, the proposed protocol offers a secure and efficient authentication protocol for fog-enabled VANET.

Shared group session key-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication protocol for VANETs

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) have significantly enhanced driving safety and comfort by leveraging vehicular wireless communication technology. Due to the open nature of VANETs, conditional privacy-preserving authentication protocol should be offered against potential attacks. Efficient and secure authentication among vehicles in VANETs are important requirements, but there are various limitations in the existing conditional privacy-preserving authentication protocols for securing VANETs. To cope with the inherent issues, we propose a conditional privacy-preserving authentication protocol based share group session key (SGSK) by integrating the self-healing key distribution technique, blockchain, and MTI/C0 protocol. In our protocol, we use SGSK instead of the time-consuming Certificate Revocation List (CRL) checking, and we revoke malicious vehicles by updating SGSK. It is shared among unrevoked vehicles within a domain and across-domain. As a result, when a malicious revoked vehicle enters a new domain, it is difficult for it to access the system and send false messages. Furthermore, our protocol can not only achieve computation efficiency by reducing the number of computing operations of bilinear pairing but also resist various attacks while keeping conditional privacy protection. We implement our protocol in the Hyperledger Fabric platform. The experimental results show that our protocol is available to revoke 180 malicious vehicles in across-domain scenarios within one second, and it can meet the requirement of verifying 600 messages per second easily. Moreover, our comprehensive performance evaluations demonstrates that our protocol outperforms other approaches in terms of vehicle revocation checking cost, computation overhead, and communication overhead. In addition, to show the feasibility and validity of our protocol, we use SUMO and NS2 to simulate the actual VANET scenario and validate the efficiency and performance of our protocol. Simulation results prove the practicability of our protocol for VANETs.

A Robust Privacy Preserving Authentication Scheme for IOT Environment by 5G Technology

In recent years, secure communication between the interconnected components of the internet of things has become an important and worrying issue due to some attacks on the IoT. The Internet of Things (IOT) is the integration of things with the world of the Internet, where this integration takes place by adding devices or programs to be smart and, as a result, they will be able to communicate with one another and participate in all elements of life quite efficiently. Accordingly, we've developed an authentication protocol for the IoT ecosystem; it's primary function is to ensure the safety of data exchange between the many devices that make up the IoT. Our proposed protocol is based on the elliptic curve cipher (ECC) algorithm, which greatly aids in protecting IoT components from physical assault. Our informal protocol analysis demonstrates that our solution not only protects users' privacy by concealing their devices' identities but also thwarts impersonation, counterattacks, and tracking and suggestion attacks directed at IoT devices. Security characteristics of the proposed protocol are also explicitly examined with the help of the ( SCYTHER) program. In addition, the effectiveness of the suggested protocol is evaluated by determining both its excess costs and its communication costs. Therefore, it appears that the protocol is vastly superior than the many other equivalent protocols by assessing its performance and security.

Lightweight privacy-preserving authentication mechanism in 5G-enabled industrial cyber physical systems

With the deep integration of informatization and industrialization, cyber-physical system (CPS), which integrates computing, communication and control technologies, comes into being and has been widely used in industrial applications. A large number of information physical system devices and control systems are based on open internet connections, and security and privacy protection issues are gradually emerging, especially in the process of dynamic and difficult to control information physical system stream data transmission and storage, which will face new security threats. To alleviate these issues, user authentication mechanisms can prevent unauthorized access by adversaries in the CPS environment. For this purpose, we put forth a lightweight privacy-preserving authentication scheme for 5G-enabled ecosystems. This method utilizes edge devices to save online transaction data in network and securely transmits IoT devices data from the sensors to the edge gateway. Then, the edge gateway delivers and stores these data in the cloud. A detailed comparative study based on experimental results indicates that our proposal achieves a better balance between security and functionality features, communication and capitulation costs compared to other existing competitive solutions.

Cryptanalysis of a privacy-preserving authentication scheme based on private set intersection

Abstract Continuous and context-aware authentication mechanisms have been proposed as complementary security mechanisms to password-based authentication for computer devices that are handled directly by humans, such as smart phones. Such authentication mechanisms incur some privacy issues as user-dependent features are revealed to the authentication server, which is assumed to be untrusted. Domingo-Ferrer et al. proposed a privacy-preserving protocol for context-aware user authentication on the basis of private set intersection and Paillier homomorphic encryption. This approach enables user authentication based on establishing the number of similarities between sampled user context data and reference context data, without revealing any plaintext data to either party. The authors claim that their scheme is secure against malicious adversaries. In this article, we show that Domingo-Ferrer et al.’s scheme is insecure by means of two undetectable attacks that reveal all user information despite the encryption. The Paillier encryption primitive has a homomorphic property that we observe not only lacks relevance but, indeed, incurs a vulnerability that is exploited in the proposed cryptanalysis. This means that special care needs to be taken considering homomorphic properties of cryptographic primitives used in cryptographic protocols. Our cryptanalysis may therefore have a general interest regarding the design of cryptographic protocols.

User-empowered secure privacy-preserving authentication scheme for Digital Twin

Digital Twin (DT) is a revolutionary technology changing how a smart manufacturing industry carries out its day-to-day activities. DT can provide numerous advantages such as real-time synchronised functioning, monitoring and data analysis. However, security and privacy issues in DT have not been thoroughly investigated. This article proposes a user-empowerment-based privacy-preserving authentication protocol for a cloud-based Digital Twin using a Decentralised Identifier (DID) and Verifiable Credential (VC). Here, user empowerment provides full control to users over their identities, and with the help of VC, users can prove their authenticity and preserve their privacy. Although DID has emerged as a promising technology for introducing user empowerment, it suffers from some fundamental problems such as usability and auditability. Here we address all these issues and propose a user-revocation-enabled security solution for the DT. A security analysis of the proposed scheme shows that it is secured against significant security threats. With the help of performance analysis, we prove that the proposed work effectively ensures security and privacy in DT.

An efficient and certificateless conditional privacy-preserving authentication and key agreement scheme for smart healthcare

Smart healthcare overcomes the limitations of time and space, allowing users to access medical and health services anywhere and anytime, thus improving the quality and efficiency of these services. However, due to its excessive reliance on wireless public networks, smart healthcare faces challenges and issues related to communication security. As a result, authentication and key agreement are critical as the first line of defense for smart healthcare communications. Over the past few years, numerous authentication and key agreement schemes have been proposed by experts and scholars, but most of these schemes are not applicable to practical scenarios due to their lack of security and efficiency. To address these issues, we propose an elliptic curve-based certificateless conditional privacy-preserving authentication and key agreement scheme. This scheme does not require endorsement from a Certificate Authority (CA) and features lightweight and secure properties, making it suitable for resource-limited smart healthcare communication. In addition, the security of the proposed scheme is proven under the random oracle model, and its safety is supplemented using BAN logic. Finally, performance analysis reveals that the proposed scheme not only satisfies security property and can withstand general attacks but also offers certain advantages in communication efficiency.

Traceable and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for Energy Trading in V2G Networks

Traceable and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for Energy Trading in V2G Networks