Robust Mutual Authentication Research Articles

A Robust Mutual Authentication Scheme for Health-Focused Connected Intelligent Objects

A Robust Mutual Authentication Scheme for Health-Focused Connected Intelligent Objects

Secure and scalable data aggregation techniques for healthcare monitoring in WSN

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are crucial in the healthcare field as they allow for the immediate monitoring and collection of data from medical sensors. The growing incorporation of WSN in healthcare requires the creation of authentication protocols that are both strong and energy-efficient. This study presents Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Cloud-based Health-care Systems (LAPCHS) using BLAKE2 designed specifically for WSN in medical settings for secure and scalable data aggregation. The proposed method tackles the difficulties presented by limited resources in sensor nodes, with the goal of achieving a careful equilibrium between strong security and effective energy usage. LAPCHS utilizes innovative techniques to improve the energy efficiency in WSN. The system employs the BLAKE2 cryptographic hash algorithm to establish robust mutual authentication and key agreement between the tag and the cloud server. The protocol is characterized by its low weight and high efficiency, rendering it appropriate for deployment in medical sensor networks with limited resources, which minimizes the need for global key distribution and decreases communication overhead. The proposed method is useful to meet the distinct needs of medical sensor networks, where energy preservation is of utmost importance to ensure extended device scalability. The findings demonstrate that LAPCHS surpasses current approaches in terms of energy efficiency and latency, while simultaneously upholding a robust level of security. The protocol’s novel strategy for managing encryption keys and selecting cryptographic algorithms makes it a promising solution for securing medical sensor networks while maintaining energy sustainability. This study makes a valuable contribution to the developing field of WSN security by proposing a practical solution for ensuring strong and energy-efficient authentication in healthcare applications.

AKAASH: A realizable authentication, key agreement, and secure handover approach for controller-pilot data link communications

Controller-Pilot Data Link Communications (CPDLC) are rapidly replacing voice-based Air Traffic Control (ATC) communications worldwide. Being digital, CPDLC is highly resilient and bandwidth efficient, which makes it the best choice for traffic-congested airports. Although CPDLC initially seems to be a perfect solution for modern-day ATC operations, it suffers from serious security issues. For instance, eavesdropping, spoofing, man-in-the-middle, message replay, impersonation attacks, etc. Cyber attacks on the aviation communication network could be hazardous, leading to fatal aircraft incidents and causing damage to individuals, service providers, and the aviation industry. Therefore, we propose a new security model called AKAASH, enabling several paramount security services, such as efficient and robust mutual authentication, key establishment, and a secure handover approach for the CPDLC-enabled aviation communication network. We implement the approach on hardware to examine the practicality of the proposed approach and verify its computational and communication efficiency and efficacy. We investigate the robustness of AKAASH through formal (proverif) and informal security analysis. The analysis reveals that the AKAASH adheres to the CPDLC standards and can easily integrate into the CPDLC framework.

Energy Efficient Dynamic Symmetric Key Based Protocol for Secure Traffic Exchanges in Smart Homes

Highly sensitive information about people’s social life and daily activities flows in smart home networks. As such, if attackers can manage to capture or even eavesdrop on this information, the privacy of the users can be compromised. The consequences can be far-reaching, such as knowing the status of home occupancy that can then facilitate burglary. To address these challenges, approaches such as data aggregation and signcryption have been utilized. Elliptic curve cryptography, bilinear pairing, asymmetric key cryptosystem, blockchain, and exponential operations are among the most popular techniques deployed to design these security solutions. However, the computational, storage and communication complexities exhibited by the majority of these techniques are too high. This renders these techniques unsuitable for smart home components such as smart switches and sensors. Some of these schemes have centralized architectures, which present some single points of failure. In this paper, symmetric key authentication procedures are presented for smart home networks. The proposed protocol leverages on cryptographic primitives such as one-way hashing and bitwise exclusive-Or operations. The results indicate that this scheme incurs the lowest communication, storage, and computation costs compared to other related state-of-the-art techniques. Empirically, our protocol reduces the communication and computation complexities by 16.7% and 57.7%, respectively. In addition, it provides backward key secrecy, robust mutual authentication, anonymity, forward key secrecy, and unlinkability. Moreover, it can effectively prevent attacks such as impersonation, session hijacking, denial of service, packet replays, man-in-the-middle, and message eavesdropping.

A Provable Secure Cross-Verification Scheme for IoT Using Public Cloud Computing

Public cloud computing has become increasingly popular due to the rapid advancements in communication and networking technology. As a result, it is widely used by businesses, corporations, and other organizations to boost the productivity. However, the result generated by millions of network-enabled IoT devices and kept on the public cloud server, as well as the latency in response and safe transmission, are important issues that IoT faces when using the public cloud computing. These concerns and obstacles can only be overcome by designing a robust mutual authentication and secure cross-verification mechanism. Therefore, we have attempted to design a cryptographic protocol based on a simple hash function, xor operations, and the exchange of random numbers. The security of the proposed protocol has formally been verified using the ROR model, ProVerif2.03, and informally using realistic discussion. In contrast, the performance metrics have been analyzed by looking into the security feature, communication, and computation costs. To sum it up, we have compared our proposed security mechanism with the state-of-the-art protocols, and we recommend it to be effectively implemented in the public cloud computing environment.

Cryptanalysis and improved mutual authentication key agreement protocol using pseudo-identity.

The authentication key agreement is a scheme that generates a session key for encrypted communication between two participants. In the authentication key agreement, to provide the mutual authentication and the robust session key agreement is one of the important security requirements to enhance the security performance of key agreement. Recently Zhou et al. had proposed the key agreement protocol using pseudo-identifiers, but we found that there were weaknesses in their protocol. We have demonstrated that Zhou et al.'s protocol is vulnerable to replay attack, fails to provide mutual authentication, no key control, re-registration with the original identifier and efficiency in the verification of wrong password. We improved their scheme and proposed an improved authentication key agreement protocol that provides robust mutual authentication and the secure session key agreement. We analyzed its security performance using BAN logic and AVISPA tools and compared computational cost, communication overhead and security properties with other related schemes.

SafeCom: Robust mutual authentication and session key sharing protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks

Waterways are used to monitor a variety of incredible occurrences that occur in an underwater environment, such as weather impact surveillance, aquatic life, natural resource surveys, defense activities, and so on. The underwater network and its components are vulnerable to numerous attacks since they are employed to evaluate oceanographic content gathering and future forecasts. Several protocols have been offered to combat these attacks. However, they have all proven ineffective. This study considers an underwater wireless sensor network architecture and designs an authentication technique that establishes a session key for safe communication. Our protocol’s security study reveals that it protects against a wide range of serious security threats. We used Scyther Simulator to test security threats and found that the protocol is entirely secure. The suggested protocol’s performance is assessed in terms of security features, computation, and communication cost and found to be satisfactory, competing with other relevant works.

<i>ERMAP</i>: ECC-based robust mutual authentication protocol for smart grid communication with AVISPA simulations

Veracious new architectures and authentication protocols have been proposed by researchers to provide better security solutions for smart grid application. This paper analyses and discusses the limitations of the pairing-based authentication protocol proposed by Khalid Mahmood and others. It also proposes an ECC-based robust mutual authentication protocol for smart grid communication with AVISPA simulations called ERMAP that overcomes the limitations of Khalid Mahmood and others authentication protocol. ERMAP does authentication between end-user (Ui) and the smart meter (SMe) along with the authentication between service provider (SPr) and the SMe to add the security strength, which is not done by most of the authentication techniques used in smart grid systems. A formal model of ERMAP protocol has been implemented in the AVISPA tool using high-level protocol specification language (HLPSL). Also the results show better security strength. (SMe) theft issue, DOS attack, and other related attacks are addressed by ERMAP that are essential now a day, but not supported by many of the authentication techniques used in smart grid systems. ERMAP protocol does not need an extra supporting system to ensure (SMe) security. Computation cost and communication overhead of ERMAP is considerably less when compared with most of the other related authentication techniques.

A Verifiably Secure ECC Based Authentication Scheme for Securing IoD Using FANET

Perfect forward secrecy, cross-verification, and robust mutual authentication guarantee secure communication through unfavorable and unsafe channels. The speedy development in wireless communication and drone-assisted networking technology has miserable significance in many areas, including wildlife monitoring, sidewalk checking, infrastructure inspection, and smart city surveillance. But guaranteeing message integrity, non-repudiation, authenticity, and authorization for information transmission for these areas are still challenging for researchers when using Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs). The FANET’s existence for drone technology is more complicated due to dynamic changes in its topology and easily vulnerable to the adversary for numerous attacks. So far, before exhilarating a drone in the Internet-of-Drones (IoD) environment, controlled layered network architecture is indispensable to allow only legitimate drones to collaborate securely with each other and with the ground control station (GCS) for building the highest trust. A minor lapse creates a severe complication for communication security because an attacker might be trapping data from the open network channel and using it for their unusual deeds. Attentively, identification authentication and message authentication are necessary for such a sensitive environment. Therefore, in this research article, we have designed a verifiably secure Elliptic Curve Cryptographic (ECC)-based authentication scheme for IoD using FANET. The formal security proof of the scheme has been made using a programming verification toolkit ProVerif2.03, Random Oracle Model (ROM), and informally by pragmatic illustration. And the performance evaluation section of the article has been made by considering storage, computation, and communication costs. When comparing the proposed security mechanism with state-of-the-art schemes, it has been shown that the work done in this article is efficient and effective and is suitable for practically implementing in the IoD environment.

A Mutual Authentication and Cross Verification Protocol for Securing Internet-of-Drones (IoD)

With the rapid miniaturization in sensor technology, Internet-of-Drones (IoD) has delighted researchers towards information transmission security among drones with the control station server (CSS). In IoD, the drone is different in shapes, sizes, characteristics, and configurations. It can be classified on the purpose of its deployment, either in the civilian or military domain. Drone’s manufacturing, equipment installation, power supply, multi-rotor system, and embedded sensors are not issues for researchers. The main thing is to utilize a drone for a complex and sensitive task using an infrastructure-less/self-organization/resource-less network type called Flying Ad Hoc Network (FANET). Monitoring data transmission traffic, emergency and rescue operations, border surveillance, search and physical phenomenon sensing, and so on can be achieved by developing a robust mutual authentication and cross-verification scheme for IoD deployment civilian drones. Although several protocols are available in the literature, they are either design issues or suffering from other vulnerabilities; still, no one claims with conviction about foolproof security mechanisms. Therefore, in this paper, the researchers highlighted the major deficits in prior protocols of the domain, i.e., these protocols are either vulnerable to forgery, side channel, stolen-verifier attacks, or raised the outdated data transmission flaw. In order to overcome these loopholes and provide a solution to the existing vulnerabilities, this paper proposed an improved and robust public key infrastructure (PKI) based authentication scheme for the IoD environment. The proposed protocol’s security analysis section has been conducted formally using BAN (Burrows-Abadi-Needham) logic, ProVerif2.03 simulation, and informally using discussion/pragmatic illustration. While the performance analysis section of the paper has been assessed by considering storage, computation, and communication cost. Upon comparing the proposed protocol with prior works, it has been demonstrated that it is efficient and effective and recommended for practical implementation in the IoD environment.

Towards design strong emergency and COVID-19 authentication scheme in VANET

The wide use of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) in the last decade hasled many researchers to find efficient and reliable methods to obtain the desired benefits and offer services, such as healthcare and traffic management. However, VANETs suffer from security issues represented by authentication and data integrity. In thispaper, we propose a robust mutual authentication scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), cryptography hash function, and a pseudonym. The proposed work was twofold in focus: first, on healthcare in emergency cars which use VANETs, and second, on overcoming security issues, such as resisting familiar attacks (e.g. insider attacks and reply attacks). Because of the serious situation generated by the worldwide outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic, we also found this research valuable in supporting global efforts to combat the rapid spread of this virus, by finding the safest and fastest routes to epidemic treatment centres for medical staff, assistance teams in medical operations, fumigation control, and all work teams associated with disease control. This research attempts to contribute by proposing a special signal used to define epidemic teams. The best route, fast route can be chosen by using VANETs infrastructure. This scheme also deals with metric security features, such as key management, data integrity, and data privacy. In the communication and computation cost, we noticed that our proposed scheme achieved good results compared with the related works.

Design of Robust Mutual Authentication and Key Establishment Security Protocol for Cloud-Enabled Smart Grid Communication

In recent days, the most important concern in the Internet of Things (IoT) is to experience distinct technologies in the communication systems. Smart grid is a pertinent common application under a single umbrella of the IoT and it can accomplish the communication via the Internet Protocol to sustain the information exchange between the service provider and the smart meter in the system. However, IP-based communication systems make this task susceptible to several serious security attacks. To prevent these attacks, many security protocols between the service provider and smart meter have been proposed in the literature. Existing security mechanisms allow the smart meters to establish a connection with the service provider, but it is essential to design a security system by which the service provider can communicate with multiple smart meters and establish a connection with them. To establish such connection, all the smart meters need be authenticated with the service provider and agree on an individual session key. In this article, we propose a novel mutually authenticated key establishment protocol between the service provider and the smart meter by which the service provider can initiate the communication. The proposed protocol is proven to be correct using the formal method Gong, Needham, and Yahalom logic. The protocol is also simulated in the automated tool ProVerif and the results are detailed. The proposed protocol and the existing pertinent protocols are compared in several aspects. Comparison results show that our protocol outperforms the others.

A Robust Mutual Authentication with a Key Agreement Scheme for Session Initiation Protocol

Session initiation protocol (SIP) is the most widely used application layer control protocol for creating, modifying, and terminating session processes. Many authentication schemes have been proposed for SIP aimed at providing secure communication. Recently, a new authentication and key agreement scheme for SIP has been proposed, and it was claimed that it could resist a variety of attacks. However, in this paper, we show that this scheme is vulnerable to an offline password guessing attack and a stolen memory device attack. Furthermore, we show that it lacks the verification mechanism for a wrong password, and that the password updating process is not efficient. To mitigate the flaws and inefficiencies of this scheme, we design a new robust mutual authentication with a key agreement scheme for SIP. A security analysis revealed that our proposed scheme was robust to several kinds of attacks. In addition, the proposed scheme was simulated by the automatic cryptographic protocol tool ProVerif. A performance analysis showed that our proposed scheme was superior to other related schemes.

A robust mutual authentication protocol for WSN with multiple base-stations

Security and Privacy are very crucial for data communication in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In order to provide ample security, recently many user authentication and key agreement (UAKA) protocols with single base-station have been put forward for WSNs. The base-station experienced huge load for such type of protocol, and thus, the quality of the service is dramatically reduced with the increasing number of users. This problem can be eliminated if the load is distributed to multiple base-stations. However, multiple base-stations based UAKA (MBS-UAKA) protocol with for WSN has not yet been proposed. This paper focuses to design a robust and effective MBS-UAKA protocol for WSN, which makes the secure communication as well as authentication. We evaluated all the known security properties of our MBS-UAKA protocol through formal and informal security analysis. Besides, the BAN logic analysis ensures that our MBS-UAKA protocol satisfies the mutual authentication property. Our comparative analysis ensures better performance compared to existing research works.

A Robust Mutual Authentication Scheme Based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography for Telecare Medical Information Systems

The telecare medical information systems (TMISs) provide the convenience to the patients/users to be served at home. Along with such ease, it is essential to preserve the privacy and to provide the security to the patients/users in TMIS. Often, authentication protocols are adopted to guarantee privacy and secure interaction between the patients/users and remote server. Recently, Chaudhry et al. pointed out that Islam et al. ’s scheme based on smart card is prone to user impersonation and server impersonation attacks. Chaudhry et al. later presented an enhanced scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography to remedy the weaknesses of Islam et al. ’s scheme. Unfortunately, we find some important limitations in both schemes. We remark that their scheme is prone to off-line password guessing attack, user/server impersonation attack, and man-in-middle attack. To overcome these limitations, we present an improved authentication scheme keeping apart the threats encountered in the design of Chaudhry et al. ’s scheme. Moreover, the presented scheme can also resist all known attacks. We prove the security of the proposed scheme with the help of widespread Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic. A brief comparison with the previous works provides that the presented protocol is more efficient and more secure than other related schemes.

A robust mutual authentication scheme for session initiation protocol with key establishment

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a communication protocol that controls multimedia communication sessions. As the Internet users widely use SIP services, mutual authentication between the user and SIP server becomes an important issue. Several authentication protocols for SIP have been proposed for enhancing security and better complexities. Very recently, Lu et al. proposes an authenticated key agreement protocol for SIP and claims that it withstands various attacks and efficient. This paper points out that their protocol does not provide one of the most important features user anonymity. In addition, the same protocol is not able to resist user impersonation attack, server impersonation attack and fails to provide mutual authentication. The paper also presents an improved mutual authentication and key establishment protocol that conquers the security weaknesses in Lu et al.’s protocol. Informal security analysis is also carried out for several security properties. The formal proof for the correctness of mutual authentication and session key agreement is provided using BAN logic. It is shown that the proposed protocol is provably secure against identity and password guessing attacks in the random oracle model. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with that of the existing related Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) based schemes for SIP and shown that our scheme outperforms the others.

A Robust Mutual Authentication between User Devices and Relaying Server(FIDO Server) using Certificate Authority in FIDO Environments

Recently, Biometrics is being magnified than ID or password about user authentication. However, unlike a PIN, password, and personal information there is no way to modify the exposure if it is exposed and used illegally. As FIDO(Fast IDentity Online) than existing server storing method, It stores a user's biometric information to the user device. And the user device authentication using the user's biometric information, the user equipment has been used a method to notify only the authentication result to the server FIDO. However, FIDO has no mutual authentication between the user device and the FIDO server. We use a Certificate Authority in order to mutually authenticate the user and the FIDO server. Thereby, we propose a more reliable method and compared this paper with existed methods about security analysis.

A robust and anonymous patient monitoring system using wireless medical sensor networks

In wireless medical sensor network (WMSN), bio-sensors are implanted within the patient body to sense the sensitive information of a patient which later on can be transmitted to the remote medical centers for further processing. The patient’s data can be accessed using WMSN by medical professionals from anywhere across the globe with the help of Internet. As the patient sensitive information is transmitted over an insecure WMSN, so providing a secure access and privacy of the patient’s data are challenging issues in WMSN environments. However, in literature, to provide secure data access, few user authentication protocols exist. Most of these existing protocols may not be applicable to WMSNs for providing user’s anonymity. To fill these gaps, in this article, we propose an architecture for patient monitoring health-care system in WMSN and then design an anonymity-preserving mutual authentication protocol for mobile users. We used the AVISPA tool to simulate the proposed protocol. The results obtained indicate that the proposed authentication protocol resists the existing well known attacks. In addition, the BAN logic model confirms mutual authentication feature of the proposed protocol. Moreover, an informal cryptanalysis is also given, which ensures that the proposed protocol withstands all known attacks. We perform a comparative discussion of the proposed protocol against the existing protocols and the comparative results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is efficient and robust. Specifically, the proposed protocol is not only effective in providing robustness against common security threats, but it also offers an efficient login, robust mutual authentication, and user-friendly password change.

Robust Remote Mutual Authentication Scheme with Key Agreement

In 2006, Shieh and Wang proposed a remote mutual authentication and key agreement scheme, in which a user can login to a remote server with his password and smartcard. In Shieh and Wang’s scheme, it requires only hash functions operations during the login and key agreement phase. However, Holbl et al. demonstrated some attacks on Shieh and Wang’s scheme and proposed an improved scheme to overcome the shown attacks in 2010. In this paper, we point out that Holbl et al.’s proposed scheme is still vulnerable to an offline password guessing and forgery attack. In addition, Holbl et al.’s scheme fails to achieve explicit key authentication. We propose a robust remote mutual authentication scheme with key agreement to resist against above mentioned attacks and provide more security requirements.

Robust Mutual Authentication with a Key Agreement Scheme for the Session Initiation Protocol

The session initiation protocol (SIP) is a powerful signaling protocol that controls communication on the Internet, establishing, maintaining, and terminating the sessions. The services that are enabled by SIP are equally applicable in the world of mobile and ubiquitous computing. In 2009, Tsai proposed an efficient nonce-based authentication scheme for SIP. The current paper, however, demonstrates that Tsai’s authentication scheme is still vulnerable to offline password guessing attacks, Denning-Sacco attacks, and stolen-verifier attacks, and does not provide perfect forward secrecy. We also propose a new secure and efficient authentication scheme based on the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem for SIP in order to overcome such security problems.