Secure Data Communication Research Articles

Developing an Integrated Framework for Securing Internet of Things Traffic in Smart Cities Using Machine Learning Techniques

Internet of Things technology opens the horizon to a broader scope of intelligent applications in smart cities. However, the massive amount of traffic exchanged among devices may cause security risks, especially when devices are compromised or vulnerable to cyberattack. An intrusion detection system is the most powerful tool to detect unauthorized attempts to access smart systems. It identifies malicious and benign traffic by analyzing network traffic. In most cases, only a fraction of network traffic can be considered malicious. As a result, it is difficult for an intrusion detection system to detect attacks at high detection rates while maintaining a low false alarm rate. This work proposes an integrated framework to detect suspicious traffic to address secure data communication in smart cities. This paper presents an approach to developing an intrusion detection system to detect various attack types. It can be carried out by implementing a Principal Component Analysis method that eliminates redundancy and reduces system dimensionality. Furthermore, the proposed model shows how to improve intrusion detection system performance by implementing an ensemble model.

On the privacy and security for e-health services in the metaverse: An overview

Metaverse-enabled healthcare systems are expected to efficiently utilize an unprecedented amount of health-related data without disclosing sensitive or private information of individuals during data collection, communications, and learning-based processing. In this paper, we study the privacy and security of the metaverse healthcare from different aspects. Specifically, we first investigate the security of data collection and communications in the access layer of the metaverse. We then go through the privacy and security issues inside the metaverse, by addressing the privacy and security threats of utilizing clinical machine learning for intelligent e-health. From a human-centric perspective, privacy of social interactions among patients in a metaverse-enabled healthcare platform is also studied. We try to provide a holistic and less-investigated approach to help metaverse-as-a-health service providers facilitate the realization of secure and private e-health services from different aspects, ranging from the access layer to the social interactions among clients. Future vision and directions are also discussed to bring further insights for the network designers in the metaverse era.

Color Image Steganography Using Gradient Selective Bezier Curves

Internet technology has revolutionized the landscape of communication technologies in the modern era. However, because the internet is open to the public, communication security cannot be guaranteed. As a result, data concealment approaches have been developed to ensure confidential information sharing. Various methods have emerged to achieve the goal of secure data communication via multimedia documents. This study proposes a method, which is both adaptable and imperceptible, for concealing a secret text in a color image. From an adaptivity perspective, image corners are detected using the Harris corner detection algorithm and utilized as anchor points for picking the optimal hiding regions of interest using Bezier curve interpolation. On the other hand, because human vision is less sensitive to aberrations in edge regions, imperceptibility is guaranteed by utilizing curves that cross through these regions. Experiments indicate that utilizing gradient selective Bezier curves for secret text concealment can keep the imperceptibility even when the payload capacity is increased.

Secure identity key and blockchain‐based authentication approach for secure data communication in multi‐WSN

SummaryBlockchain technology is an effective way to protect data that is handled by wireless sensor network (WSN). The traditional authentication protocol relies on trusted third parties, and most of the WSN paradigm does not allow these conditions, which results in single‐point failure. Sometimes the authentication process is slower, eventually hampers user experience, and thus users are inclined towards other alternatives that can offer multi‐factor authentication. To solve such issues, a secure identity key and blockchain‐based authentication framework is designed using a hybrid blockchain system in multi‐WSN to enhance the system's security. The nodes cooperate in the network to perform specific tasks such that interaction between nodes ensures the legitimacy of node's identity. With hybrid blockchain technology, nodes' identity information is authenticated and stored in the network after verification to establish communication among ordinary nodes and between the ordinary nodes and end user. The proposed method obtains higher security by achieving less computation time, higher detection rate, and limited memory usage of 0.072 s, 92.48%, and 3.925 MB, respectively. The developed authentication method is proved capable of proving resistance in case of different attacks in the network.

Enhancing Security and Efficiency in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks: A Lightweight Key Management Framework

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) obtains more attention due to their wide range of applications such as underwater oil field discovery, Tsunami monitoring systems, surveillance systems, and many more. In such a resource-constrained environment, sensors are more vulnerable to malicious attacks. Node authentication and secure communication is one of the vital issues in UWSNs. In this study, a secure and lightweight key management framework for UWSNs is proposed. The proposed framework includes key generation, key distribution, revocation, and authentication mechanisms along with lightweight implementation, and scalability. We use an elliptic curve-based algorithm for key distribution, and certificate revocation list (CRL) for key revocation. We also examine the performance of the proposed framework taking into account the amount of communication overhead as well as the level of security. The simulation results show that the proposed framework provides better security with less communication overhead compared to existing frameworks. This framework can be used for secure data communication in UWSNs, which has various applications in oceanography, environmental monitoring, and military operations.

Ensuring Secure Data Exchange in Software-defined Local Network

Introduction. Protecting outer perimeter is not enough to ensure secure data communication in the information system of local area network. Analytical reports of leading information security companies confirm this fact. Usually, an attacker having overcome the outer perimeter conducts network reconnaissance before carrying out an attack. The success of a network attack depends on the completeness of the information collected. The constantly changing network topology does not provide an attacker with long-term network topology information, as a result, the attacker is forced to collect information more intensively thereby identifying himself. Otherwise, the effectiveness of the planned attack is reduced. The aim of this research is to increase the intra-network data transfer security level by means of network topology dynamic reconfiguration. The authors proposed a new solution for ensuring secure node interaction countering both internal and external attackers having overcome an outer perimeter.Materials and methods. The proposed solution is based on a software-defined network and VxLAN technology. The solution involves constant network reconfiguration both with a certain frequency and on the occurrence of certain events, so that an attacker could not have long-term information. If an intruder is detected or an information security incident occurs, the network is automatically reconfigured in such a way as to lessen or prevent possible consequences.Results. The obtained results show that periodic network changes do not allow an attacker to covertly collect complete information about the network, and the proposed solution may allow to detect and isolate the attacker.Discussion and conclusion. The obtained results show that it is possible to apply the proposed solution for organizing secure data communication within the local computer network of the information system.

A robust and secure user authentication scheme based on multifactor and multi‐gateway in IoT enabled sensor networks

AbstractThe Internet of Things (IoT) enabled wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used to collect data from various nodes in hostile environments, but it is essential to authenticate legitimate nodes to prevent malicious attacks. Traditional authentication schemes may be vulnerable to attack, necessitating the development of more secure authentication techniques. To address this problem, we propose a novel authentication technique for multi‐gateway IoT‐enabled WSNs that achieves effective and secure data communication. The proposed scheme is based on biological information, hash, and XOR operations, which reduce computational costs. Passwords, biometric information, and session keys are updated securely to maintain forward and backward secrecy during communication. We provide an informal security analysis of the proposed scheme and a formal security analysis of the session key using the real‐or‐random (ROR) model. We also use the AVISPA simulation toolkit to verify the proposed user authentication scheme. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme is more effective than previous multi‐factor multi‐gateway authentication protocols.

A Blockchain-Centric IoT Architecture for Effective Smart Contract-Based Management of IoT Data Communications

The exponential growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) is being witnessed nowadays in different sectors. This makes IoT data communications more complex and harder to manage. Addressing such a challenge using a centralized model is an ineffective approach and would result in security and privacy difficulties. Technologies such as blockchain provide a potential solution to enable secure and effective management of IoT data communication in a distributed and trustless manner. In this paper, a novel lightweight blockchain-centric IoT architecture is proposed to address effective IoT data communication management. It is based on an event-driven smart contract that enables manageable and trustless IoT data exchange using a simple publish/subscribe model. To maintain system complexity and overhead at a minimum, the design of the proposed system relies on a single smart contract. All the system operations that enable effective IoT data communication among the different parties of the system are defined in the smart contract. There is no direct blockchain–IoT-device interaction, making the system more useable in wide IoT deployments incorporating IoT devices with limited computing and energy resources. A practical Ethereum-based implementation of the system was developed with the ability to simulate different IoT setups. The evaluation results demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed architecture. Considering varying-scale and varying-density experimental setups, reliable and secure data communications were achieved with little latency and resource consumption.

SDAA: Secure Data Aggregation and Authentication Using Multiple Sinks in Cluster-Based Underwater Vehicular Wireless Sensor Network.

Security is one of the major concerns while designing robust protocols for underwater sensor networks (UWSNs). The underwater sensor node (USN) is an example of medium access control (MAC) that should control underwater UWSN, and underwater vehicles (UV) combined. Therefore, our proposed method, in this research, investigates UWSN combined with UV optimized as an underwater vehicular wireless network (UVWSN) that can completely detect malicious node attacks (MNA) from the network. Thus, MNA that engages the USN channel and launches MNA is resolved by our proposed protocol through SDAA (secure data aggregation and authentication) protocol deployed in UVWSN. SDAA protocol plays a significant role in secure data communication, as the cluster-based network design (CBND) network organization creates a concise, stable, and energy-efficient network. This paper introduces SDAA optimized network known as UVWSN. In this proposed SDAA protocol, the cluster head (CH) is authenticated through the gateway (GW) and the base station (BS) to guarantee that a legitimate USN oversees all clusters deployed in the UVWSN are securely established for providing trustworthiness/privacy. Furthermore, the communicated data in the UVWSN network guarantee that data transmission is secure due to the optimized SDAA models in the network. Thus, the USNs deployed in the UVWSN are securely confirmed to maintain secure data communication in CBND for energy efficiency. The proposed method is implemented and validated on the UVWSN for measuring reliability, delay, and energy efficiency in the network. The proposed method is utilized for monitoring scenarios for inspecting vehicles or ship structures in the ocean. Based on the testing results, the proposed SDAA protocol methods improve energy efficiency and reduce network delay compared to other standard secure MAC methods.

Localizing an underwater sensor node using sonar and establishing underwater wireless optical communication for data transfer applications

Locating an underwater sensor node over the seabed and acquiring fast, secure data communication between the node and an underwater vehicle could lead to advancements in underwater exploration and marine technology. Currently, the seabed is extensively mapped using multibeam sonar modules, providing detailed information about the bed. Because of its high computational requirements and cost, multibeam sonar is not suitable for this application. The aim of this article is to deploy an experimental setup with a single-beam sonar to localize the node, and then, establish a communication link. The single beam sonar has a 30° beamwidth, which can be improvised to have a full range scan using a custom pan-tilt mechanism setup. To accomplish the full-scale area mapping, underwater servo motors have been used in our customized pan-tilt mechanism. Once the localization is done using a custom pan-tilt mechanism, a line-of-sight optical wireless communication is established with a 200 kbps data rate. The channel is modeled based on the test pool experiments. The channel model is used to simulate underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) to a longer link length and higher data rate. An underwater link length of 3.13 m was achieved at 1 W and 1 Gbps data rate with a Q factor of 6 and BER of 10−9. For this test setup and simulation parameters, various parameters such as BER and quality factor are examined.

On chip network with increased performance for efficient wireless communication

Core systems with network transactions deployed semiconductor materials to develop wireless networks-on-chip to minimize latency with increased performance. For transmitting data from the source point towards the target point, an appropriate reconfigurable routing method has to be deployed with respect to nodes. For overhead on-chip communication that involves the linking of many cores in a single chip, congestion may occur which has to be eliminated. A marching memory arbitrator is deployed in the path that is prone to congestion which computes the port as a buffer. The static degradation of energy power utilization in the router is solved by using a Marching memory buffer. The secure communication of data can be deployed with hash, identity, and address verification blocks. The traffic is then relaxed by routing arbitrator and then data transmission is done through frequency division multiplexing in the communication channel with reconfigurable routing. The analysis of simulation results is found to have a better throughput, less latency, and reduced power consumption.

A secured wireless charging scheme with data transmission

This research task proposes a magnetic resonant coupling wireless power transfer(MRC-WPT) scheme for electric vehicles, which realizes secure data communication between the wireless charging station and the electric vehicle using binary phase shift-keying (BPSK) data transmission, thereby waving any radio frequency(RF) communication links. The secondary side is designed to accept power, while it transmits data back to the primary side simultaneously. The BPSK design ensures data transmission robustness to against disturbance interference. The data are encrypted by the user's biometric features for information security. The magnetic resonance performs better than that of the traditional magnetic induction in the power transmission efficiency against coil misalignments. With the Internet of Thing(IOT) architecture, the encrypted data can be stored and retrieved via the cloud server.

CADF-CSE: Chaotic map-based authenticated data access/sharing framework for IoT-enabled cloud storage environment

Data is an essential asset of an organization or individual in this information age. Secure and resource-efficient data communication has become paramount in the IoT-enabled cloud storage environment. The users must communicate with the cloud storage servers to access, store, and share the data utilizing the public communication channel, which is exposed to various security threats. Moreover, various security frameworks have been presented to render secure data access, storage, and sharing functionalities for the cloud storage environment. Most of them are complicated and incapacitated of resisting various security attacks. Thus, it is imperative to design a secure and resource-efficient data access, storage, and sharing framework for the cloud storage environment. This paper presents a chaotic map-based authenticated data access/sharing framework for the IoT-enabled cloud storage environment (CADF-CSE). CADF-CSE is designed using the chaotic map, authenticated encryption scheme (AEGIS), and one-way hash function (Esch256). The proposed CADF-CSE comprises three significant phases user access control, data storage, and data sharing. The user access control phase enables the user and cloud server to attain mutual authentication followed by the secret session key establishment. Using the established SK during the access control phase user and cloud server exchange information securely across the public Internet. The data storage phase facilitates the data owner to store the data on a cloud server in encrypted form, where encryption is performed with a secret key derived from the user’s biometric. The data-sharing phase enables users to access the data from the cloud server after acquiring mutual permission from the cloud server and the data owner. In addition, an explication of the CADF-CSE through formal and informal analysis shows its resilience to various security attacks. Finally, the performance comparison explicates that CADF-CSE renders better security features while requiring lower computational and communication costs than the related security frameworks.

Efficient Medical Data Transmission in Mobile Hospital Systems with Wireless Body Area Network

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are expected to play a major role in the field of patient- health monitoring shortly. One of the challenges is to establish secure communication architecture between sensors and users, whilst addressing the prevalent security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose communication architecture for BANs and design a scheme to secure the data communications between implanted /wearable sensors and the data sink/data consumers (doctors or nurses) by employing Cipher text-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) and signature to store the data in cipher text format at the data sink, hence ensuring data security. Our scheme achieves a role-based access control by employing an access control tree defined by the attributes of the data. We also design two protocols to securely retrieve the sensitive data from a BAN and instruct the sensors in a BAN. We analyze the proposed scheme and argue that it provides message authenticity and collusion resistance, and is efficient and feasible. We also evaluate its performance in terms of energy consumption and communication/computation overhead. Keywords: Wireless Body Area Networks, Encryption, data sink, secure data communication.

Secure Digital Information Forward Using Highly Developed AES Techniques in Cloud Computing

Nowadays, in communications, the main criteria are ensuring the digital information and communication in the network. The normal two users' communication exchanges confidential data and files via the web. Secure data communication is the most crucial problem for message transmission networks. To resolve this problem, cryptography uses mathematical encryption and decryption data on adaptation by converting data from a key into an unreadable format. Cryptography provides a method for performing the transmission of confidential or secure communication. The proposed AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)-based Padding Key Encryption (PKE) algorithm encrypts the Data; it generates the secret key in an unreadable format. The receiver decrypts the data using the private key in a readable format. In the proposed PKE algorithm, the sender sends data into plain Text to cypher-text using a secret key to the authorized person; the unauthorized person cannot access the data through the Internet; only an authorized person can view the data through the private key. A method for identifying user groups was developed. Support vector machines (SVM) were used in user behaviour analysis to estimate probability densities so that each user could be predicted to launch applications and sessions independently. The results of the proposed simulation offer a high level of security for transmitting sensitive data or files to recipients compared to other previous methods and user behaviour analysis.

A Comprehensive Study on Crypto-Algorithms.

In the field of computer network and security, cryptography plays a vital role for secure data transmission as it follows the principle of data confidentiality, integrity, non-repudiation, authentication. By using several cryptographic algorithms, a user can deliver and receive the message in more convenient way. In this paper, we have collaborated on various cryptographic algorithms, several types of cryptographic techniques along with different types of security attacks prevailing in case of cryptography. During the exchanging of any sort of information, the key generation, encryption and decryption processes are examined in more details in the current paper. We have discussed regarding RSA (Ron Rives, Adi Shamir and Len Adelman), which is one of the most secure algorithm in the context of data and information sharing, that has been analysed clearly in our work along with the basic concepts of DES(Data Encryption Standard) , conventional encryption model, ECC(Elliptic curve cryptography), Digital signature, ABE(Attribute based Encryption), KP-ABE(Key policy Attribute based encryption), CP-ABE(Ciphertext policy attribute based encryption), IBE(Identity based Encryption). We have elaborated various cryptograhic concepts for keeping the message confidential and secure while considering secured data communication in case of networks.

Reputation based Symmetric Key Authentication for Secure Data Transmission in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

INTRODUCTION: MANETs were a group of nodes which connected each other to establish the network via wireless association to forward packets towards destinations. OBJECTIVES: Reputation-based Symmetric Key Authentication (RSKA) technique is proposed to improve the security of data communication, which securely transmits data packets within MANET communication. Initially, a reputation counts-based node authentication algorithm is designed in RSKA technique by considering the reputation value of mobile nodes in networks. METHODS: By using a reputation count-based node authentication algorithm, the RSKA technique performs the node authentication process before initiating route identification and selects cooperative nodes in MANETs for data transmission. Therefore, the RSKA of nodes results in improved security of data communication for enhancing throughput and reducing data loss rate. Besides, the RSKA technique uses symmetric key cryptography for secure data transmission in which a secret key is generated for the data to be transmitted by the corresponding mobile node along the route path of the source-destination pair. The destination node having the secret key can only decrypt the cypher text. RESULTS: Thus, the RSKA technique improves the data confidentiality rate as well as minimizes the time to protect the data transmission in an efficient way. RSKA was calculated by various parameters, namely data loss rate, throughput and time to protect data delivery as well as data confidentiality rate. CONCLUSION: The simulation result of RSKA improves the data confidentiality rate for achieving secured data transmission as well as minimizes time to protect data delivery within MANETs compared with conventional methods.

Experimental Implementation of Metasurfaces for Secure Multi‐Channel Image Encryption in the Infrared

AbstractThe ability to tailor light–matter interactions using artificially engineered materials has opened up new avenues for secure data storage and communication. This work presents an experimental investigation of metasurfaces for secure, multi‐channel image encryption in the infrared (IR). The proposed metasurfaces consist of an array of pixels, each designed to produce a wavelength‐ and polarization‐dependent IR absorptivity. A basis set of pixels is designed for encrypting images of arbitrary resolution on a given number of wavelength and polarization channels. These pixels are fabricated, and their spectral response is experimentally measured using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The measured data is used to emulate the encryption and decryption of binary and 8‐bit grayscale images. Finally, the security of the encryption scheme proposed in this work is evaluated by performing statistical analyses on the image data stored on different channels. The results presented in this study suggest intriguing possibilities for the development of encrypted tagging technologies in the infrared and thus have implications for secure object identification and anti‐counterfeiting.

State-of-the-art session key generation on priority-based adaptive neural machine (PANM) in telemedicine.

Telemedicine is one of the safest methods to provide healthcare facilities to the remote patients with the help of digitization. In this paper, state-of-the-art session key has been proposed based on the priority oriented neural machines followed by its validation. State-of-the-art technique can be mentioned as newer scientific method. Soft computing has been extensively used and modified here under the ANN domain. Telemedicine facilitates secure data communication between the patients and the doctors regarding their treatments. The best fitted hidden neuron can contribute only in the formation of the neural output. Minimum correlation was taken into consideration under this study. Hebbian learning rule was applied on both the patient's neural machine and the doctor's neural machine. Lesser iterations were needed in the patient's machine and the doctor's machine for the synchronization. Thus, the key generation time has been shortened here which were 4.011ms, 4.324ms, 5.338ms, 5.691ms, and 6.105ms for 56 bits, 128 bits, 256 bits, 512 bits, and 1024 bits of state-of-the-art session keys, respectively. Statistically, different key sizes of the state-of-the-art session keys were tested and accepted. Derived value-based function had yielded successful outcomes too. Partial validations with different mathematical hardness had been imposed here too. Thus, the proposed technique is suitable for the session key generation and authentication in the telemedicine in order to preserve the patients' data privacy. This proposed method has been highly protective against numerous data attacks inside the public networks. Partial transmission of the state-of-the-art session key disables the intruders to decode the same bit patterns of the proposed set of keys.

A zero trust and blockchain-based defense model for smart electric vehicle chargers

Electric vehicles (EVs) have rapidly developed over the last decade due to their environmental benefits. As a key component of EVs, electric vehicle chargers are becoming increasingly digital and intelligent. However, due to the vast attack surface and the lack of systematic study, EV chargers and charging management cloud platforms are facing cyber security problems. These problems include weak cryptographic mechanisms, insecure data communication, and malicious firmware attacks. Through specific vulnerabilities, attackers can tamper with the data communication or replay network requests between EV chargers and cloud platforms. It will cause threats such as user-level privacy leakage, power fluctuations in the smart grid, and damage to Electric vehicles, damaging public life and property safety. Given the above, this paper proposes a security protection scheme incorporating blockchain, zero trust, and ShangMi cryptographic (SM) algorithms. The scheme uses Hyperledger Fabric for key management and trust evaluation event storage to guarantee the authenticity, non-repudiation, and tamper-proof of keys and events. In addition, zero trust is applied to secure valuable resources and enforce identity and access management (IAM) for accessing entities. We adopt the dynamic trust evaluation method to assess the trustworthiness of accessing entities in real time to implement dynamic authorization. Furthermore, the SM algorithms SM2, SM3, and SM4 are used to protect data confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. Experimental results demonstrate that our scheme can effectively resist replay and tampering attacks, securing data communication between EV chargers and cloud platforms. And the performance of the cryptographic algorithm, blockchain system, and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) meets Chinese national and industry standards.