Secure Mutual Authentication Scheme Research Articles

A Robust Privacy-Preserving ECC-Based Three-Factor Authentication Scheme for Metaverse Environment

Metaverse is revolutionizing the future iteration of technology with the potential to ameliorate efficiency and innovation drastically. It fashions engaging spaces for user interaction that simulate the real world by integrating augmented and virtual reality. Metaverse furnishes immersive interactive experiences, unrestricted time and space, visualizations, minimal learning costs, and endorses communication. A metaverse offers various services, such as virtual environments and avatars for telecommuting, education, and gaming. Yet, to access services, users must register with the server, where the registration requires user’s identity, password, and personal information. Additionally, the user interaction in metaverse is mediated through avatars over public channels, fabricating opportunities for security attacks such as replay and impersonation attacks. Consequently, we propose a secure mutual authentication scheme for safer user-server and avatar–avatar interactions utilizing Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and fuzzy extractor. The security of protocol is examined with Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, Real-or-Random (ROR) model, and Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols Applications (AVISPA). We also conduct a comparative analysis of the computational and communication costs and the security features of proposed scheme with pre-existing works. Hence, the suggested protocol offers magnificent security and efficiency, making it suitable for the metaverse environment.

Provably Secure and Lightweight Authentication Key Agreement Scheme for Smart Meters

Smart Grid is an indispensable part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and has the potential to revolutionise the electricity energy industry. Smart meters, as an important component of Smart Grid, are responsible for the exchange of information between end consumers and service providers. Smart meters and service providers need to use authentication key exchange protocols (AKE) to establish a secure session for secure information transmission. However, The current state-of-the-art lightweight solutions do not support identity anonymity and mostly have high communication costs. This paper proposes a lightweight and secure mutual authentication scheme, which is particularly designed for devices with limited computing capability to provide identity anonymity such as smart meters, based on the Shangyong Mima 2 (SM2) AKE protocol stipulated by the State Cryptography Administration of China. We conducted formal analysis of the security of the proposed scheme and proved its security. In addition, the computational overhead of the protocol was evaluated through performance analysis. Compared with related lightweight protocols, our scheme can reduce up to 30%-40% computational overhead. The results verified that the proposed scheme is indeed suitable for secure communication involving devices with constrained computing capability.

Provably Secure Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme Using PUF in Internet of Drones Deployments.

Internet of Drones (IoD), designed to coordinate the access of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), is a specific application of the Internet of Things (IoT). Drones are used to control airspace and offer services such as rescue, traffic surveillance, environmental monitoring, delivery and so on. However, IoD continues to suffer from privacy and security issues. Firstly, messages are transmitted over public channels in IoD environments, which compromises data security. Further, sensitive data can also be extracted from stolen mobile devices of remote users. Moreover, drones are susceptible to physical capture and manipulation by adversaries, which are called drone capture attacks. Thus, the development of a secure and lightweight authentication scheme is essential to overcoming these security vulnerabilities, even on resource-constrained drones. In 2021, Akram et al. proposed a secure and lightweight user-drone authentication scheme for drone networks. However, we discovered that Akram et al.'s scheme is susceptible to user and drone impersonation, verification table leakage, and denial of service (DoS) attacks. Furthermore, their scheme cannot provide perfect forward secrecy. To overcome the aforementioned security vulnerabilities, we propose a secure mutual authentication and key agreement scheme between user and drone pairs. The proposed scheme utilizes physical unclonable function (PUF) to give drones uniqueness and resistance against drone stolen attacks. Moreover, the proposed scheme uses a fuzzy extractor to utilize the biometrics of users as secret parameters. We analyze the security of the proposed scheme using informal security analysis, Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, a Real-or-Random (RoR) model, and Automated Verification of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation. We also compared the security features and performance of the proposed scheme and the existing related schemes. Therefore, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme is suitable for IoD environments that can provide users with secure and convenient wireless communications.

Design of Secure Handover Authentication Scheme for Urban Air Mobility Environments

Urban air mobility (UAM) is a future air transportation system to solve the air pollution and movement efficiency problems of the traditional mobility system. In UAM environments, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are used to transport passengers and goods providing various convenient services such as package delivery, air bus, and air taxi. However, UAVs communicate with ground infrastructures through open channels that can be exposed to various security attacks. Therefore, a secure mutual authentication scheme is necessary for UAM environments. Moreover, a handover authentication is also necessary to ensure seamless communication when the service location is changed. In this paper, we design a secure and efficient handover authentication scheme for UAM environments considering various security vulnerabilities and efficiency using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). We utilize informal security analysis, Real-or-Random (RoR), Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, and Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) to prove the security of the proposed scheme. Furthermore, we compare the computation and communication cost comparisons of the proposed scheme with the other related schemes. The results show that the proposed scheme is secure and efficient for UAM environments.

Design of Secure Mutual Authentication Scheme for Metaverse Environments Using Blockchain

During the COVID-19 pandemic, engagement in various remote activities such as online education and meetings has increased. However, since the conventional online environments typically provide simple streaming services using cameras and microphones, there have limitations in terms of physical expression and experiencing real-world activities such as cultural and economic activities. Recently, metaverse environments, three-dimensional virtual reality that use avatars, have attracted increasing attention as a means to solve these problems. Thus, many metaverse platforms such as Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite have been emerging to provide various services to users. However, such metaverse environments are potentially vulnerable to various security threats because the users and platform servers communicate through public channels. In addition, sensitive user data such as identity, password, and biometric information are managed by each platform server. In this paper, we design a system model that can guarantee secure communication and transparently manage user identification data in metaverse environments using blockchain technology. We also propose a mutual authentication scheme using biometric information and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to provide secure communication between users and platform servers and secure avatar interactions between avatars and avatars. To demonstrate the security of the proposed mutual authentication scheme, we perform informal security analysis, Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, Real-or-Random (ROR) model, and Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA). In addition, we compare the computation costs, communication costs, and security features of the proposed scheme with existing schemes in similar environments. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has lower computation and communication costs and can provide a wider range of security features than existing schemes. Thus, our proposed scheme can be used to provide secure metaverse environments.

Lightweight and Secure Mutual Authentication Scheme for IoT Devices Using CoAP Protocol

Internet of things enables every real world objects to be seamlessly integrated with traditional internet. Heterogeneous objects of real world are enhanced with capability to communicate, computing capabilities and standards to interoperate with existing network and these entities are resource constrained and vulnerable to various security attacks. Huge number of research works are being carried out to analyze various possible attacks and to propose standards for securing communication between devices in internet of things (IoT). In this article, a robust and lightweight authentication scheme for mutual authentication between client and server using constrained application protocol is proposed. Internet of things enables devices with different characteristics and capabilities to be integrated with internet. These heterogeneous devices should interoperate with each other to accumulate, process and transmit data for facilitating smart services. The growth of IoT applications leads to the rapid growth of IoT devices incorporated to the global network and network traffic over the traditional network. This scheme greatly reduces the authentication overhead between the devices by reducing the packet size of messages, number of messages transmitted and processing overhead on communicating devices. Efficiency of this authentication scheme against attacks such as DoS (denial of service), replay attacks and attacks to exhaust the resources are also examined. Message transmission time reduced upto 50% of using proposed techniques.

A Secure and Lightweight Anonymous Mutual Authentication Scheme for Wearable Devices in Medical Internet of Things

A Secure and Lightweight Anonymous Mutual Authentication Scheme for Wearable Devices in Medical Internet of Things

Using Blockchain based Authentication Solution for the Remote Surgery in Tactile Internet

Since the Tactile Internet has been considered as a new era of Internet, delivering real-time interactive systems as well as ultra-reliable and ultra-responsive network connectivity, tremendous efforts have been made to ensure authentication between communication’s parties to secure remote surgery. Since this human to machine interaction like remote surgery is critical and the communication between the surgeon and the tactile actor i.e. robot arms should be fully protected during the surgical procedure, a fully secure mutual user authentication scheme should be used in order to establish a secure session among the communicating parties. The existing methods usually require a server to ensure the authentication among the communicating parties, which makes the system vulnerable to single of point failure and not fit the design of such critical distributed environment i.e. tactile internet. To address these issues, we propose a new decentralized blockchain based authentication solution for tactile internet. In our proposed solution, there is no need for a trusted party; moreover, the decentralized nature of our proposed solution makes the authentication immutable, efficient, secure, and low latency requirement. The implementation of our proposed solution is deployed on Ethereum official test network Ropsten. The experimental results show that our solution is efficient, highly secured, and flexible.

ECC-Based Authentication Scheme for Cloud-Based Robots

Security is one of the important aspects for many robotic applications. Cloud Robotics is one of the areas where security plays a vital role. Cloud-based robots access cloud resources to offload computational intensive tasks such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. Cloud-based robots can also get access to on-demand services. However, there is a strong need to provide these services secured manner. In security, authentication is one of the critical aspects because it ensures that only legitimate users get access to resources. In cloud-based robots, we intend to provide cloud services to the authorized robots only. In this paper, we have created a secure mutual authentication scheme between robots and cloud servers using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) with the key agreement for robots that access the cloud resources. The proposed scheme has been testified against the various well-known attacks using the Proverif tool. Moreover, when compared with other ECC-based authentication schemes, our proposed authentication scheme found efficient than them.

A secure mutual authentication scheme of blockchain-based in WBANs

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) refer to small sensor network that consists of sensor devices mounted on the surface of the body or implanted in the body, as such networks are employed to harvest physiological data of the human body or to act as an assistant regulator of several specific physiological indicators of the human body. The sensor devices transmit the harvested human physiological data to the local node via a public channel. Before transmitting data, the sensor device and the local node should perform mutual authentication and key agreement. It is proposed in this paper a secure mutual authentication scheme of blockchain-based in WBANs. To analyze the security of this scheme, formal security analysis, and informal security analysis are used, then the computation and communication costs are compared with those of the relevant schemes. Relevant experimental results reveal that the proposed scheme exhibit more effective control over energy consumption and promising.

Multi Factor Two-way Hash-Based Authentication in Cloud Computing

The expansion of Cloud computing is influencing various domains such as education, the banking sector, industries, government, health informatics, and individuals. The characteristics of an easy interface, on-demand access, scalability, and low infrastructure investment have to lead to the fast adaptation of Cloud computing based upon their needs. Despite the advantages, Cloud computing is open to more security risks and attacks especially in terms of communication due to the lack of secure authentication and privacy. In this article is presented a novel hash-based multifactor secure mutual authentication scheme that includes mathematical hashing properties, certificates, nonce values, traditional user ids, and password mechanisms that resist MITM attacks, replay attacks, and forgery attacks. We implemented our proposed method in the Microsoft Azure cloud and the results are evaluated. The security analysis is done by using the Scyther tool and with a formal analysis by using GNY belief logic. The results indicate the proposed scheme is capable of providing strong secure authentication.

A secure and privacy-preserving key agreement and mutual authentication scheme

A secure and privacy-preserving key agreement and mutual authentication scheme

A secure and privacy-preserving key agreement and mutual authentication scheme

The development of manufacturing, communication, and computing technologies has promoted convergence of different network architectures, aiming to make full use of all resources to create valuable information. While heterogeneous integrated networks play a key role in providing highly effective and efficient solutions for medical users, they also raise various security and privacy issues. Strengthen the security and privacy protection and efficiency before transmitting sensitive data is a primary challenge to be addressed. Traditional authentication methods fail to differentiate the privacy sensitivity difference between data collected by distinct devices. We propose a secure and efficient key management scheme based on a key-exposure resistant chameleon hash function. Through adopting the devices' privacy sensitivity and users' attribute credential as two factors to establish trust between different entities, we proposed a secure and anonymous authentication protocol. The security analyses indicate that the proposed protocol can satisfy security requirements.

Secure mutual authentication with privacy preservation in vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) plays an important role in smart transportation to reduce the driver's risk of having an accident and offer many entertainment facilities services. However, since the nature of open communication for VANETs, the messages broadcasted by vehicle are easily suffer from security attacks. Recently, many schemes have been proposed to address the aforesaid problems for VANETs, however most of them have huge computational and communication overhead. In this paper, we propose a secure mutual authentication scheme with privacy preservation to address the aforesaid challenges existing in VANETs. Firstly, before the vehicle broadcasts messages to other vehicles, it needs to execute mutual authentication process between TA and the vehicle to ensure that any attacker could not enter the range of communication to broadcast fake message causes damage. Secondly, before the attacker acquires the information (such as internal pseudo-identity and encryption key) stored in the tamper proof device via the side-channel attack, these information have been updated, so the side-channel attack could be resisted. Finally, because the bilinear pairing is not used in our scheme, the system cost is lower than other schemes during the performance evaluation. Therefore, our scheme is more suitable for the large scale VANETs.

An improved three-factor authentication scheme for patient monitoring using WSN in remote health-care system

Background and objective: Wireless sensor network-based remote health-care systems are becoming popular day by day with the rapid growth of Internet technologies and the proliferation of Internet-based application. A remote health-care system always demands a flexible and secure mechanism since any misuse of health-care related data leads to the risk of a patient’s life. To make patient-related information more secure, we further consider that the patient related all the communication must be anonymous and untraceable to prevent traffic analysis. This particular approach makes the healthcare system more secure and suitable for real-time scenario.Methods: Recently, a three-factor mutual authentication scheme in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is suggested by Challa et al. to deal with the security of the remote health-care system. They believe that their scheme is suitable and ensure the security of the remote health-care system. However, the authors of this article have found that their scheme suffers from sensor node capture attack; user identity reveals attack, session key leak attack, and message modification attack. Further, their scheme designs improper user revocation phase and re-registration phase, which produces the risk of illegal use of smartcard by a legitimate user. So, in this paper, the authors have given an enhanced mechanism for developing a three-factor secure mutual authentication scheme to attain effectively the security of the remote health-care system for patient monitoring. Further, the proper revocation and re-registration of users have been incorporated to support some additional securities in a case when the user lost his/her smartcard or smartcard is stolen.Results and conclusions: Testing with the BAN logic model affirms the accuracy of mutual authentication of the scheme designed in this paper. Also, the output of the AVISPA simulation depicts that the enhanced scheme efficiently tackle the active and passive attacks. Further, the comparative studies of our scheme with state-of-the-art schemes are also acceptable in terms of different security aspects.

A multi‐attack resilient lightweight IoT authentication scheme

AbstractMajority of the devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) are deployed in an environment that is susceptible to cyber‐attacks. Due to the resource‐constraint nature of IoT, it is very hard to meet the security challenges that arise due to the deployment of IoT devices in the unsecure environment. In this context, the authentication of IoT devices is one of the core challenges. Many protocols have been designed to address and overcome the security issues that stem from the authentication failure. However, many of these protocols are designed using the complex cryptographic techniques that may not be supported by IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and secure mutual authentication scheme for resource constraint IoT devices. The proposed scheme is robust against cyber‐attacks, such as impersonation, modification, session key disclosure, and eavesdropping attacks. The security of the proposed scheme is formally tested using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool and found the scheme to be secure in the Dolev‐Yao attack model. Moreover, the performance features such as communication overhead, computation time, and the turnaround time of the proposed scheme are evaluated and compared with the recent schemes of same category, where the proposed scheme shows a balance of performance without compromising the security features.

A Secure Mutual Batch Authentication Scheme for Patient Data Privacy Preserving in WBAN.

The current advances in cloud-based services have significantly enhanced individual satisfaction in numerous modern life areas. Particularly, the recent spectacular innovations in the wireless body area networks (WBAN) domain have made e-Care services rise as a promising application field, which definitely improves the quality of the medical system. However, the forwarded data from the limited connectivity range of WBAN via a smart device (e.g., smartphone) to the application provider (AP) should be secured from an unapproved access and alteration (attacker) that could prompt catastrophic consequences. Therefore, several schemes have been proposed to guarantee data integrity and privacy during their transmission between the client/controller (C) and the AP. Thereby, numerous effective cryptosystem solutions based on a bilinear pairing approach are available in the literature to address the mentioned security issues. Unfortunately, the related solution presents security shortcomings, where AP can with ease impersonate a given C. Hence, this existing scheme cannot fully guarantee C’s data privacy and integrity. Therefore, we propose our contribution to address this data security issue (impersonation) through a secured and efficient remote batch authentication scheme that genuinely ascertains the identity of C and AP. Practically, the proposed cryptosystem is based on an efficient combination of elliptical curve cryptography (ECC) and bilinear pairing schemes. Furthermore, our proposed solution reduces the communication and computational costs by providing an efficient data aggregation and batch authentication for limited device’s resources in WBAN. These additional features (data aggregation and batch authentication) are the core improvements of our scheme that have great merit for limited energy environments like WBAN.

Rapid Retrieval of Secured Data from the Sensor Cloud using a Relative Record Index and Energy Management of Sensors

A massive amount of data is produced by sensors. These data finds a place in the cloud through a base station. Occasionally, the data collection process is disrupted as a result of the energy level of the sensor network due to voids. Void sensors do not propagate messages intended for the destination. We have addressed the issue of voids in sensors with the dynamic void removal algorithm. Retrieval of data from cloud is performed by relative record index associated with a security mechanism. Authenticated customers are given a secret key to rapidly retrieve data from the cloud. Meanwhile sensor networks require a secure mutual authentication scheme in an anxious network environment; our etiquette can handle all problems thrown up by the former schemes. Therefore, our protocol is more suited to an open and higher-security Sensor Network environment despite greater computation cost and energy.

A Mutual Authentication Scheme for Secure Fog Computing Service Handover in Vehicular Network Environment

Handover schemes play a vital role on fog computing service (FCS) provided through vehicular network. It not only determines the quality of services (QoSs) but also the security and safety of vehicular network system against adversaries. As a part of handover process, authentication between vehicles and a new fog node (FN) significantly contributes to protecting private information and infrastructure of vehicular network at once. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and secure mutual authentication scheme for handover process considering limited access FCS in the vehicular network environment and also service reservation scenario at login and service request phase. In the proposed scheme, mutual authentication process is assisted by a cloud server (CS) during login and service request phase in which CS distributes the credentials for on-the-road authentication between the vehicles and FN installed on road side unit (RSU). We demonstrate that our proposed scheme is lightweight due to employing one-way hash function and exclusive-or operation extensively. In addition, our scheme is efficient in terms of computational cost as well as computation cost. We show that our scheme achieves 1.1-56.67 times faster computation and also reduces the total message size by 30%-58.21% in comparison with the previous authentication schemes in the most relevant environment. The informal and formal security analyses show that this authentication scheme can protect the secrecy of transactions of all interacting entities against various known attacks. In addition, validation using SPAN software based on AVISPA also confirms that the proposed authentication scheme can satisfy mutual authentication goal and, at the same time, also protect against replay and man-in-the-middle attack.

Enhanced secure mutual authentication and key agreement scheme with user anonymity in ubiquitous global mobility networks

With the widespread use of mobile gadgets, security in mobile communication becomes an important issue. In 2011, Zhou et al. proposed a mutual authentication and key agreement scheme with the user anonymity for roaming environments. In this article, however, we reveal that the authentication protocol presented by Zhou et al. suffers from certain weaknesses which have been overlooked during design. As a consequence of these weaknesses, Zhou et al.’s scheme cannot achieve desired security. Therefore, here we propose a novel authentication scheme to overcome these weaknesses that is efficient, secure, and causes significantly less computational overhead as compared to Zhou et al.’s scheme.