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.

A Secure LEACH-PRO Protocol Based on Blockchain

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are becoming more popular for many applications due to their convenient services. However, sensor nodes may suffer from significant security flaws, leading researchers to propose authentication schemes to protect WSNs. Although these authentication protocols significantly fulfill the required protection, security enhancement with less energy consumption is essential to preserve the availability of resources and secure better performance. In 2020, Youssef et al. suggested a scheme called Enhanced Probabilistic Cluster Head Selection (LEACH-PRO) to extend the sensors' lifetime in WSNs. This paper introduces a new variant of the LEACH-PRO protocol by adopting the blockchain security technique to protect WSNs. The proposed protocol (SLEACH-PRO) performs a decentralized authentication mechanism by applying a blockchain to multiple base stations to avoid system and performance degradation in the event of a station failure. The security analysis of the SLEACH-PRO is performed using Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool. Moreover, the SLEACH-PRO is evaluated and compared to related protocols in terms of computational cost and security level based on its resistance against several attacks. The comparison results showed that the SLEACH-PRO protocol is more secure and requires less computational cost compared to other related protocols.

LR-AKAP: A Lightweight and Robust Security Protocol for Smart Home Environments

For the betterment of human life, smart Internet of Things (IoT)-based systems are needed for the new era. IoT is evolving swiftly for its applications in the smart environment, including smart airports, smart buildings, smart manufacturing, smart homes, etc. A smart home environment includes resource-constrained devices that are interlinked, monitored, controlled, and analyzed with the help of the Internet. In a distributed smart environment, devices with low and high computational power work together and require authenticity. Therefore, a computationally efficient and secure protocol is needed. The authentication protocol is employed to ensure that authorized smart devices communicate with the smart environment and are accessible by authorized personnel only. We have designed a novel, lightweight secure protocol for a smart home environment. The introduced novel protocol can withstand well-known attacks and is effective with respect to computation and communication complexities. Comparative, formal, and informal analyses were conducted to draw the comparison between the introduced protocol and previous state-of-the-art protocols.

Provably Secure Three-Factor-Based Mutual Authentication Scheme with PUF for Wireless Medical Sensor Networks

Wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) are used in remote medical service environments to provide patients with convenient healthcare services. In a WMSN environment, patients wear a device that collects their health information and transmits the information via a gateway. Then, doctors make a diagnosis regarding the patient, utilizing the health information. However, this information can be vulnerable to various security attacks because the information is exchanged via an insecure channel. Therefore, a secure authentication scheme is necessary for WMSNs. In 2021, Masud et al. proposed a lightweight and anonymity-preserving user authentication scheme for healthcare environments. We discover that Masud et al.'s scheme is insecure against offline password guessing, user impersonation, and privileged insider attacks. Furthermore, we find that Masud et al.'s scheme cannot ensure user anonymity. To address the security vulnerabilities of Masud et al.'s scheme, we propose a three-factor-based mutual authentication scheme with a physical unclonable function (PUF). The proposed scheme is secure against various security attacks and provides anonymity, perfect forward secrecy, and mutual authentication utilizing biometrics and PUF. To prove the security features of our scheme, we analyze the scheme using informal analysis, Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, the Real-or-Random (RoR) model, and Automated Verification of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation. Furthermore, we estimate our scheme's security features, computation costs, communication costs, and energy consumption compared with the other related schemes. Consequently, we demonstrate that our scheme is suitable for WMSNs.

Towards the Design of Efficient and Secure Architecture for Software-Defined Vehicular Networks

Recently, by the rapid development of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) and the advancement of Software Defined Networking (SDN) as an emerging technology, the Software-Defined Vehicular Network (SDVN) has a tremendous attraction in the academia and research community. SDN's unique properties and features, such as its flexibility, programmability, and centralized control, make the network scalable and straightforward. In VANETs, traffic management and secure communication of vehicle information using the public network are the main research dimensions in the current era for the researchers to be considered while designing an efficient and secure VANETs architecture. This paper highlights the possible identified threat vectors and efficiently resolves the network vulnerabilities to design a novel and secure hierarchic architecture for SDVN. To solve the above problem, we proposed a Public Key Infrastructure-based digital signature model for efficient and secure communication from Vehicle to Vehicle. We also used the public key authority infrastructure for Vehicle to Infrastructure and the three-way handshake method for secure session creation and secure data communication in the SDN controller. The proposed security is validated through the well-known simulation tool AVISPA. Additionally, a formal security model is applied to validate the design hierarchic architecture's fundamental security properties for SDVN in an efficient and desirable way. In a comparative analysis, we prove that our proposed scheme fulfills all the essential security properties compared to other states of the art schemes.

A Smartcard-Based User-Controlled Single Sign-On for Privacy Preservation in 5G-IoT Telemedicine Systems

Healthcare is now an important part of daily life because of rising consciousness of health management. Medical professionals can know users’ health condition if they are able to access information immediately. Telemedicine systems, which provides long distance medical communication and services, is a multi-functional remote medical service that can help patients in bed in long-distance communication environments. As telemedicine systems work in public networks, privacy preservation issue of sensitive and private transmitted information is important. One of the means of proving a user’s identity are user-controlled single sign-on (UCSSO) authentication scheme, which can establish a secure communication channel using authenticated session keys between the users and servers of telemedicine systems, without threats of eavesdropping, impersonation, etc., and allow patients access to multiple telemedicine services with a pair of identity and password. In this paper, we proposed a smartcard-based user-controlled single sign-on (SC-UCSSO) for telemedicine systems that not only remains above merits but achieves privacy preservation and enhances security and performance compared to previous schemes that were proved with BAN logic and automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA).

A Secure and Lightweight Authentication Protocol for IoT-Based Smart Homes

With the information and communication technologies (ICT) and Internet of Things (IoT) gradually advancing, smart homes have been able to provide home services to users. The user can enjoy a high level of comfort and improve his quality of life by using home services provided by smart devices. However, the smart home has security and privacy problems, since the user and smart devices communicate through an insecure channel. Therefore, a secure authentication protocol should be established between the user and smart devices. In 2020, Xiang and Zheng presented a situation-aware protocol for device authentication in smart grid-enabled smart home environments. However, we demonstrate that their protocol can suffer from stolen smart device, impersonation, and session key disclosure attacks and fails to provide secure mutual authentication. Therefore, we propose a secure and lightweight authentication protocol for IoT-based smart homes to resolve the security flaws of Xiang and Zheng’s protocol. We proved the security of the proposed protocol by performing informal and formal security analyses, using the real or random (ROR) model, Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, and the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool. Moreover, we provide a comparison of performance and security properties between the proposed protocol and related existing protocols. We demonstrate that the proposed protocol ensures better security and lower computational costs than related protocols, and is suitable for practical IoT-based smart home environments.

WSN-SLAP: Secure and Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are widely used to provide users with convenient services such as health-care, and smart home. To provide convenient services, sensor nodes in WSN environments collect and send the sensing data to the gateway. However, it can suffer from serious security issues because susceptible messages are exchanged through an insecure channel. Therefore, secure authentication protocols are necessary to prevent security flaws in WSN. In 2020, Moghadam et al. suggested an efficient authentication and key agreement scheme in WSN. Unfortunately, we discover that Moghadam et al.’s scheme cannot prevent insider and session-specific random number leakage attacks. We also prove that Moghadam et al.’s scheme does not ensure perfect forward secrecy. To prevent security vulnerabilities of Moghadam et al.’s scheme, we propose a secure and lightweight mutual authentication protocol for WSNs (WSN-SLAP). WSN-SLAP has the resistance from various security drawbacks, and provides perfect forward secrecy and mutual authentication. We prove the security of WSN-SLAP by using Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, Real-or-Random (ROR) model, and Automated Verification of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation. In addition, we evaluate the performance of WSN-SLAP compared with existing related protocols. We demonstrate that WSN-SLAP is more secure and suitable than previous protocols for WSN environments.

Lightweight Authentication Protocol for M2M Communications of Resource-Constrained Devices in Industrial Internet of Things

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) consists of sensors, networks, and services to connect and control production systems. Its benefits include supply chain monitoring and machine failure detection. However, it has many vulnerabilities, such as industrial espionage and sabotage. Furthermore, many IIoT devices are resource-constrained, which impedes the use of traditional security services for them. Authentication allows devices to be confident of each other’s identity, preventing some security attacks. Many authentication protocols have been proposed for IIoT; however, they have high computing requirements not viable to resource-constrained devices, or they have been found insecure. In this paper, an authentication protocol for resource-constrained IIoT devices is proposed. It is based on the lightweight operations xor, addition, and subtraction, and a hash function. Also, only four messages are exchanged between the principals to authenticate. It has a low execution-time and communication-cost. Its security was successfully assessed with the formal methods Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool and Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, together with an informal analysis of its resistance to known attacks. Its performance and security were compared with state-of-the-art protocols, resulting in a good performance for resource-constrained IIoT devices, and higher security similar to computational expensive schemes.

LDAKM-EIoT: Lightweight Device Authentication and Key Management Mechanism for Edge-Based IoT Deployment

In recent years, edge computing has emerged as a new concept in the computing paradigm that empowers several future technologies, such as 5G, vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and the Internet of Things (IoT), by providing cloud computing facilities, as well as services to the end users. However, open communication among the entities in an edge based IoT environment makes it vulnerable to various potential attacks that are executed by an adversary. Device authentication is one of the prominent techniques in security that permits an IoT device to authenticate mutually with a cloud server with the help of an edge node. If authentication is successful, they establish a session key between them for secure communication. To achieve this goal, a novel device authentication and key management mechanism for the edge based IoT environment, called the lightweight authentication and key management scheme for the edge based IoT environment (LDAKM-EIoT), was designed. The detailed security analysis and formal security verification conducted by the widely used “Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA)” tool prove that the proposed LDAKM-EIoT is secure against several attack vectors that exist in the infrastructure of the edge based IoT environment. The elaborated comparative analysis of the proposed LDAKM-EIoT and different closely related schemes provides evidence that LDAKM-EIoT is more secure with less communication and computation costs. Finally, the network performance parameters are calculated and analyzed using the NS2 simulation to demonstrate the practical facets of the proposed LDAKM-EIoT.

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 Secure Lightweight Three-Factor Authentication Scheme for IoT in Cloud Computing Environment

With the development of cloud computing and communication technology, users can access the internet of things (IoT) services provided in various environments, including smart home, smart factory, and smart healthcare. However, a user is insecure various types of attacks, because sensitive information is often transmitted via an open channel. Therefore, secure authentication schemes are essential to provide IoT services for legal users. In 2019, Pelaez et al. presented a lightweight IoT-based authentication scheme in cloud computing environment. However, we prove that Pelaez et al.’s scheme cannot prevent various types of attacks such as impersonation, session key disclosure, and replay attacks and cannot provide mutual authentication and anonymity. In this paper, we present a secure and lightweight three-factor authentication scheme for IoT in cloud computing environment to resolve these security problems. The proposed scheme can withstand various attacks and provide secure mutual authentication and anonymity by utilizing secret parameters and biometric. We also show that our scheme achieves secure mutual authentication using Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic analysis. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our scheme resists replay and man-in-the-middle attacks usingthe automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) simulation tool. Finally, we compare the performance and the security features of the proposed scheme with some existing schemes. Consequently, we provide better safety and efficiency than related schemes and the proposed scheme is suitable for practical IoT-based cloud computing environment.

Secure Three-Factor Authentication Protocol for Multi-Gateway IoT Environments

Internet of Things (IoT) environments such as smart homes, smart factories, and smart buildings have become a part of our lives. The services of IoT environments are provided through wireless networks to legal users. However, the wireless network is an open channel, which is insecure to attacks from adversaries such as replay attacks, impersonation attacks, and invasions of privacy. To provide secure IoT services to users, mutual authentication protocols have attracted much attention as consequential security issues, and numerous protocols have been studied. In 2017, Bae et al. presented a smartcard-based two-factor authentication protocol for multi-gateway IoT environments. However, we point out that Bae et al.’s protocol is vulnerable to user impersonation attacks, gateway spoofing attacks, and session key disclosure, and cannot provide a mutual authentication. In addition, we propose a three-factor mutual authentication protocol for multi-gateway IoT environments to resolve these security weaknesses. Then, we use Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic to prove that the proposed protocol achieves secure mutual authentication, and we use the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool to analyze a formal security verification. In conclusion, our proposed protocol is secure and applicable in multi-gateway IoT environments.

Secure Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks in Vehicular Communications

With wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a driver can access various useful information for convenient driving, such as traffic congestion, emergence, vehicle accidents, and speed. However, a driver and traffic manager can be vulnerable to various attacks because such information is transmitted through a public channel. Therefore, secure mutual authentication has become an important security issue, and many authentication schemes have been proposed. In 2017, Mohit et al. proposed an authentication protocol for WSNs in vehicular communications to ensure secure mutual authentication. However, their scheme cannot resist various attacks such as impersonation and trace attacks, and their scheme cannot provide secure mutual authentication, session key security, and anonymity. In this paper, we propose a secure authentication protocol for WSNs in vehicular communications to resolve the security weaknesses of Mohit et al.’s scheme. Our authentication protocol prevents various attacks and achieves secure mutual authentication and anonymity by using dynamic parameters that are changed every session. We prove that our protocol provides secure mutual authentication by using the Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic, which is a widely accepted formal security analysis. We perform a formal security verification by using the well-known Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool, which shows that the proposed protocol is safe against replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. We compare the performance and security properties of our protocol with other related schemes. Overall, the proposed protocol provides better security features and a comparable computation cost. Therefore, the proposed protocol can be applied to practical WSNs-based vehicular communications.

Secure anonymity-preserving password-based user authentication and session key agreement scheme for telecare medicine information systems

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Information and communication and technology (ICT) has changed the entire paradigm of society. ICT facilitates people to use medical services over the Internet, thereby reducing the travel cost, hospitalization cost and time to a greater extent. Recent advancements in Telecare Medicine Information System (TMIS) facilitate users/patients to access medical services over the Internet by gaining health monitoring facilities at home.

METHODS

Amin and Biswas recently proposed a RSA-based user authentication and session key agreement protocol usable for TMIS, which is an improvement over Giri et al.'s RSA-based user authentication scheme for TMIS. In this paper, we show that though Amin-Biswas's scheme considerably improves the security drawbacks of Giri et al.'s scheme, their scheme has security weaknesses as it suffers from attacks such as privileged insider attack, user impersonation attack, replay attack and also offline password guessing attack. A new RSA-based user authentication scheme for TMIS is proposed, which overcomes the security pitfalls of Amin-Biswas's scheme and also preserves user anonymity property.

RESULTS

The careful formal security analysis using the two widely accepted Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and the random oracle models is done. Moreover, the informal security analysis of the scheme is also done. These security analyses show the robustness of our new scheme against the various known attacks as well as attacks found in Amin-Biswas's scheme. The simulation of the proposed scheme using the widely accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool is also done.

CONCLUSIONS

We present a new user authentication and session key agreement scheme for TMIS, which fixes the mentioned security pitfalls found in Amin-Biswas's scheme, and we also show that the proposed scheme provides better security than other existing schemes through the rigorous security analysis and verification tool. Furthermore, we present the formal security verification of our scheme using the widely accepted AVISPA tool. High security and extra functionality features allow our proposed scheme to be applicable for telecare medicine information systems which is used for e-health care medical applications.

In silico to in vivo splicing analysis using splicing code models

With the growing appreciation of RNA splicing's role in gene regulation, development, and disease, researchers from diverse fields find themselves investigating exons of interest. Commonly, researchers are interested in knowing if an exon is alternatively spliced, if it is differentially included in specific tissues or in developmental stages, and what regulatory elements control its inclusion. An important step towards the ability to perform such analysis in silico was made with the development of computational splicing code models. Aimed as a practical how-to guide, we demonstrate how researchers can now use these code models to analyze a gene of interest, focusing on Bin1 as a case study. Bridging integrator 1 (BIN1) is a nucleocytoplasmic adaptor protein known to be functionally regulated through alternative splicing in a tissue-specific manner. Specific Bin1 isoforms have been associated with muscular diseases and cancers, making the study of its splicing regulation of wide interest. Using AVISPA, a recently released web tool based on splicing code models, we show that many Bin1 tissue-dependent isoforms are correctly predicted, along with many of its known regulators. We review the best practices and constraints of using the tool, demonstrate how AVISPA is used to generate high confidence novel regulatory hypotheses, and experimentally validate predicted regulators of Bin1 alternative splicing.