Abstract

Digital networks connect an increasing number of users, sensors, and devices, which communicate, access, share, and analyze data. This phenomenon of diverse data generation is recognized as Big data. While people are benefiting from the convenience added by Big data, they also meet direct threats to privacy and data security. As Big data is massive, it needs an effective security framework with energy-efficient computing environment. Signcryption technique combines both encryption and signature to present an efficient solution. To address threats to data security, chosen cipher security and chosen message security are two important attributes. This means that it is very important to design an efficient framework where we can address these issues. This article introduces an identity-based signcryption technique by combining encryption as well as signature, which provides a solution for secure and authenticated communication in the Big data environment, called SFEEC (security framework for energy-efficient computing). SFEEC fulfills the requirements of less computation and communication overheads by offering pairing-free computation at the user end. SFEEC is also proven under the “indistinguishable against chosen ciphertext” and “secure against chosen message” attacks in the standard model.

Abstract

In the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), secure information sharing among vehicles is crucial in order to upgrade driving safety as well as to strengthen vehicular services. However, public communication among vehicles leads to various potential attacks, such as replay, man-in-the-middle, impersonation, unlinkability and traceability attacks. To address this issue, we design a new conditional privacy preserving batch verification-based authentication mechanism in the IoV environment using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) technique, where a vehicle can authenticate its neighbor vehicle and also a Road-Side Unit (RSU) can authenticate its nearby vehicles in a batch. The proposed scheme is shown to be highly secure against a passive/active adversary through various security analysis, such as random oracle based formal security, formal security verification via automated simulation tool, and also informal security analysis. An exhaustive comparative analysis reveals that the proposed scheme offers better security and functionality attributes, and comparable storage, communication and computation overheads when these are compared with the relevant schemes.

Abstract

With the ever-increasing rate of adoption of internet-enabled smart devices, the allure of greater integration of technologies, such as smart home, smart city, and smart grid into everyday life is undeniable. However, this trend inevitably leaves a massive amount of information and infrastructure connected to the public Internet, which exposes the data to many security threats and challenges. In this paper, we discuss the need for fine-grained user access control for IoT smart devices. The inherently distributed nature of IoT environment necessitates the support of multi-authority attribute-based encryption (ABE) for the implementation of fine-grained access control. Therefore, we present a secure fine-grained user access control scheme for data usage in the IoT environment. The proposed scheme is a three-factor user access control scheme, which supports multi-authority ABE and it is highly scalable as both the ABE key size stored in the user’s smart card and ciphertext size needed for authentication request are constant with respect to the number of attributes. Through the formal and informal security analysis, we show that the proposed scheme is secure and robust against several potential attacks required in an IoT environment. Moreover, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme performs at par or better than existing schemes while providing greater functionality features.

Abstract

The demand for remote data storage and computation services is increasing exponentially in our data-driven society; thus, the need for secure access to such data and services. In this paper, we design a new biometric-based authentication protocol to provide secure access to a remote (cloud) server. In the proposed approach, we consider biometric data of a user as a secret credential. We then derive a unique identity from the user's biometric data, which is further used to generate the user's private key. In addition, we propose an efficient approach to generate a session key between two communicating parties using two biometric templates for a secure message transmission. In other words, there is no need to store the user's private key anywhere and the session key is generated without sharing any prior information. Extensive experiments and a comparative study demonstrate the efficiency and utility of the proposed approach.

Abstract

Global industry is undergoing major transformations with the genesis of a new paradigm known as the Internet of Things (IoT) with its underlying technologies. Many company leaders are investing more effort and money in transforming their services to capitalize on the benefits provided by the IoT. Thereby, the decision makers in public waste management do not want to be outdone, and it is challenging to provide an efficient and real-time waste management system. This paper proposes a solution (hardware, software, and communications) that aims to optimize waste management and include a citizen in the process. The system follows an IoT-based approach where the discarded waste from the smart bin is continuously monitored by sensors that inform the filling level of each compartment, in real-time. These data are stored and processed in an IoT middleware providing information for collection with optimized routes and generating important statistical data for monitoring the waste collection accurately in terms of resource management and the provided services for the community. Citizens can easily access information about the public waste bins through the Web or a mobile application. The creation of the real prototype of the smart container, the development of the waste management application and a real-scale experiment use case for evaluation, demonstration, and validation show that the proposed system can efficiently change the way people deal with their garbage and optimize economic and material resources. View Full-Text

Abstract

The Internet of Intelligent Things (IoIT) communication environment can be utilized in various types of applications (for example, intelligent battlefields, smart healthcare systems, the industrial internet, home automation, and many more). Communications that happen in such environments can have different types of security and privacy issues, which can be resolved through the utilization of blockchain. In this paper, we propose a tutorial that aims in desiging a generalized blockchain-based secure authentication key management scheme for the IoIT environment. Moreover, some issues with using blockchain for a communication environment are discussed as future research directions. The details of different types of blockchain are also provided. Some of the widely-accepted consensus algorithms are then discussed. Next, we discuss different types of applications in blockchain-based IoIT communication environments. The details of the associated system models are provided, such as, the network and attack models for the blockchain-based IoIT communication environment, which are helpful in designing a security protocol for such an environment. A practical demonstration of the proposed generalized scheme is provided in order to measure the impact of the scheme on the performance of the essential parameters. Finally, some of the future research challenges in the blockch

Abstract

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a kind of connected infrastructure of smart medical devices along with software applications, health systems and services. These medical devices and applications are connected to healthcare systems through the Internet. The Wi-Fi enabled devices facilitate machine-to-machine communication and link to the cloud platforms for data storage. IoMT has the ability to make accurate diagnoses, with fewer mistakes and lower costs of care. IoMT with smartphone applications permits the patients to exchange their health related confidential and private information to the healthcare experts (i.e., doctors) for the better control of diseases, and also for tracking and preventing chronic illnesses. Due to insecure communication among the entities involved in IoMT, an attacker can tamper with the confidential and private health related information for example an attacker can not only intercept the messages, but can also modify, delete or insert malicious messages during communication. To deal this sensitive issue, we design a novel blockchain enabled authentication key agreement protocol for IoMT environment, called BAKMP-IoMT. BAKMP-IoMT provides secure key management between implantable medical devices and personal servers and between personal servers and cloud servers. The legitimate users can also access the healthcare data from the cloud servers in a secure way. The entire healthcare data is stored in a blockchain maintained by the cloud servers. A detailed formal security including the security verification of BAKMP-IoMT using the widely-accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool is performed to demonstrate its resilience against the different types of possible attack. The comparison of BAKMP-IoMT with relevant existing schemes is conducted which identifies that the proposed system furnishes better security and functionality, and also needs low communication and computational costs as compared to other schemes. Finally, the simulation of BAKMP-IoMT is conducted to demonstrate its impact on the performance parameters.

Abstract

The widespread use of mobile devices, sensors, and wireless sensor networks and the progressive development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has motivated medical and health-care societies to employ IoT to monitor, collect data, and communicate with patients using the wireless body area networks (WBANs). The collected data will make a lot of medical diagnosis applications of WBANs, which are obtained directly from the patients’ bodies. Therefore, because of the nature of wireless networks and freely accessible data feature over the public channel, the security and privacy of WBANs is the most critical concern for those who use it for health-care purposes. Accordingly, there is a need for an authentication scheme for letting a trusted user such as doctors or clinical personnel access to the sensor’s data from patients. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight hash-chain-based and forward secure authentication scheme for wireless body area networks in health-care IoT. Our scheme is secure against various known attacks obliged for WBANs. Additionally, we perform the formal security analysis using Real-or Random (ROR) model, and informal security on the proposed scheme, also, security verification of our scheme is validated by the ProVerif tool. Besides, our scheme is simulated by the OPNET network simulator and compared with several new schemes in terms of security and performance requirements. The simulation results and comparisons confirm that the proposed scheme is suitable for WBANs, and it supports more security features compared to related schemes.

Abstract

The Internet of Thing (IoT) is useful for connecting and collecting variable data of objects through the Internet, which makes to generate useful data for humanity. An indispensable enabler of IoT is the wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Many environments, such as smart healthcare, smart transportation and smart grid, have adopted WSN. Nonetheless, WSNs remain vulnerable to variety of attacks because they send and receive data over public channels. Moreover, the performance of IoT enabled sensor devices has limitations since the sensors are lightweight devices and are resource constrained. To overcome these problems, many security authentication protocols for WSNs have been proposed. However, many researchers have pointed out that preventing smartcard stolen and off-line guessing attacks is an important security issue, and guessing identity and password at the same time is still possible. To address these weaknesses, this paper presents a secure and efficient authentication protocol based on three-factor authentication by taking advantage of biometrics. Meanwhile, the proposed protocol uses a honey_list technique to protect against brute force and stolen smartcard attacks. By using the honey_list technique and three factors, the proposed protocol can provide security even if two of the three factors are compromised. Considering the limited performance of the sensors, we propose an efficient protocol using only hash functions excluding the public key based elliptic curve cryptography. For security evaluation of the proposed authentication protocol, we perform informal security analysis, and Real-Or-Random (ROR) model-based and Burrows Abadi Needham (BAN) logic based formal security analysis. We also perform the formal verification using the widely-used Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation software. Besides, compared to previous researches, we demonstrate that our proposed authentication protocol for WSNs systems is more suitable and secure than others.

Abstract

With advancements in engineering and science, the application dimensions of Cyber–Physical System (CPS) are increasing due to their improving efficiency, safety, reliability, usability and autonomy. By providing on-demand access to shared processing resources, cloud computing reduces infrastructure costs. Ensuring quality of service and information privacy and security is important in such environments. In this paper, we design a new authentication scheme related to the cloud-assisted CPS in two directions: (1) authentication between a user and a cloud server, and (2) authentication between a smart meter and a cloud server. In the former situation, any external party (user) can access the information stored in a cloud server provided that the user is legal and has the right to access information. In the later situation, a smart meter and a cloud server authentication is needed for secure communication of data stored in the cloud server. In both cases, both entities first mutually authenticate each other and only after successful authentication with the help of a trusted authority, establish a session key for their future secure communication. The proposed scheme deals with both the cases and provides high security as compared to other related works, which is shown through formal and informal security analysis. In addition, the mutual authentication using the widely-accepted Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic (BAN logic) and also formal security verification using the broadly-used Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation tool demonstrate further that the scheme is strong in security. Finally, the proposed scheme is shown to be efficient in terms of communication and computation costs as compared to those for other related existing schemes.