Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is now a buzzword for Internet connectivity which extends to embedded devices, sensors and other objects connected to the Internet. Rapid development of this technology has led to the usage of various embedded devices in our daily life. However, for resource sharing and communication among these devices, there is a requirement for connecting these embedded devices to a large pool of resources like a cloud. The promising applications of IoT in Government and commercial sectors are possible by integrating cloud servers with these embedded devices. But such an integration of technologies involves security issues like data privacy and authentication of devices whenever information is exchanged between them. Recently, Kalra and Sood proposed an authentication scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for IoT and cloud servers and claimed that their scheme satisfies all security requirements and is immune to various types of attacks. However, in this paper, we show that Kalra and Sood scheme is susceptible to offline password guessing and insider attacks and it does not achieve device anonymity, session key agreement, and mutual authentication. Keeping in view of the shortcomings of Kalra and Sood’s scheme, we have proposed an authentication scheme based on ECC for IoT and cloud servers. In the proposed scheme in this paper, we have formally analyzed the security properties of the designed scheme by the most widely accepted and used Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool. Security and performance analysis show that when compared with other related schemes, the proposed scheme is more powerful, efficient, and secure with respect to various known attacks.

Abstract

Emerging Cloud computing paradigm came up with the on-demand ubiquitous service sharing facility via the Internet. In this synergy, the cloud service providers provide various services, namely, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) to their clients. In such a provision, both the end parties demand proper auditing so that the resources can be legitimately utilized, and meanwhile the privacy is also preserved. In order to achieve this goal, there is a need for designing an efficient and robust authentication mechanism. Though other existing authentication protocols, such as Kerberos, Open Authorization (OAuth) and OpenID are proposed in the literature, they are vulnerable to various security threats such as replay, online dictionary, offline dictionary, stolen-verifier, impersonation, denial-of-service, privileged-insider and man-in-the-middle attacks. In this paper, we aim to propose an authentication protocol which overcomes these security loopholes in the existing protocols. In the proposed protocol, a new dynamic password-based two-server authentication and key exchange mechanism is proposed with the help of both public and private key cryptography. Moreover, to achieve strong user anonymity property, a new multi-factor authentication scheme with identity preservation has been also introduced. The security analysis using both the formal security using the broadly-accepted Real-Or-Random (ROR) model and the informal security show that the proposed protocol protects several well-known attacks. In addition, the formal security verification using the widely-used Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) ensures that the scheme is resilient against replay as well as man-in-the-middle attacks. Finally, the performance study contemplates that the overheads incurred in the protocol is reasonable and comparable to that of other existing state-of-art authentication protocols. High security along with comparable overheads make the proposed protocol to be robust and practical for a secure access to the cloud services.

Abstract

It is well known that it is impossible to clone an arbitrary quantum state. However, this inability does not lead directly to no-cloning of quantum coherence. Here, we show that it is impossible to clone the coherence of an arbitrary quantum state which is a stronger statement than the ’no-cloning of quantum state’. In particular, with ancillary system as machine state, we show that it is impossible to clone the coherence of states whose coherence is greater than the coherence of the known states on which the transformations are defined. Also, we characterize the class of states for which coherence cloning will be possible for a given choice of machine. Furthermore, we find the maximum range of states whose coherence can be cloned perfectly. The impossibility proof also holds when we do not include machine states.

Abstract

With advancements in information and communication technology, there is a steep increase in the remote healthcare applications in which patients can get treatment from the remote places also. The data collected about the patients by remote healthcare applications constitute big data because it varies with volume, velocity, variety, veracity, and value. To process such a large collection of heterogeneous data is one of the biggest challenges which requires a specialized approach. To address this challenge, a new fuzzy rule based classifier is presented in this paper with an aim to provide Healthcare-as-a-Service. The proposed scheme is based upon the initial cluster formation, retrieval, and processing of the big data in cloud environment. Then, a fuzzy rule based classifier is designed for efficient decision making for data classification in the proposed scheme. To perform inferencing from the collected data, membership functions are designed for fuzzification and defuzzification processes. The proposed scheme is evaluated on various evaluation metrics, such as average response time, accuracy, computation cost, classification time, and false positive ratio. The results obtained confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme with respect to various performance evaluation metrics in cloud computing environment.

Abstract

With the widespread popularity of Internet-enabled devices, there is an exponential increase in the information sharing among different geographically located smart devices. These smart devices may be heterogeneous in nature and may use different communication protocols for information sharing among themselves. Moreover, the data shared may also change with respect to various Vs (volume, velocity, variety, and value) to categorize it as big data. However, as these devices communicate with each other using an open channel, the Internet, there is a higher chance of information leakage during communication. Most of the existing solutions reported in the literature ignore these facts. Keeping focus on these points, in this article, we propose secure storage, verification, and auditing (SecSVA) of big data in cloud environment. SecSVA includes the following modules: an attribute-based secure data deduplication framework for data storage on the cloud, Kerberos-based identity verification and authentication, and Merkle hash-tree-based trusted third-party auditing on cloud. From the analysis, it is clear that SecSVA can provide secure third party auditing with integrity preservation across multiple domains in the cloud environment.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is composed of different networked objects (i.e., smart devices) which are interconnected to gather, process, refine, and exchange meaningful data over the Internet. These objects are assigned to their respective IP addresses, and they are able to send and receive data over a network without any human assistance. IoT offers different types of applications, such as, but not limited to, smart traffic monitoring, smart home, smart health care and smart cities, to name a few. In a Cyber-Physical System (CPS), computing elements coordinate and communicate with sensor devices, which monitor cyber and physical indicators, and actuators, and also modify the cyber and physical environment where they run. The synergy of computational as well as physical components, specifically the use of CPSs, led to the advancement of IoT implementations. In a cloud-driven IoT-based big data environment, a cloud-based platform is used to store the data generated by IoT devices (normally by sensor devices) which further can be considered as a big data warehouse. This environment is highly scalable and provides important real-time event processing (for example, in critical scenarios like surveillance and monitoring of an industrial plant). In IoT-based critical applications, the real-time data access is obligatory as and when it is required. Such access is possible if we permit only authorized external users to access the real-time data directly from the IoT sensors. Sometimes authorized user may also request for big data query processing and big data analytics over the data stored in cloud servers to figure out hidden patterns of some phenomena (i.e., chances of fire in an industrial plant in future). Therefore, we need secure authentication schemes for cloud-driven IoT-based big data environment in which a legitimate user and an IoT sensor can mutually authenticate each other and establish a common session key for secure communication. In this context, this paper first discusses the network and threat models of the authentication schemes for cloud-driven IoT-based big data environment. Some security requirements, issues and challenges of this environment are then discussed. A taxonomy of various existing authentication schemes applicable for cloud-driven IoT-based big data environment is also discussed, which covers a comparative study of these schemes. We identify and briefly discuss some future research challenges in designing the authentication schemes and other security protocols for cloud-driven IoT-based big data environment that need to be addressed in the future.

Abstract

The Internet of Drones (IoD) provides a coordinated access to unmanned aerial vehicles that are referred as drones. The on-going miniaturization of sensors, actuators, and processors with ubiquitous wireless connectivity makes drones to be used in a wide range of applications ranging from military to civilian. Since most of the applications involved in the IoD are real-time based, the users are generally interested in accessing real-time information from drones belonging to a particular fly zone. This happens if we allow users to directly access real-time data from flying drones inside IoD environment and not from the server. This is a serious security breach which may deteriorate performance of any implemented solution in this IoD environment. To address this important issue in IoD, we propose a novel lightweight user authentication scheme in which a user in the IoD environment needs to access data directly from a drone provided that the user is authorized to access the data from that drone. The formal security verification using the broadly accepted automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications tool along with informal security analysis show that our scheme is secure against several known attacks. The performance comparison demonstrates that our scheme is efficient with respect to various parameters, and it provides better security as compared to those for the related existing schemes. Finally, the practical demonstration of our scheme is done using the widely accepted NS2 simulation.

Abstract

Hadoop framework has been evolved to manage big data in cloud. Hadoop distributedfile system and MapReduce, the vital components of this framework, provide scalable and fault-tolerantbig data storage and processing services at a lower cost. However, Hadoop does not provide any robustauthentication mechanism for principals’ authentication. In fact, the existing state-of-the-art authenticationprotocols are vulnerable to various security threats, such as man-in-the-middle, replay, password guessing,stolen-verifier, privileged-insider, identity compromization, impersonation, denial-of-service, online/off-linedictionary, chosen plaintext, workstation compromization, and server-side compromisation attacks. Besidethese threats, the state-of-the-art mechanisms lack to address the server-side data integrity and confidentialityissues. In addition to this, most of the existing authentication protocols follow a single-server-based userauthentication strategy, which, in fact, originates single point of failure and single point of vulnerabilityissues. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose a fault-tolerant authentication protocol suitablefor the Hadoop framework, which is called the efficient authentication protocol for Hadoop (HEAP). HEAPalleviates the major issues of the existing state-of-the-art authentication mechanisms, namely operating-system-based authentication, password-based approach, and delegated token-based schemes, respectively,which are presently deployed in Hadoop. HEAP follows two-server-based authentication mechanism. HEAPauthenticates the principal based on digital signature generation and verification strategy utilizing bothadvanced encryption standard and elliptic curve cryptography. The security analysis using both the formalsecurity using the broadly accepted real-or-random (ROR) model and the informal (non-mathematical)security shows that HEAP protects several well-known attacks. In addition, the formal security verificationusing the widely used automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications ensures that HEAPis resilient against replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. Finally, the performance study contemplates thatthe overheads incurred in HEAP is reasonable and is also comparable to that of other existing state-of-the-art authentication protocols. High security along with comparable overheads makes HEAP to be robust andpractical for a secure access to the big data storage and processing services.

Abstract

Designing a secure and efficient handover authentication scheme has al-ways been a concern of cellular networks especially in 4G Long Term Evolution(LTE) wireless networks. What makes their handover so complex, is the presence of different types of base stations namely eNodeB (eNB) and Home eNodeB (HeNB).In addition, they cannot directly communicate with each other. Recently, an efficient proxy signature-based handover authentication scheme has been suggested by Qui etal. Despite its better performance and security advantages than previous schemes, itsuffers serious vulnerabilities, namely being prone to DoS attack , eNB imperson-ation attack and lack of perfect forward secrecy. In this paper, we propose an im-proved handover authentication scheme in LTE wireless networks that resists against such attacks. Further, we validate the security of the proposed scheme using Real-Or-Random (ROR) model and ProVerif analysis tool. The results confirm our security claims of the proposed scheme. In addition, the performance analysis shows that compared to other schemes, our proposed scheme is more efficient.

Abstract

Due to the widespread popularity of Internet-enabled devices, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) becomes popular in recent years. However, as the smart devices share the information with each other using an open channel, i.e., Internet, so security and privacy of the shared information remains a paramount concern. There exist some solutions in the literature for preserving security and privacy in IIoT environment. However, due to their heavy computation and communication overheads, these solutions may not be applicable to wide category of applications in IIoT environment. Hence, in this paper, we propose a new biometric-based privacy preserving user authentication (BP2UA) scheme for cloud-based IIoT deployment. BP2UA consists of strong authentication between users and smart devices using preestablished key agreement between smart devices and the gateway node. The formal security analysis of BP2UA using the well-known real-or-random model is provided to prove its session key security. Moreover, an informal security analysis of BP2UA is also given to show its robustness against various types of known attacks. The computation and communication costs of BP2UA in comparison to the other existing schemes of its category demonstrate its effectiveness in the IIoT environment. Finally, the practical demonstration of BP2UA is also done using the NS2 simulation.