Abstract

Authentication protocols for multi-server architectures have gained momentum in recent times due to advancements in computing technologies and associated constraints. Lu et al. recently proposed a biometrics and smartcards-based authentication scheme for multi-server environment. The careful analysis of this paper demonstrates Lu et al.’s protocol is susceptible to user impersonation attacks and comprises insufficient data. In addition, this paper proposes an improved authentication with key-agreement protocol for multi-server architecture based on biometrics and smartcards. The formal security of the proposed protocol is verified using the widely accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool to ensure that our protocol can withstand active and passive attacks. The formal and informal security analysis, and performance analysis sections determines that our protocol is robust and efficient compared to Lu et al.’s protocol and existing similar protocols.

Abstract

Ubiquitous networks support the roaming service for mobile communication devices. The mobile user can use the services in the foreign network with the help of the home network. Mutual authentication plays an important role in the roaming services, and researchers put their interests on the authentication schemes. Recently, in 2016, Gope and Hwang found that mutual authentication scheme of He et al. for global mobility networks had security disadvantages such as vulnerability to forgery attacks, unfair key agreement, and destitution of user anonymity. Then, they presented an improved scheme. However, we find that the scheme cannot resist the off‐line guessing attack and the de‐synchronization attack. Also, it lacks strong forward security. Moreover, the session key is known to HA in that scheme. To get over the weaknesses, we propose a new two‐factor authentication scheme for global mobility networks. We use formal proof with random oracle model, formal verification with the tool Proverif, and informal analysis to demonstrate the security of the proposed scheme. Compared with some very recent schemes, our scheme is more applicable. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract

Ubiquitous networks provide effective roaming services for mobile users (MUs). Through the worldwide roaming technology, authorized MUs can avail ubiquitous network services. Important security issues to be considered in ubiquitous networks are authentication of roaming MUs and protection of privacy of MUs. However, because of the broadcast nature of wireless channel and resource limitations of terminals, providing efficient user authentication with privacy preservation is a challenging task. Very recently, Farash et al. proposed an authentication scheme with anonymity for consumer roaming in ubiquitous networks and claimed their scheme achieves all security requirements. In this paper, we show that the scheme of Farash et al. fails to achieve user anonymity and mutual authentication. Their scheme also fails to provide local password verification, and it has a faulty password change phase. Moreover, their scheme is vulnerable to replay, offline password guessing, and forgery attacks. To fix the security flaws of the scheme of Farash et al., we present an improved authentication scheme for accessing roaming service provided by ubiquitous networks. We then formally verify the security properties of our scheme by the widely‐accepted push‐button tool called Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications. Security and performance analyses show that our scheme is more powerful, efficient, and secure when it is compared with existing schemes. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract

The energy cost of public‐key cryptography is a vital component of modern secure communications. It inhibits the widespread adoption within the ultra‐low energy regimes (for example, implantable medical devices and Radio Frequency Identification tags). In the ciphertext‐policy attribute‐based encryption (CP‐ABE), an encryptor can decide the access policy that who can decrypt the data. Thus, data will be protected from the unauthorized users. However, most of the existing CP‐ABE schemes require huge storage and computational overheads. Moreover, CP‐ABE schemes based on bilinear map loose high efficiency over the elliptic curve cryptography because of the requirement of the security parameters of larger size. These drawbacks prevent the use of ultra‐low energy devices in practice. In this paper, we aim to propose a novel expressive AND gate access structured CP‐ABE scheme with constant‐size secret keys (CSSK) with cost‐efficient solutions for encryption and decryption using elliptic curve cryptography, called the CP‐ABE‐CSSK scheme. In the proposed CP‐ABE‐CSSK, the size of the secret key is as small as 320 bits. In addition, elliptic curve cryptography is efficient and more suitable for lightweight devices as compared with bilinear pairing‐based cryptosystem. Thus, the proposed CP‐ABE‐CSSK scheme provides low computation and storage overheads with an expressive AND gate access structure as compared with related existing schemes. Consequently, our scheme becomes very practical for CP‐ABE key storage and computation cost for ultra‐low energy devices. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract

Cloud computing, the conjoin of many types of computing, has made a great impact on the life of everyone. People from anywhere can access the different cloud-based services by using the Internet. A user, who wants to access some cloud-based service, needs to register himself/herself to an authority (service provider), and after that, he/she can use the service. To access the service, each user needs to authenticate to that particular cloud server. Several user authentication schemes for cloud computing have been presented but mostly have limitations/drawbacks as they are prone to various known attacks, such as privileged insider, user and server impersonation, and strong reply attacks, and they also have lack of functionality features. Moreover, these schemes do not provide efficient password change phase. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we propose a new provably secure biometric-based user authentication and key agreement scheme for cloud computing. The proposed scheme overcomes the weaknesses of the existing schemes and supports extra functionality features including user anonymity and efficient password and biometric update phase for multi-server environment. The careful formal security analysis under standard model and informal security analysis and the simulation results for formal security verification using the most acceptable AVISPA tool show that the proposed scheme is secure against various known possible attacks. The analysis of computation and communication overheads of our scheme depicts its efficiency over other related existing schemes, and thus, the proposed scheme is suitable for the cloud computing environment.

Abstract

In recent years, user authentication has emerged as an interesting field of research in wireless sensor networks. Most recently, in 2016, Chang and Le presented a scheme to authenticate the users in wireless sensor network using a password and smart card. They proposed two protocols urn:x-wiley:sec:media:sec1573:sec1573-math-0001 and urn:x-wiley:sec:media:sec1573:sec1573-math-0002. urn:x-wiley:sec:media:sec1573:sec1573-math-0003 is based on exclusive or (XOR) and hash functions, while urn:x-wiley:sec:media:sec1573:sec1573-math-0004 deploys elliptic curve cryptography in addition to the two functions used in urn:x-wiley:sec:media:sec1573:sec1573-math-0005. Although their protocols are efficient, we point out that both urn:x-wiley:sec:media:sec1573:sec1573-math-0006 and urn:x-wiley:sec:media:sec1573:sec1573-math-0007 are vulnerable to session specific temporary information attack and offline password guessing attack, while urn:x-wiley:sec:media:sec1573:sec1573-math-0008 is also vulnerable to session key breach attack. In addition, we show that both the protocols urn:x-wiley:sec:media:sec1573:sec1573-math-0009 and urn:x-wiley:sec:media:sec1573:sec1573-math-0010 are inefficient in authentication and password change phases. To withstand these weaknesses found in their protocols, we aim to design a new authentication and key agreement scheme using elliptic curve cryptography. Rigorous formal security proofs using the broadly accepted, the random oracle models, and the Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic and verification using the well‐known Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool are preformed on our scheme. The analysis shows that our designed scheme has the ability to resist a number of known attacks comprising those found in both Chang–Le's protocols

Abstract

Traditional two party client server authentication protocol may not provide a scalable solution for present network environments where personal and ubiquitous computing technologies are involved as it is now becoming multi-server based. To achieve efficient authorized communication, multi-server based authentication protocols have been designed. The key feature of multi-server based protocols is one time registration. We study the existing multi-server based authentication protocols, and identify that many of the multi-server based authentication protocols involve control server in mutual authentication or trusted server environment is required. The involvement of central authority in mutual authentication may be a bottleneck for large network, and the servers may be semi-trusted. To erase these drawbacks, Wei et al. recently proposed a multi-server based authentication protocol. Their protocol does not require all servers to be trusted and involvement of control server in mutual authentication. Unfortunately, we identify the security vulnerability of Wei et al.'s scheme to insider attack and password guessing attack. Additionally, lack of pre-smart card authentication leads to denial of service attack. To enhance the security of Wei et al.'s protocol, we propose a secure biometric-based authentication scheme for multi-server environment using smart card. We simulate the proposed protocol for the formal security verification using the widely accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool to show that our scheme is secure against active and passive attacks. In addition, we prove that our proposed scheme provides mutual authentication using the widely-accepted Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic and is also secured against various well known attacks. In addition, our scheme is efficient in terms of computational and communication overheads as compared to Wei et al.'s scheme and other existing related schemes.

Abstract

A novel biometric identity-based digital multi-signature (BIO-IDMS) scheme is put forwarded in this paper. The proposed scheme is constructed with the help of fuzzy extractor and elliptic curve bilinear pairings. Furthermore, we designed the formal model and the security model of the proposed BIO-IDMS scheme. The formal security analysis demonstrates that the forgery of the proposed scheme is infeasible in the random oracle model based on the intractability assumption of the computational Diffie–Hellman (CDH) problem. The proposed scheme outperforms in terms of computational cost compared with other related existing multi-signature schemes.

Abstract

User authentication in wireless sensor network (WSN) plays a very important role in which a legal registered user is allowed to access the real‐time sensing information from the sensor nodes inside WSN. To allow such access, a user needs to be authenticated by the accessed sensor nodes as well as gateway nodes inside WSNs. Because of resource limitations and vulnerability to physical capture of some sensor nodes by an attacker, design of a secure user authentication in WSN continues to be an important and challenging research area in recent years. In this paper, we propose a new three‐factor user authentication scheme based on the multi‐gateway WSN architecture. Through the widely‐accepted Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic, we prove that our scheme provides the secure mutual authentication. We then present the formal security verification of our proposed scheme using AVISPA tool, which is a powerful validation tool for network security applications, and show that our scheme is secure. In addition, the rigorous informal security analysis shows that our scheme is also secure against possible other known attacks including the sensor node capture attack. Furthermore, we present the additional functionality features that our scheme offers, which are efficient in communication and computation.

Abstract

In 2012, Mun et al. proposed an enhanced secure authentication with key-agreement protocol for roaming service in global mobility networks environment based on elliptic curve cryptography. They claimed that their protocol is efficient and resistant to prominent security attacks. The careful analysis of this study proves that Mun et al.'s protocol is susceptible to several attacks such as replay attack, man-in-middle attack, user impersonation attack, privileged insider attack, denial-ofservice attack, no login phase and imperfect mutual authentication phase. In addition, this study proposes an enhanced lightweight authentication with key-agreement protocol for mobile networks based on elliptic curve cryptography using smart cards. The proposed protocol is lightweight and perfectly suitable for real-time applications as it accomplishes simple one-way hash function, message authentication code and exclusive-OR operation. Furthermore, it achieves all the eminent security properties and is resistant to various possible attacks. The security analysis and comparison section demonstrates that the proposed protocol is robust compared with Mun et al.'s protocol.