Abstract

Nowadays, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are essential for monitoring and data collection in many industrial environments. Industrial environments are usually huge. The distances between the devices located in them can be vast; in this case, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) leads to greater productivity and efficiency of industries. Furthermore, the sensor devices in IIoT have limited memory and constrained processing power, and using gateway nodes is inevitable to cover these vast areas and manage communications between industrial sensors. Security threats such as compromised devices, denial of service, and leakage of confidential information can incur hefty expenses and irreparable damage to industrial systems. Hence, in the IIoT hierarchical architecture, anonymous and mutual authentication between users, gateway nodes, and sensor nodes is essential to protect users and the system’s security and privacy. In this article, we propose a lightweight anonymous privacy-preserving three-factor authentication scheme for WSN-Based IIoT (LAPTAS). In LAPTAS, registered users can use their security smartcard to communicate with sensors and access their data. Moreover, the proposed scheme supports sensor node dynamic registration, password and biometric change, and revocation phase. Additionally, we evaluate and verify our scheme’s security formally using the Real-or-Random model and informally with the automatic cryptographic Protocol Verifier tool(ProVerif). Finally, our scheme is simulated by the OPNET network simulator and compared with other similar schemes to ensure that the LAPTAS meets all security and performance requirements.

Abstract

With the tremendous growth of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) have opened the door for many potential applications ranging from smart grids and smart cities to transportation, retail, public safety and networking, healthcare and industrial manufacturing. However, due to communication via public channel occurring among various entities in an industrial CPS (ICPS) with the help of the 5G technology and Software-Defined Networking (SDN), it poses several potential security threats and attacks. To mitigate these issues, we propose a new three-factor user authentication and key agreement scheme (UAKA-5GSICPS) for 5G-enabled SDN based ICPS environment. UAKA-5GSICPS allows an authorized user to access the real-time data directly from some designated Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart devices provided that a successful mutual authentication among them is executed via their controller node in the SDN network. It is shown to be robust against various potential attacks through detailed security analysis including the simulation-based formal security verification. A detailed comparative study with the help of experimental results shows that UAKA-5GSICPS achieves better trade-off among security and functionality features, communication and computation overheads as compared to other existing competing schemes.

Abstract

Recent advances in Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) are expected to augment the already prodigious proliferation of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, this unrepresented growth is tinged by the uncertainty of possible challenges in security and privacy. In this work, we propose a novel blockchain-envisioned fine grained user access control scheme for data security and scalability in IIoT environment. The proposed scheme supports multiple attribute authorities and also a constant size key and ciphertext. The data gathered by the IoT smart devices are encrypted using the cipher-policy attribute based encryption (CP-ABE) and sent to their nearby gateway nodes. Later, the gateway nodes form the transactions from the encrypted data from the smart devices which are used to form partial blocks. The partial blocks are then forwarded to the cloud server(s) in the peer-to-peer (P2P) network to convert them into full blocks, which are verified, mined and added into the blockchain using the voting-based practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) consensus algorithm. The proposed scheme also allows a user to access the secure data stored in the blocks into the blockchain using the CP-ABE mechanism. The security analysis demonstrates the robustness of the proposed scheme against various attacks, and the comparative study with related relevant schemes also highlights the advantage of the proposed scheme over existing approaches. Finally, a blockchain implementation of the presented scheme summarizes the computational costs for a varied number of transactions per block, and also for a varied number of blocks mined in the blockchain.

Abstract

Smart home is intended to be able to enhance home automation systems and achieves goals such as reducing operational costs and increasing comfort while providing security to mobile users. However, an attacker may attempt security attacks in smart home environments because he/she can inject, insert, intercept, delete, and modify transmitted messages over an insecure channel. Secure and lightweight authentication protocols are essential to ensure useful services in smart home environments. In 2020, Iqbal et al. presented an anonymous lightweight authentication protocol for software-defined networking (SDN) enabled smart home, called ALAM. They claimed that ALAM protocol could resist security threats, and also provide secure mutual authentication and user anonymity. This comment demonstrates that ALAM protocol is fragile to various attacks, including session key disclosure, impersonation, and man-in-the-middle attacks, and also their scheme cannot provide user anonymity and mutual authentication. We propose the essential security guidelines to overcome the security flaws of ALAM protocol.

Abstract

The Internet of things (IoT) is a framework of various services and smart technologies that mutually communicate information between mobile devices and users or just between devices with the help of Internet connectivity. The dramatic progression of IoT helps numerous network applications and communication technologies to introduce state-of-the-art communication models for enabling interaction among mobile server, clients and various other smart entities. Now-a-days, online mobile services have gained huge attention by providing ample convenience to the distant users. However, it is necessary to secure the information, being exchanged among mobile clients and server. Therefore, a large number of authentication protocols have been presented but majority of them are unsuitable to fulfill novel security requirements and standards. Moreover, they are incompatible for IoT Environment due to higher computation and communication complexity. Consequently, there is a dire need of developing an adequate, reliable and cost-effective authentication protocol. In this article, we introduce a novel identity-based key agreement protocol using the puncturable pseudorandom functions for mobile clients in IoT environment. The proposed PSK-MC protocol enable two mobile clients to accomplish mutual authentication via server. The proposed protocol is evaluated formally and informally to determine its security strength. The formal security analysis is presented using the widely used random oracle model. Moreover, all the cryptographic operations used at mobile client side are executed on a mobile device, while the operations used at server side are implemented on a desktop machine to get the experimental results to determine computation cost. The performance analysis reveals the fact that our protocol is comparatively better than related protocols by exhibiting least communication and computation overhead.

Abstract

In recent years, the Internet of things (IoT) has become an encouraging communication paradigm that has numerous applications including smart city, smart home and intelligent transportation system. The information sensed by several IoT smart devices can be security stored at the (cloud) servers. An external user, being a client, can access the services from a server for the sensing information, provided that a mutual authentication happens among them. Using the established session key among the user and the server, encrypted information with the help of session key can be delivered to the user by the server securely. Recently, Rana et al. proposed a smart-card based remote user authentication scheme using user password. In this comment paper, we carefully analyzed the scheme of Rana et al. and tracked down that their scheme is insecure against serious attacks, including stolen smart card attack, privileged-insider attack, user impersonation attack, password change attack and Ephemeral Secret Leakage (ESL) attack. Furthermore, their scheme does not preserve untraceability feature. To remedy these security pitfalls, we also provide some remedies that can help in building more secure and effective user authentication scheme to apply in securing next generation IoT infrastructure.

Abstract

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) and Internet of Vehicle (IoV) technologies are particularly attracting attention from industry communities because of the intelligent transportation systems of smart city technologies. This study proposes an authentication and key agreement protocol for vehicle-to-vehicle(V2V) communication of IoV. Through V2V communication, traffic system management and road safety can be guaranteed. However, V2V communication cannot manage many vehicles as a whole, so it needs to be segmented and communicated by region. Therefore, considering locality, key agreement is made for V2V communication of the same or different regions, and a lightweight protocol is proposed for dynamic properties of vehicles to achieve such a goal. In addition, since the vehicle information is transmitted through a public channel, the security against various attacks is guaranteed by using mutual authentication and honey_list technology. It provides verification of safety through a detailed security analysis using the formal analysis using the widely-accepted Real-Or-Random(ROR) model, formal security verification using the broadly-accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications(AVISPA) software validation tool and non-mathematical(informal) security analysis. In addition, a detailed comparative study that the proposed scheme can be applied in the communication environment between actual vehicles as compared to other existing competing schemes.

Abstract

In a blockchain network, full nodes aid in decentralization by validating incoming transactions and also by assisting new nodes who want to join the network. However, due to the high storage cost incurred by full nodes, the total number of full nodes in a system is falling. In order to curb this problem and maintain decentralization, a secure fountain code (SeF) approach has been proposed earlier, where a class of fountain codes known as LT codes have been used. In this paper, we present Secure Raptor Encoder and Decoder (S-RED) built on Raptor Codes, which in addition to reducing storage costs, also has constant decoding time with respect to k (number of input blocks). We also present error-resilient double-peeling decoder that can recover original blocks with a high probability, even under the presence of adversaries

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the problem of sum-rate maximization in a millimeter-wave (mmWave) multi-user downlink system employing non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). Specifically, we consider the design of optimal transmit beamformer and power allocation that is robust in the presence of channel state information (CSI) errors. In order to reduce hardware complexity, we consider analog beamforming using a single RF chain and a double-phase shifter network. The original formulation of this problem is nonconvex; however, we reformulate this problem as an equivalent but tractable weighted mean squared error (MSE) minimization problem. We propose an iterative algorithm to solve this reformulated problem. We demonstrate the robust performance of the proposed algorithms via simulations.

Abstract

In the pliable index coding (PICOD) problem, a server is to serve multiple clients, each of which possesses a unique subset of the complete message set as side information and requests a new message which it does not have. The goal of the server is to do this using as few transmissions as possible. This work presents a hypergraph coloring approach to the PICOD problem. A textit{conflict-free coloring} of a hypergraph is known from literature as an assignment of colors to its vertices so that each edge of the graph contains one uniquely colored vertex. For a given PICOD problem represented by a hypergraph consisting of messages as vertices and request-sets as edges, we present achievable PICOD schemes using conflict-free colorings of the PICOD hypergraph. Various graph theoretic parameters arising out of such colorings (and some new variants) then give a number of upper bounds on the optimal PICOD length, which we study in this work. Our achievable schemes based on hypergraph coloring include scalar as well as vector linear PICOD schemes. For the scalar case, using the correspondence with conflict-free coloring, we show the existence of an achievable scheme which has length where refers to a parameter of the hypergraph that captures the maximum `incidence' number of other edges on any edge. This result improves upon known achievability results in PICOD literature, in some parameter regimes.