A mutual authentication and key update protocol in satellite communication network

This paper describes an authentication protocol using a Hardware-Embedded Delay PUF called HELP. HELP derives randomness from within-die path delay variations that occur along the paths within a hardware implementation of a cryptographic primitive, such as AES or SHA-3. The digitized timing values which represent the path delays are stored in a database on a secure server (verifier) as an alternative to storing PUF response bitstrings. This enables the development of an efficient authentication protocol that provides both privacy and mutual authentication. The security properties of the protocol are analyzed using data collected from a set of Xilinx Zynq FPGAs.

In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, healthcare continuously harnesses its benefits, propelling advancements in medical practices. Within intelligent healthcare, medical robots play a pivotal role, providing integral support to healthcare professionals, streamlining processes, and delivering efficient services. These robots securely transmit patient treatment plans, transferring them to cloud storage and subsequently storing them in blockchain systems. This innovative approach ensures the integrity and accessibility of patient data, introducing novel avenues for seamless interaction with medical information for hospitals and patients’ families. Despite these advantages, the looming privacy risks associated with sensitive patient data transmission pose a compelling challenge, demanding a comprehensive solution. In response to this challenge, we propose a mutual authentication and key agreement protocol designed to optimize healthcare services while prioritizing data security and patient privacy. To validate the robustness of our authentication protocol, we conduct thorough analyses based on both formal and informal models, establishing a foundational framework for evaluating the protocol’s security. Additionally, we perform a comprehensive comparative analysis, assessing the proposed protocol against existing counterparts across various dimensions. This comparative scrutiny reveals the superiority of our protocol in terms of security, as well as its efficiency in communication cost and computational overhead. These findings affirm the efficacy of our proposed solution in navigating the intricate interplay between medical robotics, blockchain, and data security.

The integrated information network is a large capacity information network that integrates various communication platforms on the ground, at sea, in the air and in the deep air through the inter-satellite and satellite-ground links to acquire information accurately, process it quickly, and transmit it efficiently. The satellite communication, as an important part of integrated information networks, is one of main approaches to acquire, process and distribute communication information and resources. In this paper, based on current researches of the satellite communication network, we put forward a 3-layer satellite communication network model based on the Software Defined Network (SDN). Meanwhile, to improve current routing policies of the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communication network, we put forward an Adaptive Routing Algorithm (ARA) to sustain the shortest satellite communication link. Experiment results show that the proposed method can effectively reduce link distance and communication delay, and realize adaptive path planning.

Delegated authentication is a very popular and effective paradigm to deal with entity authentication problems for resource-constrained clients in cyber-physical systems; namely, the authentication between two clients is proxied by a trusted authentication server. However, an attacker may compromise the authentication server to impersonate the clients for sabotaging the cyber-physical systems. To detect the identity fraud attacks caused by an authentication server compromise, we propose two mutual authentication protocols by using a pseudo-random function family and a one-time signature (OTS) scheme. Our idea is to leverage the continuously evolving OTS signing and verifying keys at the signer and the verifier sides respectively for identity fraud detection because an identity fraud attack would violate the victim's honest OTS key update procedure. The proposed protocols are proven secure under a new mutual authentication security model that formulates the identity fraud detection.

This paper considers satellite communication networks where each satellite terminal is equipped with energy harvesting (EH) devices to supply energy continuously, and randomly transmits bursty packets to a geostationary satellite over a shared wireless channel. Packet replicas combined with a successive iteration cancellation scheme can reduce the negative impact of packet collisions but consume more energy. Hence, appropriate energy management policies are required to mitigate the adverse effect of energy outages. Although centralized access schemes can provide better performance on the networks’ throughput, they expend extra signallings to allocate the resources, which leads to non-negligible communication latencies, especially for the satellite communication networks. In order to reduce the communication overhead and delay, a distributed random access (RA) scheme considering the energy constraints is studied. Each EH satellite terminal (EH-ST) decides whether to transmit the packet and how many replicas are transmitted according to its local energy and EH rates to maximize the average long-term network throughput. Owing to the nonconvexity of this problem, we adopted a game theoretic method to approximate the optimal solution. By forcing all the EH-STs to employ the same policy, we characterized and proved the existence and uniqueness of the symmetric Nash equilibrium (NE) of the game. Moreover, an efficient algorithm is proposed to calculate the symmetric NE by combining a policy iteration algorithm and the bisection method. The performance of the proposed RA scheme was investigated via numerous simulations. Simulation results showed that the proposed RA scheme is applicable to the EH devices in the future low-cost interactive satellite communication system.

Recently, Guo et al. proposed a chaotic maps based mutual authentication and key agreement protocol using smart cards for wireless communications. In this paper, we demonstrate that this protocol does not possess the security of session key. To overcome their security weakness, we propose an improved chaotic maps-based mutual authentication and key agreement scheme with the same conditions.

The authentication protocols existing in the realm of mobile satellite communication networks, usually employ the one-time shared secret technique. Although the technique combats well against replay attacks, however, it is vulnerable to desynchronisation attacks. The later type of attacks, if framed and mounted against the crucial update mechanisms, which occur in mobile satellite communication systems, can lead to permanent Denial of Service (DoS) conditions. In this context, the authentication protocol initially proposed by Lee et al. [1] has emerged as the defacto protocol and forms the basis for various other authentication protocols developed since then.In this paper our contribution is two-fold. The first part of the paper presents an analysis of the authentication protocol [1], which reveals that the protocol is fundamentally susceptible to two attacks: impersonation attack and desynchronisation attack. To overcome these susceptibilities, in the second part of the paper, a new authentication protocol is proposed which incorporates a resynchronization phase. The paper demonstrates that the proposed solution is robust to impersonation attacks as well as to permanent DoS conditions caused by desynchronisation attacks. Moreover, the proposed solution is expected to find its application to address the desynchronisation issue found in numerous other recently published enhanced authentication protocols.

In recent years, RFID (radio-frequency identification) systems are widely used in many applications. One of the most important applications for this technology is the Internet of things (IoT). Therefore, researchers have proposed several authentication protocols that can be employed in RFID-based IoT systems, and they have claimed that their protocols can satisfy all security requirements of these systems. However, in RFID-based IoT systems we have mobile readers that can be compromised by the adversary. Due to this attack, the adversary can compromise a legitimate reader and obtain its secrets. So, the protocol designers must consider the security of their proposals even in the reader compromised scenario. In this paper, we consider the security of the ultra-lightweight RFID mutual authentication (ULRMAPC) protocol recently proposed by Fan et al. They claimed that their protocol could be applied in the IoT systems and provide strong security. However, in this paper we show that their protocol is vulnerable to denial of service, reader and tag impersonation and de-synchronization attacks. To provide a solution, we present a new authentication protocol, which is more secure than the ULRMAPC protocol and also can be employed in RFID-based IoT systems.

Wireless Sensor Networks are being widely used in many real time applications that require continuous monitoring and maintenance of surroundings and their environment. Communication is a vital operation in WSN and most of the times the data is confidential. Hence, security of data is a major concern in WSN and it has been observed that a secure authentication mechanism will ensure confidentiality and integrity of data in WSN. Many authentication mechanisms have been designed but most of them require the sensor nodes to have much computational resources, involves much communication and storage overheads and are quite complex. In this paper, we propose a simple, secure, dynamic, scalable, efficient and lightweight protocol for mutual authentication of nodes in WSN. The protocol is based on tokens, each sensor node acquires a token from base station (BS) and later on without any involvement of BS sensor nodes mutually authenticate each other using acquired tokens. The proposed protocol was modeled in scyther for verification and no potential attacks were detected.

Cryptanalysis of the Cho et al. protocol: A hash-based RFID tag mutual authentication protocol

A Lightweight Leakage-Resilient Identity-Based Mutual Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol for Resource-limited Devices

Wireless sensor network (WSN) have been applied in many different areas. Mutual authentication is an important service in WSN. In 2010, Chen and Shih proposed a robust mutual authentication (RMA) protocol for WSN. However, this paper points out that Chen-Shih's RMA protocol has some drawbacks: (1) user impersonation attacks by a malicious registered user, (2) GW-node impersonation attacks by a malicious registered user, (3) sensor node impersonation attacks by a malicious registered user, (4) privileged insider attacks, and (5) time synchronization problem.

The growing usage of wireless devices has significantly increased the need for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) during the past two decades. However, security (most notably authentication) remains a major roadblock to WLAN adoption. Several authentication protocols exist for verifying a supplicant's identity who attempts to connect his wireless device to an access point (AP) of an organization's WLAN. Many of these protocols use the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) framework. These protocols are either vulnerable to attacks such as violation of perfect forward secrecy, replay attack, synchronization attack, privileged insider attack, and identity theft or require high computational and communication costs. In this paper, a lightweight EAP-based authentication protocol for IEEE 802.11 WLAN is proposed that not only addresses the security issues in the existing WLAN authentication protocols but is also cost-effective. The security of the proposed protocol is verified using BAN logic and the Scyther tool. Our analysis shows that the proposed protocol is safe against all the above attacks and attacks defined in RFC-4017. A comparison of the computational and communication costs of the proposed protocol with other existing state-of-the-art protocols shows that the proposed protocol is lightweight than existing solutions.

Aiming at to avoid the security drawbacks of the authentication protocol in Long Term Evolution-Wireless Local Area Network (LTE-WLAN) heterogeneous converged network proposed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), an improved protocol based on hybrid cryptosystem is proposed to achieve access authentication for WLAN user equipment(UE) with identity privacy protection. The security analysis shows that by using certificateless signcryption(CLSC) scheme without pairing calculation based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), hash chain and identity index mechanism, the proposed authentication protocol provides the following ten kinds of security properties: anonymous protection for International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI), update on shared keys, protection for master session key(MSK), resistance to impersonation attack, replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack, redirect attack and Denial of Service (DoS) attack, mutual authentication between communication entities, and without framework modification from the original protocol. The performance analysis shows that the approximate calculation time of all the communication entities is 79 ms in total and that of UE is 266 us . Thus, our proposed protocol is superior to some other related improved protocols in terms of security and efficiency.

RFID technology can potentially be applied almost everywhere. A typical RFID system involves a reader and a number of tags, which may range from the battery-powered ones with Wi-Fi capabilities, to the low-cost ones that are constrained in resources with even no internal power. Keeping RFID systems secure is important, because they are vulnerable to a number of malicious attacks. As for low-cost RFID systems, security problems become much more challenging, as many traditional security mechanisms are inefficient or even impossible due to resource constraints. Some existing solutions utilize traditional cryptographic primitives such as hash or encryption functions, which are often too expensive in hardware to be implemented on low-cost RFID tags. Furthermore, some other lightweight solutions have been reported to be broken, revealing their keys and ID numbers to the attackers. In this thesis, we propose lightweight solutions to Mutual Authentication and Ownership Transfer for RFID systems. Mutual Authentication mitigates the issues of eavesdropping and cloning of tags. Only authenticated readers and tags will successfully communicate with each other. Furthermore, we adapt our Mutual Authentication scheme to secure the Ownership Transfer of RFID tags, which is a pertinent issue in the scope of RFID. When an item passes from one owner to another, it is undesirable for the old owner to be able to access the tag or read data from it. The new user must therefore update the access-granting information without revealing this to the old owner. Tag search is another important functionality that a RFID system should provide. In this thesis, we study how to secure tag search with a focus on low-cost RFID systems for which existing solution is not efficient. These protocols are all realized by utilizing minimalistic cryptography such as Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF) and Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSR). PUFs and LFSRs