A Secure and Scalable Group Access Control Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Media sharing in cloud environment, which supports sharing media content at any time and from anywhere, is a promising paradigm of social interaction. However, it also brings forth security issues in terms of data confidentiality and access control on media data consumers with different access privileges. One promising solution is scalable media access control, which is capable of providing data confidentiality by encrypting the media data and issuing the key to only authorized data consumers. More importantly, it can empower the data distributor to provide the same media content with various quality levels to the consumers with different privileges. Traditional schemes without utilizing the cloud resources achieve scalable media access control by generating access keys using hash chains. Despite of their computational efficiency, such schemes suffer from various problems including vulnerability to user collusion attack in two-dimensional case, inflexible key distribution, and ambiguous key revocation strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel two-dimensional-scalable access control by generating access keys based on Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) algorithm. Moreover, the proposed scheme can efficiently achieve comprehensive key management including key distribution and key revocation by fully exploiting the cloud. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme is able to provide collusion resistance, as well as forward and backward secrecy. We have also evaluated the efficiency of the scheme through numerical analysis and initial implementation.

The Internet of things is playing more and more important role in smart healthcare, smart grids, and smart transportation, and using wireless sensor network (WSN), we can easily obtain and transmit information. However, the data security and users’ privacy are the biggest challenges for WSN because sensor nodes have low computing power and low storage capacity and are easy to be captured, and wireless networks are vulnerable. In 2021, Shuai et al. proposed a lightweight three-factor anonymous authentication scheme for WSN. However, we found that their protocol is vulnerable to stolen-verifier attack, modification of messages’ attack, and no perfect forward secrecy. Then, a new three-factor anonymous authentication scheme using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is proposed. Through informal and formal security analyses, our scheme can resist various known attacks and maintains low computational complexity.

A self-healing key distribution enables non-revoked users to recover the lost session keys on their own from the received broadcast messages and their private information. It decreases the load on the group manager and is very suitable for the unreliable wireless sensor networks. In 2008, Du and He [5] proposed a self-healing key distribution with revocation in wireless sensor networks which is claimed to resist to the collusion attack. In this paper, we show that the scheme 2 in [5] is not secure against the collusion attack. A newly joined user colluding with a revoked user can recover the group session keys that are not supposed to be known to them. Then the scheme will be improved and the modified one, through the analysis, is able to resist the collusion attack. Moreover, the modified scheme has the properties of constant storage, long life-span, forward secrecy and backward secrecy.

In this paper we study group distributed key management schemes for wireless sensor networks. We focus on forward secrecy and backward secrecy which means protecting the group keys used in the past and to be used in the future against an adversary who has gained accesses to the network. Unfortunately, most existing distributed schemes for group key management do not guarantee forward and backward secrecy when a certain number of nodes are compromised or some group keys are leaked. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic distributed group key management scheme based on local collaboration that provides both forward and backward secrecy. Also we prove its robustness against various node capture attacks and compare it with two related schemes both analytically and by simulations to verify its efficiency on storage and communication overhead.

MLPPT-MHS: Multi-Layered Privacy Preserving and Traceable Mobile Health System

Development of the Internet of things (IoT) is considered as one of the major events in modern manufacturing industry, and IoT devices are expected to create and exchange vast amounts of data, thereby bringing forth unprecedented challenges in terms of robust and vendor‐neutral data sharing. While access control is widely used to protect the security of data sharing, it still has some security flaws and limitations, such as privacy leakage, fixed access permissions, security vulnerabilities, and so on. Aiming at these problems, this article proposes a permission‐combination scalable access control (PCS‐AC) scheme, in which the methods of access permissions assignment, data encryption, and data access are given. In contrast to prior works, PCS‐AC differs in several significant ways: (1) it supports anonymous access and traceability. Anonymous access can prevent leakage of users' privacy. Traceability can track the illegally accessed entity when the resource is illegally accessed; (2) it supports scalable access to data resources. Users use a combination of attribute permissions to access data at different security levels; (3) it achieves high efficiency because the entity can quickly search ciphertext resources by plaintext keywords. After searching and downloading the ciphertext, decrypt it by group key to obtain the corresponding plaintext information. PCS‐AC is proven secure under the hardness assumption of Discrete Logarithm problem and Inverse Computational Diffe‐Hellman problem. The performance analysis shows that PCS‐AC has higher efficiency than the referred works.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are widely used to provide users with convenient services such as health-care, and smart home. To provide convenient services, sensor nodes in WSN environments collect and send the sensing data to the gateway. However, it can suffer from serious security issues because susceptible messages are exchanged through an insecure channel. Therefore, secure authentication protocols are necessary to prevent security flaws in WSN. In 2020, Moghadam et al. suggested an efficient authentication and key agreement scheme in WSN. Unfortunately, we discover that Moghadam et al.’s scheme cannot prevent insider and session-specific random number leakage attacks. We also prove that Moghadam et al.’s scheme does not ensure perfect forward secrecy. To prevent security vulnerabilities of Moghadam et al.’s scheme, we propose a secure and lightweight mutual authentication protocol for WSNs (WSN-SLAP). WSN-SLAP has the resistance from various security drawbacks, and provides perfect forward secrecy and mutual authentication. We prove the security of WSN-SLAP by using Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, Real-or-Random (ROR) model, and Automated Verification of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation. In addition, we evaluate the performance of WSN-SLAP compared with existing related protocols. We demonstrate that WSN-SLAP is more secure and suitable than previous protocols for WSN environments.

In a time-bound cryptographic key assignment scheme, distinct temporal keys for distinct time periods are assigned to the channels in order to encrypt and decrypt the channels for secure broadcasting. It has numerous applications including the Pay-TV systems. In this paper, we aim to propose a novel time-bound hierarchical access control scheme for secure broadcasting, in which each user needs to store a distinct and unique user's private key, and hence each user in a channel group can subscribe for an individual channel. Our scheme reduces significantly the implementation cost and also improves the computational performance along with extra features. Through the informal and formal security analysis, it is shown that our scheme is secure against various known attacks including the collusion attack. As a result, our scheme is more secure and efficient as compared to other related schemes in the literature.

Healing on the cloud: Secure cloud architecture for medical wireless sensor networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables all objects to connect to the Internet and exchange data via different emerging technologies, which makes the intelligent identification and management a reality. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), as a crucial basis of IoT, have been applied in many fields like smart health care and smart transportation. With the development of WSNs, data security has attracted more and more attention, and user authentication is a popular mechanism to ensure the information security of WSNs. Recently, many authentication mechanisms for wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) have been proposed, but most of the protocols cannot achieve the features of local password change and forward secrecy while resisting stolen smart card attack. To enhance the security based on previous work, an ECC-based secure three-factor authentication protocol with forward secrecy for WMSN is proposed in this paper. It utilizes a fuzzy commitment scheme to handle the biometric information. Meanwhile, fuzzy verifier and honey_list techniques are used to solve the contradiction of local password verification and mobile device lost attack. The security of our protocol is evaluated by provable security, Proverif tool, and information analysis. Besides, the comparisons with the relevant protocols are given, and the results indicate that our protocol is robust and secure for WMSN systems.

When the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is combined with the Internet of Things (IoT), it can be employed in a wide range of applications, such as agriculture, industry 4.0, health care, smart homes, among others. Accessing the big data generated by these applications in Cloud Servers (CSs), requires higher levels of authenticity and confidentiality during communication conducted through the Internet. Signcryption is one of the most promising approaches nowadays for overcoming such obstacles, due to its combined nature, i.e., signature and encryption. A number of researchers have developed schemes to address issues related to access control in the IoT literature, however, the majority of these schemes are based on homogeneous nature. This will be neither adequate nor practical for heterogeneous IoT environments. In addition, these schemes are based on bilinear pairing and elliptic curve cryptography, which further requires additional processing time and more communication overheads that is inappropriate for real-time communication. Consequently, this paper aims to solve the above-discussed issues, we proposed an access control scheme for IoT environments using heterogeneous signcryption scheme with the efficiency and security hardiness of hyperelliptic curve. Besides the security services such as replay attack prevention, confidentiality, integrity, unforgeability, non-repudiations, and forward secrecy, the proposed scheme has very low computational and communication costs, when it is compared to existing schemes. This is primarily because of hyperelliptic curve lighter nature of key and other parameters. The AVISPA tool is used to simulate the security requirements of our proposed scheme and the results were under two backbends (Constraint Logic-based Attack Searcher (CL-b-AtSER) and On-the-Fly Model Checker (ON-t-FL-MCR)) proved to be SAFE when the presented scheme is coded in HLPSL language. This scheme was proven to be capable of preventing a variety of attacks, including confidentiality, integrity, unforgeability, non-repudiation, forward secrecy, and replay attacks.

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), communication between connected machines has become necessity. We simulate the communication of IoT by short-lived instant messaging for group communication. Group communication security requires such measures as group forward and backward secrecy and perfect forward secrecy. We satisfy these security measures by using a group controller and Attributebased Encryption (ABE) to encrypt data on update procedures. The communication overhead is outsourced to a mediating MQ Telemetry Transport broker. Thus, we decrease the costs for group joins and leaves to T(1). The number of attributes used in the system are reduced to O(log(N)), where N represents the maximum number of members. We provide an intuitive approach to fit the maximum number N = 2k members to our requirements and to increase the maximum size of members, if needed by N = 2k+1.

Recently, various user authentication schemes have successfully drawn researchers' attention and been studied widely in order to guarantee secure communication for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This paper proposes a new biometric-based authenticated key agreement scheme using Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC) for WSN to minimize the complexity of computational costs between the sensor node and the GW-node and fit low-power sensor network environments. Compared with previous schemes, the newly proposed scheme has the following more practical characteristics: (1) it provides secure session key agreement function by adopting elliptic curve cryptosystem, (2) it can reduce the total execution time and memory requirement due to the elliptic curve cryptography, (3) it is not only secure against well-known cryptographical attacks but also provides perfect forward secrecy, and (4) it does not require the user password and uses only hash function. Analysis results show that the proposed scheme is extremely suitable for use in WSNs since it provides security, reliability, and efficiency.

Secured lightweight authentication for 6LoWPANs in machine-to-machine communications

Multi-source multi-client (M/M) searchable encryption has drawn increasing attention as data sharing becomes prevalent in the digital economics era. It allows data from multiple sources to be securely outsourced to third parties and queried by authorized clients. In response to these demands, various schemes sprung up in the last few years. However, empirical results show that they suffer from performance limitations. Specifically, they either require per-interaction in per-query between data sources and clients or time-consuming public-key encryption. To address these issues, we propose a searchable encryption scheme that allows authorized clients to efficiently search encrypted data from multiple sources. Compared to previous schemes, our design reduces the interaction overhead of authorization and query with the aid of a set-constrained pseudo-random function. Given practical considerations in the M/M setting, we further refine the forward privacy (FP) as “FP with client” and “FP with server” for data addition. To achieve these new security notions, we construct a new M/M scheme only with efficient symmetric cryptographic tools. We perform a formal security analysis of the proposed schemes and implement them to compare with prior arts. The theoretical and experimental results confirm that our designs are practical with lower communication and computation overhead.