Design of a Provable Secure ECC and HMAC-Based Robust and Efficient Authentication Scheme for Maritime Transportation System

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), a key enabler of Industry 4.0, integrates advanced communication technologies with the industrial economy to enable intelligent manufacturing and interconnected systems. Secure and reliable identity authentication in the IIoT becomes essential as connectivity expands across devices, systems, and domains. Blockchain technology presents a promising solution due to its decentralized, tamper-resistant, and traceable characteristics, facilitating secure and transparent identity verification. However, current blockchain-based cross-domain authentication schemes often lack a lightweight design, rendering them unsuitable for latency-sensitive and resource-constrained industrial environments. This paper proposes a lightweight cross-domain authentication scheme that combines blockchain with Chebyshev chaotic mapping. Unlike existing schemes relying heavily on Elliptic Curve Cryptography or bilinear pairing, our design circumvents such computationally intensive primitives entirely through the algebraic structure of Chebyshev polynomials. A formal security analysis using the Real-Or-Random (ROR) model demonstrates the scheme’s robustness. Furthermore, performance evaluations conducted with Hyperledger Fabric and the MIRACL cryptographic library validate the method’s effectiveness and superiority over existing approaches in terms of both security and operational efficiency.

The rapid growth of fog-supported Internet of Things (IoT) networks presents significant challenges in securing efficient and scalable communication between heterogeneous devices. The age-old authentication and key management schemes like RSA and hash are prone to emergent attacks and are characterized by high computational cost. To address these challenges, the paper will present a lightweight Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-based mutual authentication and key management system, combined with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), to ensure the safety of data transmission. The suggested model uses a Gateway Node (GWN) as a semi-trusted intermediary to enhance the process of registration of devices, verifying their identities, and determining a session key between the IoT devices and fog nodes. Formal security analysis and mathematical formulations prove that the scheme has mutual authentication, freshness of keys, forward secrecy, and resistance to replay and impersonation attacks. Performance analysis based on NS-3 (v3.40) reveals that the proposed framework has 48% reduced latency and 35% lower cost of computation than the traditional RSA-based models, while also having good security properties. The findings affirm that the proposed ECC-AES model provides an efficient trade-off between security and computation efficiency, and can be used in real-time and resource-constrained fog-IoT systems.

Wireless sensor network consists of micro electromechanical sensor nodes which are operated by battery power. Sensor network has emerged as an important supplement to the modern wireless communication systems due to its wide range of applications. The modern researchers are facing the various issues concerning sensor networks more graciously. However, offering security to an energy constrained network of sensor nodes is still a challenge. The proposed scheme named as Secure Cluster Based Routing Scheme (SCBRS) for Wireless Sensor Networks adopts a hierarchical network model coupled with low weight security mechanisms in order to conserve energy as well as offer security to the network. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) based public key cryptography, Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange scheme, nested hash based message authentication codes (HMAC) and RC5 symmetric cypher are the light-weight security methods used by the proposed scheme. Simulation results prove that SCBRS performs better than Tree Based Protocol for Key Management in Wireless Sensor Networks in terms of energy efficiency and security. SCBRS also performs better than Secure Hierarchical Routing Protocol (SHRP) in fields where security is the most important issue.

Radio‐frequency identification (RFID) technology has proliferated over the last few years and being deployed as identification technology in numerous domains like intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and Internet of Vehicles (IoV) for applications like road safety, efficient traffic management, automatic toll collection, intelligent parking, etc. As RFID devices, as well as the possible domains of ITS and IoV onto which the RFID technology can be deployed, are usually resource‐constrained, thus, security and privacy become a major concern. So, public‐key cryptography becomes the better choice for enhancing the security of RFID based systems. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is one of the dominant and secure asymmetric‐key cryptosystems being used for RFID security due to its smaller key size. Numerous RFID authentication schemes based on ECC have been suggested in literature, however, the majority has various serious security weaknesses. To bridge those existing security weaknesses, an enhanced ECC based light weight protocol for RFID systems has been proposed in this article. An extensive security analysis has been performed to demonstrate various secure features offered by our proposed protocol, and formal security analysis is being conducted using Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool. The performance of our proposed RFID protocol has been compared with various existing RFID based security solutions on the basis of parameters, that is, computational cost, communication cost, and storage requirement. Simulation results indicate that the proposed lightweight protocol is more secure and performance efficient than the existing RFID protocols, and is well suited for practical applications.

In 2016, Gope and Hwang have proposed a scheme, in which they stated that their scheme preserves user anonymity. However with the thorough cryptanalysis of their scheme, we have proved that their scheme is vulnerable to various security attacks. To overcome the security attacks and to achieve the security goals, a new scheme has been proposed. Through the rigorous informal and formal security analysis, we have demonstrated that the proposed scheme is secure against the security attacks. Further, the proposed scheme is simulated using widely accepted automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) tool. With the simulated results of the proposed scheme, we proved that the proposed scheme is secure against active and passive security attacks. Additionally, the proposed scheme is compared with Gope and Hwang and other schemes in terms of performance, computational cost and communication overhead. The proposed scheme is efficient and robust.

Home automation Internet of Things (IoT) systems have recently become a target for several types of attacks. In this paper, we present an authentication and key agreement protocol for a home automation network based on the ZigBee standard, which connects together a central controller and several end devices. Our scheme performs mutual authentication between end devices and the controller, which is followed by device-to-device communication. The scheme achieves confidentiality, message integrity, anonymity, unlinkability, forward and backward secrecy, and availability. Our scheme uses only simple hash and XOR computations and symmetric key encryption, and hence is resource-efficient. We show using a detailed security analysis and numerical results that our proposed scheme provides better security and anonymity without using timestamps and time synchronization, and is more efficient in terms of computation time, communication cost, and storage cost than schemes proposed in prior works.

Recently, Wei & Chen proposed a secure three-party mutual authentication protocol for RFID based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). Their approach can allow insecure communication between the reader and the backend, so their approach must achieve mutual authentication between the tag, reader, and backend. In addition, their method also satisfies the essential characteristics of RFID systems, such as confidentiality, anonymity, resistance to tracking attacks, and spoofing attacks. However, this article finds that its method cannot meet the mutual authentication and denial of service attacks.

Providing a mechanism to authenticate users in healthcare applications is an essential security requirement to prevent both external and internal attackers from penetrating patients’ identities and revealing their health data. Many schemes have been developed to provide authentication mechanisms to ensure that only legitimate users are authorised to connect, but these schemes still suffer from vulnerable security. Various attacks expose patients’ data for malicious tampering or destruction. Transferring health-related data and information between users and the health centre makes them exposed to penetration by adversaries as they may move through an insecure channel. In addition, previous mechanisms have suffered from the poor protection of users’ authentication information. To ensure the protection of patients’ information and data, we propose a scheme that authenticates users based on the information of both the device and the legitimate user. In this paper, we propose a Robust Authentication Model for Healthcare Users (RAMHU) that provides mutual authentication between the server and clients. This model utilizes an Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme (ECIES) and PHOTON to achieve strong security and good overall performance. RAMHU relies on multiple-pseudonym, physical address, and one-time password mechanisms to authenticate legitimate users. Moreover, extensive informal and formal security analysis with the automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) tool demonstrate that our model offers a high level of security in repelling a wide variety of possible attacks.

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.

Several key management schemes for dynamic access control in a user hierarchy are proposed in the literature. Most schemes are based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and polynomial interpolation. Due to time-consuming operations involved in the elliptic curve scalar multiplication and construction of interpolating polynomials, most existing schemes require high storage and computational complexity. Moreover, most of the proposed schemes are vulnerable to different attacks including the man-in-the-middle attacks. In this paper, we devise a novel key management scheme for hierarchical access control based on linear polynomials only. We show that our scheme is secure against all possible different attacks including the man-in-the-middle attack, which are required for designing an access control scheme, through both the informal and formal security analysis. The computational cost and the storage space are significantly reduced in our scheme while compared to the recently proposed related schemes. Thus, o...

Ensuring the security and privacy of patient data is a critical concern in the healthcare industry. The growing utilization of electronic data transmission and storage in medical records has amplified apprehensions about data security. However, due to varying stakeholder interests, not all data can be freely shared, necessitating the development of secure protocols. This study presents a highly secure protocol that integrates blockchain technology, patient biometric information, and robust cryptographic algorithms (elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and advanced encryption algorithm (AEC)) to facilitate data encryption and decryption. The protocol encompasses secure login, secure key sharing, and data sharing mechanisms among miners, offering comprehensive security measures. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol, both informal and formal security analyses are conducted. The security protocol description language in Scyther is utilized to evaluate the protocol's resilience against attacks. The culmination of this research is a secure protocol that leverages blockchain technology and ECC for the secure storage and sharing of medical records. The protocol covers all stages, including system setup, user registration, login mechanisms, key exchange between users and blockchain, communication between blockchains, and interaction with other miners, with a steadfast emphasis on security. Furthermore, the protocol's communication and computation costs are assessed, with a comparison to existing blockchain-based schemes. Informal proofs establish the protocol's security against common attacks faced by medical institutions. Formal simulation of the protocol using the Scyther tool provides definitive evidence of its resistance to attacks. As a result, this protocol presents a viable real-time implementation solution for safeguarding patient data within the healthcare domain, representing a significant contribution to data security.

To provide secure communication for mobile devices, authenticated key agreement protocol is an important primitive for establishing session key. So far, several protocols have been proposed to provide robust mutual authentication and key establishment for wireless local area network (WLAN). In this paper we present a secure authenticated key agreement (EC-SAKA) protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography. Our proposed protocol provides secure mutual authentication, key establishment and key confirmation over an untrusted network. The new protocol achieves many of the required security and performance properties. It can resist dictionary attacks mounted by either passive or active networks intruders. It can resist man-in-the middle attack. It also offers perfect forward secrecy which protects past sessions and passwords against future compromise. In addition, it can resist known-key and resilience to server attack. Our proposed protocol uses the signature techniques of ECDSA and the authentication protocol SKA concept. We show that our protocol meets the above security attributes under the assumption that the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem is secure. Our proposed protocol offers significantly improved performance in computational and communication load over comparably many authenticated key agreement protocols such as B-SPEKE, SRP, AMP, PAK-RY, PAK-X, SKA, LR-AKE and EC-SRP.

In this paper, we propose a secure two-factor remote user authentication protocol using Elliptic curve cryptography. The proposed protocol provides the mutual authentication of participants, session key agreement and user anonymity. The security of our proposed protocol is based on one way hash function and elliptic curve cryptosystem and it is secure against all relevant security attacks. Compared with other relevant protocol, the security analysis and performance evaluation show that our proposed protocol can provide high level of security with less communication and computation cost. In addition, the BAN logic is applied to demonstrate the validity of the proposed protocol.

Recently, in 2013, Wu et al. proposed an efficient adaptable and scalable group access control scheme (GAC) for managing wireless sensor networks and they claimed that their proposed GAC approach provides the forward secrecy and backward secrecy, and it also prevents the man-in-the-middle attack. However, in this paper, we revisit Wu et al.'s scheme and show that Wu et al.'s scheme fails to provide the forward and backward secrecy to the group access key (GAK), and also their scheme does not prevent the man-in-the-middle attack and it does not provide the mutual authentication between a node and the task manager. Moreover, in Wu et al.'s scheme, all the past GAKs used by a node can be revealed to an adversary when that node is compromised. We then aim to propose a novel group access control mechanism to withstand the security weaknesses found in Wu et al.'s scheme while retaining the original merits of their scheme. Through the rigorous informal security analysis and the formal security analysis using the widely-accepted Burrows---Abadi---Needham logic, we show that our scheme is secure against various known attacks including the attacks found in Wu et al.'s scheme. Moreover, in our scheme, the vulnerability of the GAKs used by a node is limited and bounded to the last GAK update protocol interval when that node is compromised by an adversary. Our scheme provides efficient dynamic properties such as joining and leaving of a node from a group along with high security and the required desirable features as compared to Wu et al.'s scheme, and as a result, our scheme is very suitable for the practical applications.

Urban air mobility (UAM) is a future air transportation system to solve the air pollution and movement efficiency problems of the traditional mobility system. In UAM environments, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are used to transport passengers and goods providing various convenient services such as package delivery, air bus, and air taxi. However, UAVs communicate with ground infrastructures through open channels that can be exposed to various security attacks. Therefore, a secure mutual authentication scheme is necessary for UAM environments. Moreover, a handover authentication is also necessary to ensure seamless communication when the service location is changed. In this paper, we design a secure and efficient handover authentication scheme for UAM environments considering various security vulnerabilities and efficiency using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). We utilize informal security analysis, Real-or-Random (RoR), Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, and Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) to prove the security of the proposed scheme. Furthermore, we compare the computation and communication cost comparisons of the proposed scheme with the other related schemes. The results show that the proposed scheme is secure and efficient for UAM environments.