LiSA: A Lightweight and Secure Authentication Mechanism for Smart Metering Infrastructure

Smart metering infrastructure (SMI) is the core component of the smart grid (SG) which enables two-way communication between consumers and utility companies to control, monitor, and manage the energy consumption data. Despite their salient features, SMIs equipped with information and communication technology are associated with new threats due to their dependency on public communication networks. Therefore, the security of SMI communications raises the need for robust authentication and key agreement primitives that can satisfy the security requirements of the SG. Thus, in order to realize the aforementioned issues, this paper introduces a lightweight and secure authentication protocol, "LiSA", primarily to secure SMIs in SG setups. The protocol employs Elliptic Curve Cryptography at its core to provide various security features such as mutual authentication, anonymity, replay protection, session key security, and resistance against various attacks. Precisely, LiSA exploits the hardness of the Elliptic Curve Qu Vanstone (EVQV) certificate mechanism along with Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman Problem (ECDHP) and Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP). Additionally, LiSA is designed to provide the highest level of security relative to the existing schemes with least computational and communicational overheads. For instance, LiSA incurred barely 11.826 ms and 0.992 ms for executing different passes across the smart meter and the service providers. Further, it required a total of 544 bits for message transmission during each session.Comment: To appear in IEEE Globecom 201

An Efficient Secure Group Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks in IoT Environment

Internet of Things(IoT) consist of interconnected devices for transmitting and receiving the data over the network. Key management is important for data confidentiality while transmitting in an open network. Even though several key management techniques are feasible to use, still obtaining a key management technique is a challenge with respect to energy and computational cost. The main intention of this work is to discover and overcome the design issues of the existing system and implement a lightweight and secure solution for that issue. The existing system has a fatal security flaw that leads to the unavailability of a complete system which is considered a huge problem in Internet of things. To overcome this issue, an authenticated key management protocol is proposed which deals with the problem of single point of failure and maintains the security properties of the existing system. An authenticated scheme is provided using elliptic curve and hash functions. This scheme also provides client addition, deletion and key freshness. Security analysis and computation complexity has been also discussed. We experimented proposed algorithm and tested with Scyther verification tool. The design overcomes the issues of an existing system by utilizing our scheme in peer to peer network. This network resolves the issue of a single point of failure (SPOF) by distributing the resources and services to the multiple nodes in the network. It will dissolve the problem of SPOF and will increase the reliability and scalability of the IoT system

Improved Secure and Low Computation Authentication Protocol for Wireless Body Area Network with ECC and 2d Hash Chain

Since technologies have been developing rapidly, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has emerged as a promising technique for healthcare systems. People can monitor patients’ body condition and collect data remotely and continuously by using WBAN with small and compact wearable sensors. These sensors can be located in, on, and around the patient’s body and measure the patient’s health condition. Afterwards sensor nodes send the data via short-range wireless communication techniques to an intermediate node. The WBANs deal with critical health data, therefore, secure communication within the WBAN is important. There are important criteria in designing a security protocol for a WBAN. Sensor nodes in a WBAN have limited computation power, battery capacity, and limited memory. Therefore, there have been many efforts to develop lightweight but secure authentication protocols. In this thesis, a computationally efficient authentication protocol based on Elliptic Curves Cryptography (ECC) and 2D hash chain has been proposed. This protocol can provide high level security and require significantly low computation power on sensor nodes. In addition, a novel key selection algorithm has been proposed to improve efficiency of key usage and reduce computation cost. For this protocol, ECC is used for key exchange and key encryption. The scheme encrypts a key with ECC to create a pair of points and uses this pair of points as keys for an intermediate node and sensor nodes. 2D hash chain technique is used for generating 2D key pool for authentication procedure. This technique can generate many keys efficiently and effectively with hash functions. For security part, this protocol provides essential security features including mutual authentication, perfect forward security, session key establishment, and etc., while providing high level security. In experimental results, this protocol reduced sensor nodes’ computation cost significantly by using combination of ECC and 2D hash chain. Moreover, the computation cost on the intermediate node has been reduced to 48.2% of the existing approach by the new key selection algorithm at an initial authentication. After the initial authentication, the intermediate node’s computation cost is further reduced to 47.1% of the initial authentication by eliminating synchronization phase. In addition, communication cost which is the total packet size of all messages is 1280-bits, which is 5392-bits smaller than the existing approach, for entire authentication and after the initial authentication the cost is reduced to 768-bits

A Lightweight and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Protocol for Mobile Edge Computing

With the advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), vehicular networks and cyber-physical systems, the need for real-time data processing and analysis has emerged as an essential pre-requite for customers' satisfaction. In this direction, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) provides seamless services with reduced latency, enhanced mobility, and improved location awareness. Since MEC has evolved from Cloud Computing, it inherited numerous security and privacy issues from the latter. Further, decentralized architectures and diversified deployment environments used in MEC platforms also aggravate the problem; causing great concerns for the research fraternity. Thus, in this paper, we propose an efficient and lightweight mutual authentication protocol for MEC environments; based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), one-way hash functions and concatenation operations. The designed protocol also leverages the advantages of discrete logarithm problems, computational Diffie-Hellman, random numbers and time-stamps to resist various attacks namely-impersonation attacks, replay attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, etc. The paper also presents a comparative assessment of the proposed scheme relative to the current state-of-the-art schemes. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed scheme incurs relatively less communication and computational overheads, and is appropriate to be adopted in resource constraint MEC environments.Comment: To appear in IEEE GLOBECOM 201

A lightweight and secure multilayer authentication scheme for wireless body area networks in healthcare system

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have lately been combined with different healthcare equipment to monitor patients' health status and communicate information with their healthcare practitioners. Since healthcare data often contain personal and sensitive information, it is important that healthcare systems have a secure way for users to log in and access resources and services. The lack of security and presence of anonymous communication in WBANs can cause their operational failure. There are other systems in this area, but they are vulnerable to offline identity guessing attacks, impersonation attacks in sensor nodes, and spoofing attacks in hub node. Therefore, this study provides a secure approach that overcomes these issues while maintaining comparable efficiency in wireless sensor nodes and mobile phones. To conduct the proof of security, the proposed scheme uses the Scyther tool for formal analysis and the Canetti–Krawczyk (CK) model for informal analysis. Furthermore, the suggested technique outperforms the existing symmetric and asymmetric encryption-based schemes

Improved Framework for Blockchain Application Using Lattice Based Key Agreement Protocol

One of the most recent challenges in communicationsystem and network system is the privacy and security ofinformation and communication session. Blockchain is one oftechnologies that use in sensing application in different importantenvironments such as healthcare. In healthcare the patient privacyshould be protected use high security system. Key agreementprotocol based on lattice ensure the authentication and highprotection against different types of attack especiallyimpersonation and man in the middle attack where the latticebased protocol is quantum-withstand protocol. Proposed improvedframework using lattice based key agreement protocol forapplication of block chain, with security analysis of manyliteratures that proposed different protocols has been presentedwith comparative study. The resultant new framework based onlattice overcome the latency limitation of block chain in the oldframework and lowered the computation cost that depend onElliptic curve Diffie-Hellman. Also, it ensures high privacy andprotection of patient’s informatio