An Efficient Lightweight Provably Secure Authentication Protocol for Patient Monitoring Using Wireless Medical Sensor Networks

The refurbishing of conventional medical network with the wireless medical sensor network has not only amplified the efficiency of the network but concurrently posed different security threats. Previously, Servati and Safkhani had suggested an Internet of Things (IoT) based authentication scheme for the healthcare environment promulgating a secure protocol in resistance to several attacks. However, the analysis demonstrates that the protocol could not withstand user, server, and gateway node impersonation attacks. Further, the protocol fails to resist offline password guessing, ephemeral secret leakage, and gateway-by-passing attacks. To address the security weaknesses, we furnish a lightweight three-factor authentication framework employing the fuzzy extractor technique to safeguard the user’s biometric information. The Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, Real-or-Random (ROR) model, and Scyther simulation tool have been imposed as formal approaches for establishing the validity of the proposed work. The heuristic analysis stipulates that the proposed work is impenetrable to possible threats and offers several security peculiarities like forward secrecy and three-factor security. A thorough analysis of the preexisting works with the proposed ones corroborates the intensified security and efficiency with the reduced computational, communication, and security overheads

Certificateless Algorithm for Body Sensor Network and Remote Medical Server Units Authentication over Public Wireless Channels

Wireless sensor networks process and exchange mission-critical data relating to patients’ health status. Obviously, any leakages of the sensed data can have serious consequences which can endanger the lives of patients. As such, there is need for strong security and privacy protection of the data in storage as well as the data in transit. Over the recent past, researchers have developed numerous security protocols based on digital signatures, advanced encryption standard, digital certificates and elliptic curve cryptography among other approaches. However, previous studies have shown the existence of many security and privacy gaps that can be exploited by attackers to cause some harm in these networks. In addition, some techniques such as digital certificates have high storage and computation complexities occasioned by certificate and public key management issues. In this paper, a certificateless algorithm is developed for authenticating the body sensors and remote medical server units. Security analysis has shown that it offers data privacy, secure session key agreement, untraceability and anonymity. It can also withstand typical wireless sensor networks attacks such as impersonation, packet replay and man-in-the-middle. On the other hand, it is demonstrated to have the least execution time and bandwidth requirements

LDAKM-EIoT: Lightweight Device Authentication and Key Management Mechanism for Edge-Based IoT Deployment

In recent years, edge computing has emerged as a new concept in the computing paradigm that empowers several future technologies, such as 5G, vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and the Internet of Things (IoT), by providing cloud computing facilities, as well as services to the end users. However, open communication among the entities in an edge based IoT environment makes it vulnerable to various potential attacks that are executed by an adversary. Device authentication is one of the prominent techniques in security that permits an IoT device to authenticate mutually with a cloud server with the help of an edge node. If authentication is successful, they establish a session key between them for secure communication. To achieve this goal, a novel device authentication and key management mechanism for the edge based IoT environment, called the lightweight authentication and key management scheme for the edge based IoT environment (LDAKM-EIoT), was designed. The detailed security analysis and formal security verification conducted by the widely used Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool prove that the proposed LDAKM-EIoT is secure against several attack vectors that exist in the infrastructure of the edge based IoT environment. The elaborated comparative analysis of the proposed LDAKM-EIoT and different closely related schemes provides evidence that LDAKM-EIoT is more secure with less communication and computation costs. Finally, the network performance parameters are calculated and analyzed using the NS2 simulation to demonstrate the practical facets of the proposed LDAKM-EIoT

An authentic-based privacy preservation protocol for smart e-healthcare systems in iot

© 2013 IEEE. Emerging technologies rapidly change the essential qualities of modern societies in terms of smart environments. To utilize the surrounding environment data, tiny sensing devices and smart gateways are highly involved. It has been used to collect and analyze the real-time data remotely in all Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Since the IIoT environment gathers and transmits the data over insecure public networks, a promising solution known as authentication and key agreement (AKA) is preferred to prevent illegal access. In the medical industry, the Internet of Medical Things (IoM) has become an expert application system. It is used to gather and analyze the physiological parameters of patients. To practically examine the medical sensor-nodes, which are imbedded in the patient\u27s body. It would in turn sense the patient medical information using smart portable devices. Since the patient information is so sensitive to reveal other than a medical professional, the security protection and privacy of medical data are becoming a challenging issue of the IoM. Thus, an anonymity-based user authentication protocol is preferred to resolve the privacy preservation issues in the IoM. In this paper, a Secure and Anonymous Biometric Based User Authentication Scheme (SAB-UAS) is proposed to ensure secure communication in healthcare applications. This paper also proves that an adversary cannot impersonate as a legitimate user to illegally access or revoke the smart handheld card. A formal analysis based on the random-oracle model and resource analysis is provided to show security and resource efficiencies in medical application systems. In addition, the proposed scheme takes a part of the performance analysis to show that it has high-security features to build smart healthcare application systems in the IoM. To this end, experimental analysis has been conducted for the analysis of network parameters using NS3 simulator. The collected results have shown superiority in terms of the packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, throughput rates, and routing overhead for the proposed SAB-UAS in comparison to other existing protocols

Lightweight Three-Factor Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Internet-Integrated Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will be integrated into the future Internet as one of the components of the Internet of Things, and will become globally addressable by any entity connected to the Internet. Despite the great potential of this integration, it also brings new threats, such as the exposure of sensor nodes to attacks originating from the Internet. In this context, lightweight authentication and key agreement protocols must be in place to enable end-to-end secure communication. Recently, Amin et al. proposed a three-factor mutual authentication protocol for WSNs. However, we identified several flaws in their protocol. We found that their protocol suffers from smart card loss attack where the user identity and password can be guessed using offline brute force techniques. Moreover, the protocol suffers from known session-specific temporary information attack, which leads to the disclosure of session keys in other sessions. Furthermore, the protocol is vulnerable to tracking attack and fails to fulfill user untraceability. To address these deficiencies, we present a lightweight and secure user authentication protocol based on the Rabin cryptosystem, which has the characteristic of computational asymmetry. We conduct a formal verification of our proposed protocol using ProVerif in order to demonstrate that our scheme fulfills the required security properties. We also present a comprehensive heuristic security analysis to show that our protocol is secure against all the possible attacks and provides the desired security features. The results we obtained show that our new protocol is a secure and lightweight solution for authentication and key agreement for Internet-integrated WSNs

Secure Key Exchange Against Man-in-the-Middle Attack: Modified Diffie-Hellman Protocol

One of the most famous key exchange protocols is Diffie-Hellman Protocol (DHP) which is a widely used technique on which key exchange systems around the world depend. This protocol is simple and uncomplicated, and its robustness is based on the Discrete Logarithm Problem (DLP). Despite this, he is considered weak against the man-in-the-middle attack. This article presents a completely different version of the DHP protocol. The proposed version is based on two verification stages. In the first step, we check if the pseudo-random value α that Alice sends to Bob has been manipulated! In the second step, we make sure that the random value β that Bob sends to Alice is not manipulated. The man-in-the-middle attacker Eve can impersonate neither Alice nor Bob, manipulate their exchanged values, or discover the secret encryption key

Security in 5G-Enabled Internet of Things Communication: Issues: Challenges, and Future Research Roadmap

5G mobile communication systems promote the mobile network to not only interconnect people, but also interconnect and control the machine and other devices. 5G-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) communication environment supports a wide-variety of applications, such as remote surgery, self-driving car, virtual reality, flying IoT drones, security and surveillance and many more. These applications help and assist the routine works of the community. In such communication environment, all the devices and users communicate through the Internet. Therefore, this communication agonizes from different types of security and privacy issues. It is also vulnerable to different types of possible attacks (for example, replay, impersonation, password reckoning, physical device stealing, session key computation, privileged-insider, malware, man-in-the-middle, malicious routing, and so on). It is then very crucial to protect the infrastructure of 5G-enabled IoT communication environment against these attacks. This necessitates the researchers working in this domain to propose various types of security protocols under different types of categories, like key management, user authentication/device authentication, access control/user access control and intrusion detection. In this survey paper, the details of various system models (i.e., network model and threat model) required for 5G-enabled IoT communication environment are provided. The details of security requirements and attacks possible in this communication environment are further added. The different types of security protocols are also provided. The analysis and comparison of the existing security protocols in 5G-enabled IoT communication environment are conducted. Some of the future research challenges and directions in the security of 5G-enabled IoT environment are displayed. The motivation of this work is to bring the details of different types of security protocols in 5G-enabled IoT under one roof so that the future researchers will be benefited with the conducted work

A secure remote user authentication scheme for 6LoWPAN-based Internet of Things.

One of the significant challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT) is the provisioning of guaranteed security and privacy, considering the fact that IoT devices are resource-limited. Oftentimes, in IoT applications, remote users need to obtain real-time data, with guaranteed security and privacy, from resource-limited network nodes through the public Internet. For this purpose, the users need to establish a secure link with the network nodes. Though the IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks (6LoWPAN) adaptation layer standard offers IPv6 compatibility for resource-limited wireless networks, the fundamental 6LoWPAN structure ignores security and privacy characteristics. Thus, there is a pressing need to design a resource-efficient authenticated key exchange (AKE) scheme for ensuring secure communication in 6LoWPAN-based resource-limited networks. This paper proposes a resource-efficient secure remote user authentication scheme for 6LoWPAN-based IoT networks, called SRUA-IoT. SRUA-IoT achieves the authentication of remote users and enables the users and network entities to establish private session keys between themselves for indecipherable communication. To this end, SRUA-IoT uses a secure hash algorithm, exclusive-OR operation, and symmetric encryption primitive. We prove through informal security analysis that SRUA-IoT is secured against a variety of malicious attacks. We also prove the security strength of SRUA-IoT through formal security analysis conducted by employing the random oracle model. Additionally, we prove through Scyther-based validation that SRUA-IoT is resilient against various attacks. Likewise, we demonstrate that SRUA-IoT reduces the computational cost of the nodes and communication overheads of the network

A user-centric privacy-preserving authentication protocol for IoT-AmI environments

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in Internet of Things (IoT) has empowered healthcare professionals to monitor, diagnose, and treat patients remotely. Besides, the AmI-IoT has improved patient engagement and gratification as doctors’ interactions have become more comfortable and efficient. However, the benefits of the AmI-IoT-based healthcare applications are not availed entirely due to the adversarial threats. IoT networks are prone to cyber attacks due to vulnerable wireless mediums and the absentia of lightweight and robust security protocols. This paper introduces computationally-inexpensive privacy-assuring authentication protocol for AmI-IoT healthcare applications. The use of blockchain & fog computing in the protocol guarantees unforgeability, non-repudiation, transparency, low latency, and efficient bandwidth utilization. The protocol uses physically unclonable functions (PUF), biometrics, and Ethereum powered smart contracts to prevent replay, impersonation, and cloning attacks. Results prove the resource efficiency of the protocol as the smart contract incurs very minimal gas and transaction fees. The Scyther results validate the robustness of the proposed protocol against cyber-attacks. The protocol applies lightweight cryptography primitives (Hash, PUF) instead of conventional public-key cryptography and scalar multiplications. Consequently, the proposed protocol is better than centralized infrastructure-based authentication approaches

Securing Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks: Breaking and Fixing a Three-Factor Authentication Protocol

Heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (HWSNs) are employed in many real-time applications, such as Internet of sensors (IoS), Internet of vehicles (IoV), healthcare monitoring, and so on. As wireless sensor nodes have constrained computing, storage and communication capabilities, designing energy-efficient authentication protocols is a very important issue in wireless sensor network security. Recently, Amin et al. presented an untraceable and anonymous three-factor authentication (3FA) scheme for HWSNs and argued that their protocol is efficient and can withstand the common security threats in this sort of networks. In this article, we show how their protocol is not immune to user impersonation, de-synchronization and traceability attacks. In addition, an adversary can disclose session key under the typical assumption that sensors are not tamper-resistant. To overcome these drawbacks, we improve the Amin et al.'s protocol. First, we informally show that our improved scheme is secure against the most common attacks in HWSNs in which the attacks against Amin et al.'s protocol are part of them. Moreover, we verify formally our proposed protocol using the BAN logic. Compared with the Amin et al.'s scheme, the proposed protocol is both more efficient and more secure to be employed which renders the proposal suitable for HWSN networks.This work was partially supported by the MINECO grant TIN2016-79095-C2-2-R (SMOG-DEV—Security mechanisms for fog computing: advanced security for devices); and by the CAM grant S2013/ICE-3095 (CIBERDINE: Cybersecurity, Data, and Risks)