A secure lightweight authentication mechanism for IoT devices in generic domain

The Internet of Things prompt deployment enhances the security concerns of these systems in recent years. The enormous exchange of sensory information between devices raises the necessity for a secure authentication scheme for Internet of Things devices. Despite many proposed schemes, providing authenticated and secure communication for Internet of Things devices is still an open issue. This research addresses challenges pertaining to the Internet of Things authentication, verification, and communication, and proposes a new secure lightweight mechanism for Internet of Things devices in the generic domain. The proposed authentication method utilizes environmental variables obtained by sensors to allow the system to identify genuine devices and reject anomalous connections

Lightweight mutual authentication and privacy preservation schemes for IOT systems.

Internet of Things (IoT) presents a holistic and transformative approach for providing services in different domains. IoT creates an atmosphere of interaction between humans and the surrounding physical world through various technologies such as sensors, actuators, and the cloud. Theoretically, when everything is connected, everything is at risk. The rapid growth of IoT with the heterogeneous devices that are connected to the Internet generates new challenges in protecting and preserving user’s privacy and ensuring the security of our lives. IoT systems face considerable challenges in deploying robust authentication protocols because some of the IoT devices are resource-constrained with limited computation and storage capabilities to implement the currently available authentication mechanism that employs computationally expensive functions. The limited capabilities of IoT devices raise significant security and privacy concerns, such as ensuring personal information confidentiality and integrity and establishing end-to-end authentication and secret key generation between the communicating device to guarantee secure communication among the communicating devices. The ubiquity nature of the IoT device provides adversaries more attack surfaces which can lead to tragic consequences that can negatively impact our everyday connected lives. According to [1], authentication and privacy protection are essential security requirements. Therefore, there is a critical need to address these rising security and privacy concerns to ensure IoT systems\u27 safety. This dissertation identifies gaps in the literature and presents new mutual authentication and privacy preservation schemes that fit the needs of resource-constrained devices to improve IoT security and privacy against common attacks. This research enhances IoT security and privacy by introducing lightweight mutual authentication and privacy preservation schemes for IoT based on hardware biometrics using PUF, Chained hash PUF, dynamic identities, and user’s static and continuous biometrics. The communicating parties can anonymously communicate and mutually authenticate each other and locally establish a session key using dynamic identities to ensure the user’s unlinkability and untraceability. Furthermore, virtual domain segregation is implemented to apply security policies between nodes. The chained-hash PUF mechanism technique is implemented as a way to verify the sender’s identity. At first, this dissertation presents a framework called “A Lightweight Mutual Authentication and Privacy-Preservation framework for IoT Systems” and this framework is considered the foundation of all presented schemes. The proposed framework integrates software and hardware-based security approaches that satisfy the NIST IoT security requirements for data protection and device identification. Also, this dissertation presents an architecture called “PUF Hierarchal Distributed Architecture” (PHDA), which is used to perform the device name resolution. Based on the proposed framework and PUF architecture, three lightweight privacy-preserving and mutual authentication schemes are presented. The Three different schemes are introduced to accommodate both stationary and mobile IoT devices as well as local and distributed nodes. The first scheme is designed for the smart homes domain, where the IoT devices are stationary, and the controller node is local. In this scheme, there is direct communication between the IoT nodes and the controller node. Establishing mutual authentication does not require the cloud service\u27s involvement to reduce the system latency and offload the cloud traffic. The second scheme is designed for the industrial IoT domain and used smart poultry farms as a use case of the Industrial IoT (IIoT) domain. In the second scheme, the IoT devices are stationary, and the controller nodes are hierarchical and distributed, supported by machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. The third scheme is designed for smart cities and used IoV fleet vehicles as a use case of the smart cities domain. During the roaming service, the mutual authentication process between a vehicle and the distributed controller nodes represented by the Roadside Units (RSUs) is completed through the cloud service that stores all vehicle\u27s security credentials. After that, when a vehicle moves to the proximity of a new RSU under the same administrative authority of the most recently visited RSU, the two RSUs can cooperate to verify the vehicle\u27s legitimacy. Also, the third scheme supports driver static and continuous authentication as a driver monitoring system for the sake of both road and driver safety. The security of the proposed schemes is evaluated and simulated using two different methods: security analysis and performance analysis. The security analysis is implemented through formal security analysis and informal security analysis. The formal analysis uses the Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic (BAN) and model-checking using the automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) toolkit. The informal security analysis is completed by: (1) investigating the robustness of the proposed schemes against the well-known security attacks and analyze its satisfaction with the main security properties; and (2) comparing the proposed schemes with the other existing authentication schemes considering their resistance to the well-known attacks and their satisfaction with the main security requirements. Both the formal and informal security analyses complement each other. The performance evaluation is conducted by analyzing and comparing the overhead and efficiency of the proposed schemes with other related schemes from the literature. The results showed that the proposed schemes achieve all security goals and, simultaneously, efficiently and satisfy the needs of the resource-constrained IoT devices

Authentication Solutions in Industrial Internet of Things: A Survey

With the rapid growth of industry 4.0, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is considered to be a promising solution for converting normal operations to ‘smart’ operations in industrial sectors and systems. The well-known characteristics of IIoT has greatly improved the productivity and quality of many industrial sectors. IIoT allows the connectivity of many industrial smart devices such as, sensors, actuators and gateways. The connectivity feature makes this critical environment vulnerable to various cybersecurity attacks. Subsequently, maintaining the security of IIoT sys-tems remains a challenge to ensure their success. In particular, authenticating the connected IIoT devices is a must to ensure that they can be trusted and prevent any malicious attempts. Hence, the objective of this survey is to overview, discuss and analyze the different solutions related to de-vice authentication in the domain of IIoT. Also, we analyze the IIoT environment in terms of characteristics, architecture and security requirements. Similarly, we highlight the role of (machine-to-machine) M2M communication in IIoT. We further contribute to this survey by outlining several open issues that must be considered when designing authentication schemes for IIoT. Fi-nally, we highlight a number of research directions and open challenges

Key-Based Cookie-Less Session Management Framework for Application Layer Security

The goal of this study is to extend the guarantees provided by the secure transmission protocols such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) and apply them to the application layer. This paper proposes a comprehensive scheme that allows the unification of multiple security mechanisms, thereby removing the burden of authentication, mutual authentication, continuous authentication, and session management from the application development life-cycle. The proposed scheme will allow creation of high-level security mechanisms such as access control and group authentication on top of the extended security provisions. This scheme effectively eliminates the need for session cookies, session tokens and any similar technique currently in use. Hence reducing the attack surface and nullifying a vast group of attack vectors

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

Practical Lightweight Security: Physical Unclonable Functions and the Internet of Things

In this work, we examine whether Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) can act as lightweight security mechanisms for practical applications in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT). In order to do so, we first discuss what PUFs are, and note that memory-based PUFs seem to fit the best to the framework of the IoT. Then, we consider a number of relevant memory-based PUF designs and their properties, and evaluate their ability to provide security in nominal and adverse conditions. Finally, we present and assess a number of practical PUF-based security protocols for IoT devices and networks, in order to confirm that memory-based PUFs can indeed constitute adequate security mechanisms for the IoT, in a practical and lightweight fashion. More specifically, we first consider what may constitute a PUF, and we redefine PUFs as inanimate physical objects whose characteristics can be exploited in order to obtain a behaviour similar to a highly distinguishable (i.e., “(quite) unique”) mathematical function. We note that PUFs share many characteristics with biometrics, with the main difference being that PUFs are based on the characteristics of inanimate objects, while biometrics are based on the characteristics of humans and other living creatures. We also note that it cannot really be proven that PUFs are unique per instance, but they should be considered to be so, insofar as (human) biometrics are also considered to be unique per instance. We, then, proceed to discuss the role of PUFs as security mechanisms for the IoT, and we determine that memory-based PUFs are particularly suited for this function. We observe that the IoT nowadays consists of heterogeneous devices connected over diverse networks, which include both high-end and resource-constrained devices. Therefore, it is essential that a security solution for the IoT is not only effective, but also highly scalable, flexible, lightweight, and cost-efficient, in order to be considered as practical. To this end, we note that PUFs have been proposed as security mechanisms for the IoT in the related work, but the practicality of the relevant security mechanisms has not been sufficiently studied. We, therefore, examine a number of memory-based PUFs that are implemented using Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components, and assess their potential to serve as acceptable security mechanisms in the context of the IoT, not only in terms of effectiveness and cost, but also under both nominal and adverse conditions, such as ambient temperature and supply voltage variations, as well as in the presence of (ionising) radiation. In this way, we can determine whether memory-based PUFs are truly suitable to be used in the various application areas of the IoT, which may even involve particularly adverse environments, e.g., in IoT applications involving space modules and operations. Finally, we also explore the potential of memory-based PUFs to serve as adequate security mechanisms for the IoT in practice, by presenting and analysing a number of cryptographic protocols based on these PUFs. In particular, we study how memory-based PUFs can be used for key generation, as well as device identification, and authentication, their role as security mechanisms for current and next-generation IoT devices and networks, and their potential for applications in the space segment of the IoT and in other adverse environments. Additionally, this work also discusses how memory-based PUFs can be utilised for the implementation of lightweight reconfigurable PUFs that allow for advanced security applications. In this way, we are able to confirm that memory-based PUFs can indeed provide flexible, scalable, and efficient security solutions for the IoT, in a practical, lightweight, and inexpensive manner

An efficient privacy-preserving authentication scheme for energy internet-based vehicle-to-grid communication

The energy Internet (EI) represents a new electric grid infrastructure that uses computing and communication to transform legacy power grids into systems that support open innovation. EI provides bidirectional communication for analysis and improvement of energy usage between service providers and customers. To ensure a secure, reliable, and efficient operation, the EI should be protected from cyber attacks. Thus, secure and efficient key establishment is an important issue for this Internet-based smart grid environment. In this paper, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving authentication scheme for EI-based vehicle-to-grid communication using lightweight cryptographic primitives such as one-way non-collision hash functions. In our proposed scheme, a customer can securely access services provided by the service provider using a symmetric key established between them. Detailed security and performance analysis of our proposed scheme are presented to show that it is resilient against many security attacks, cost effective in computation and communication, and provides an efficient solution for the EI

Securing Systems with Scarce Entropy: LWE-Based Lossless Computational Fuzzy Extractor for the IoT

With the advent of the Internet of Things, lightweight devices necessitate secure and cost-efficient key storage. Since traditional secure key storage is expensive, novel solutions have been developed based on the idea of deriving the key from noisy entropy sources. Such sources when combined with fuzzy extractors allow cryptographically strong key derivation. Information theoretic fuzzy extractors require large amounts of input entropy to account for entropy loss in the key extraction process. It has been shown by Fuller \textit{et al.}~(ASIACRYPT\u2713) that the entropy loss can be reduced if the requirement is relaxed to computational security based on the hardness of the Learning with Errors problem. Using this computational fuzzy extractor, we show how to construct a device-server authentication system providing outsider chosen perturbation security and pre-application robustness. We present the first implementation of a \emph{lossless} computational fuzzy extractor where the entropy of the source equals the entropy of the key on a constrained device. The implementation needs only 1.45KB of SRAM and 9.8KB of Flash memory on an 8-bit microcontroller. Furthermore, we also show how a device-server authentication system can be constructed and efficiently implemented in our system. We compare our implementation to existing work in terms of security, while achieving no entropy loss