A lightweight privacy preserving authenticated key agreement protocol for SIP-based VoIP

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an essential part of most Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) architecture. Although SIP provides attractive features, it is exposed to various security threats, and so an efficient and secure authentication scheme is sought to enhance the security of SIP. Several attempts have been made to address the tradeoff problem between security and efficiency, but designing a successful authenticated key agreement protocol for SIP is still a challenging task from the viewpoint of both performance and security, because performance and security as two critical factors affecting SIP applications always seem contradictory. In this study, we employ biometrics to design a lightweight privacy preserving authentication protocol for SIP based on symmetric encryption, achieving a delicate balance between performance and security. In addition, the proposed authentication protocol can fully protect the privacy of biometric characteristics and data identity, which has not been considered in previous work. The completeness of the proposed protocol is demonstrated by Gong, Needham, and Yahalom (GNY) logic. Performance analysis shows that our proposed protocol increases efficiency significantly in comparison with other related protocols

An Efficient Authentication Scheme for Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly affecting human lives in multiple profound ways. “Things” have the ability to communicate, generate, transmit and store data over the network connection. During each communication between “Things”, the data transmitted is potentially vulnerable to malicious attacks, loss, distortions and interruption which impair functionality, system efficiency and user satisfaction. Additionally, inappropriate user controls can cause problems in IoT services, such as granting anonymous users access to personal resources and enable legitimate users to access resources in an illegal manner or preventing legitimate users to access resources in an authorized manner. Therefore, communications between things need to be authenticated, authorized, secured and ensured to have high privacy by applying a strong authentication protocol. The aim of this research is to enhance the authentication protocol, starting by reducing the heavy use of storage in “Things”, and eliminating unnecessary messages during authentication steps, taking into consideration the network security analysis. This research represents a security performance analysis and enhancement authentication for the IoT. The results indicate that the enhanced protocol has a positive effect on minimizing packet length and time performance in authenticating users having once obtained access to the visited location area compared with the other two protocols used for comparative purposes, with 33% increased the proposed protocol performance

An anonymous authentication and key establish scheme for smart grid: FAuth

The smart meters in electricity grids enable fine-grained consumption monitoring. Thus, suppliers could adjust their tariffs. However, as smart meters are deployed within the smart grid field, authentication and key establishment between smart grid parties (smart meters, aggregators, and servers) become an urgency. Besides, as privacy is becoming a big concern for smart meters, smart grid parties are reluctant to leak their real identities during the authentication phase. In this paper, we analyze the recent authentication schemes in smart grids and other applied fields, and propose an anonymous authentication and key establishment scheme between smart grid parties: FAuth. The proposed scheme is based on bilinear maps and the computational Diffie–Hellman problem. We changed the way the smart meter parties registered at Key Generation Center, making the proposed scheme robust against various potential attacks that could be launched by the Key Generation Center, as the scheme could avoid the private key of the smart meter parties from leaking to the Key Generation Center. Besides, the proposed scheme reduced the computational load, both at the smart meter side and at the aggregator side, which make it perfectly suitable for computation-constrained devices. Security proof results show the proposed scheme is secure under the BAN logic and random oracle model

Two-factor remote authentication protocol with user anonymity based on elliptic curve cryptography

In order to provide secure remote access control, a robust and efficient authentication protocol should realize mutual authentication and session key agreement between clients and the remote server over public channels. Recently, Chun-Ta Li proposed a password authentication and user anonymity protocol by using smart cards, and they claimed that their protocol has satisfied all criteria required by remote authentication. However, we have found that his protocol cannot provide mutual authentication between clients and the remote server. To realize ‘real’ mutual authentication, we propose a two-factor remote authentication protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography in this paper, which not only satisfies the criteria but also bears low computational cost. Detailed analysis shows our proposed protocol is secure and more suitable for practical application

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

On Security Analysis of Recent Password Authentication and Key Agreement Schemes Based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Secure and efficient mutual authentication and key agreement schemes form the basis for any robust network communication system. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) has emerged as one of the most successful Public Key Cryptosystem that efficiently meets all the security challenges. Comparison of ECC with other Public Key Cryptosystems (RSA, Rabin, ElGamal) shows that it provides equal level of security for a far smaller bit size, thereby substantially reducing the processing overhead. This makes it suitable for constrained environments like wireless networks and mobile devices as well as for security sensitive applications like electronic banking, financial transactions and smart grids. With the successful implementation of ECC in security applications (e-passports, e-IDs, embedded systems), it is getting widely commercialized. ECC is simple and faster and is therefore emerging as an attractive alternative for providing security in lightweight device, which contributes to its popularity in the present scenario. In this paper, we have analyzed some of the recent password based authentication and key agreement schemes using ECC for various environments. Furthermore, we have carried out security, functionality and performance comparisons of these schemes and found that they are unable to satisfy their claimed security goals

Security performance and protocol consideration in optical communication system with optical layer security enabled by optical coding techniques

With the fast development of communication systems, network security issues have more and more impact on daily life. It is essential to construct a high degree of optical layer security to resolve the security problem once and for all. Three different techniques which can provide optical layer security are introduced and compared. Optical chaos can be used for fast random number generation. Quantum cryptography is the most promising technique for key distribution. And the optical coding techniques can be deployed to encrypt the modulated signal in the optical layer. A mathematical equation has been derived from information theory to evaluate the information-theoretic security level of the wiretap channel in optical coding schemes. And the merits and limitation of two coherent optical coding schemes, temporal phase coding and spectral phase coding, have been analysed. The security scheme based on a reconfigurable optical coding device has been introduced, and the corresponding security protocol has been developed. By moving the encryption operation from the electronic layer to the optical layer, the modulated signals become opaque to the unauthorised users. Optical code distribution and authentication is the one of the major challenges for our proposed scheme. In our proposed protocol, both of the operations are covered and defined in detail. As a preliminary draft of the optical code security protocol, it could be a useful guidance for further research

A personal networking solution

This paper presents an overview of research being conducted on Personal Networking Solutions within the Mobile VCE Personal Distributed Environment Work Area. In particular it attempts to highlight areas of commonality with the MAGNET initiative. These areas include trust of foreign devices and service providers, dynamic real-time service negotiation to permit context-aware service delivery, an automated controller algorithm for wireless ad hoc networks, and routing protocols for ad hoc networking environments. Where possible references are provided to Mobile VCE publications to enable further reading