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

An Authentication Protocol for Future Sensor Networks

Authentication is one of the essential security services in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for ensuring secure data sessions. Sensor node authentication ensures the confidentiality and validity of data collected by the sensor node, whereas user authentication guarantees that only legitimate users can access the sensor data. In a mobile WSN, sensor and user nodes move across the network and exchange data with multiple nodes, thus experiencing the authentication process multiple times. The integration of WSNs with Internet of Things (IoT) brings forth a new kind of WSN architecture along with stricter security requirements; for instance, a sensor node or a user node may need to establish multiple concurrent secure data sessions. With concurrent data sessions, the frequency of the re-authentication process increases in proportion to the number of concurrent connections, which makes the security issue even more challenging. The currently available authentication protocols were designed for the autonomous WSN and do not account for the above requirements. In this paper, we present a novel, lightweight and efficient key exchange and authentication protocol suite called the Secure Mobile Sensor Network (SMSN) Authentication Protocol. In the SMSN a mobile node goes through an initial authentication procedure and receives a re-authentication ticket from the base station. Later a mobile node can use this re-authentication ticket when establishing multiple data exchange sessions and/or when moving across the network. This scheme reduces the communication and computational complexity of the authentication process. We proved the strength of our protocol with rigorous security analysis and simulated the SMSN and previously proposed schemes in an automated protocol verifier tool. Finally, we compared the computational complexity and communication cost against well-known authentication protocols.Comment: This article is accepted for the publication in "Sensors" journal. 29 pages, 15 figure

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

Improved on an efficient user authentication scheme for heterogeneous wireless sensor network tailored for the Internet of Things environment

Recently, Farasha et al. proposed an efficient user authentication and key agreement scheme for heterogeneous wireless sensor network tailored for the Internet of Things environment. By using BAN-logic and AVISPA tools, they confirm the security properties of the proposed scheme. However, after analyzing, we determine that the scheme could not resist the smart card loss password guessing attack, which is one of the ten basic requirements in a secure identity authentication using smart card, assisted by Liao et al. Therefore, we modify the method to include the desired security functionality, which is significantly important in a user authentication system using smart card

Secure and Efficient Privacy-preserving Authentication Scheme using Cuckoo Filter in Remote Patient Monitoring Network

With the ubiquitous advancement in smart medical devices and systems, the potential of Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) network is evolving in modern healthcare systems. The medical professionals (doctors, nurses, or medical experts) can access vitals and sensitive physiological information about the patients and provide proper treatment to improve the quality of life through the RPM network. However, the wireless nature of communication in the RPM network makes it challenging to design an efficient mechanism for secure communication. Many authentication schemes have been proposed in recent years to ensure the security of the RPM network. Pseudonym, digital signature, and Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) protocols are used for the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) to develop secure authorization and privacy-preserving communication. However, traditional authentication protocols face overhead challenges due to maintaining a large set of key-pairs or pseudonyms results on the hospital cloud server. In this research work, we identify this research gap and propose a novel secure and efficient privacy-preserving authentication scheme using cuckoo filters for the RPM network. The use of cuckoo filters in our proposed scheme provides an efficient way for mutual anonymous authentication and a secret shared key establishment process between medical professionals and patients. Moreover, we identify the misbehaving sensor nodes using a correlation-based anomaly detection model to establish secure communication. The security analysis and formal security validation using SPAN and AVISPA tools show the robustness of our proposed scheme against message modification attacks, replay attacks, and man-in-the-middle attacks

A robust authentication scheme for observing resources in the internet of things environment

© 2014 IEEE. The Internet of Things is a vision that broadens the scope of the internet by incorporating physical objects to identify themselves to the participating entities. This innovative concept enables a physical device to represent itself in the digital world. There are a lot of speculations and future forecasts about the Internet of Things devices. However, most of them are vendor specific and lack a unified standard, which renders their seamless integration and interoperable operations. Another major concern is the lack of security features in these devices and their corresponding products. Most of them are resource-starved and unable to support computationally complex and resource consuming secure algorithms. In this paper, we have proposed a lightweight mutual authentication scheme which validates the identities of the participating devices before engaging them in communication for the resource observation. Our scheme incurs less connection overhead and provides a robust defence solution to combat various types of attacks