Cryptanalysis on Privacy-Aware Two-factor Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Das first proposed two-factor authentication combining the smart card and password to resolve the security problems of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). After that, various researchers studied two-factor authentication suitable for WSNs. In user authentication protocols based on the symmetric key approach, a number of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)-based authentication protocols have been proposed. To resolve the security and efficiency problems of ECC-based two-factor authentication protocols, Jiang et al. proposed a privacy-aware two-factor authentication protocol based on ECC for WSNs. However, this paper performs a vulnerability analysis on Jiang et al.’s authentication protocol and shows that it has security problems, such as a lack of mutual authentication, a risk of SID modification and DoS attacks, a lack of sensor anonymity, and weak ID anonymity

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)

A Secure and efficient elliptic curve based authentication and key agreement protocol suitable for WSN

Authentication and key agreement protocols play an important role in wireless sensor communication networks. Recently Xue et al\u27. suggested a key agreement protocols for WSN which in this paper we show that the protocol has some security flaws. Also we introduce an enhanced authentication and key agreement protocol for WSN satisfying all the security requirements

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

AI-Oriented Two-Phase Multi-Factor Authentication in SAGINs: Prospects and Challenges

Space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGINs), which have emerged as an expansion of terrestrial networks, provide flexible access, ubiquitous coverage, high-capacity backhaul, and emergency/disaster recovery for mobile users (MUs). While the massive benefits brought by SAGIN may improve the quality of service, unauthorized access to SAGIN entities is potentially dangerous. At present, conventional crypto-based authentication is facing challenges, such as the inability to provide continuous and transparent protection for MUs. In this article, we propose an AI-oriented two-phase multi-factor authentication scheme (ATMAS) by introducing intelligence to authentication. The satellite and network control center collaborate on continuous authentication, while unique spatial-temporal features, including service features and geographic features, are utilized to enhance the system security. Our further security analysis and performance evaluations show that ATMAS has proper security characteristics which can meet various security requirements. Moreover, we shed light on lightweight and efficient authentication mechanism design through a proper combination of spatial-temporal factors.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazin

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

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