Integrated Distributed Authentication Protocol for Smart Grid Communications

In the smart grid, an integrated distributed authen- tication protocol is needed to not only securely manage the system but also efficiently authenticate many different entities for the communications. In addition, a lightweight authentication protocol is required to handle frequent authentications among billions of devices. Unfortunately, in the literature, there is no such integrated protocol that provides mutual authentication among the home environment, energy provider, gateways, and advanced metering infrastructure network. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a lightweight cloud-trusted authorities-based integrated (centrally controlled) distributed authentication protocol that provides mutual authentications among communicated entities in a distributed manner. Based on certificateless cryptosystem, our protocol is lightweight and efficient even when there are invalid requests in a batch. Security and performance analysis show that the protocol provides privacy preservation, forward secrecy, semantic security,perfect key ambiguous, and protection against identity thefts while generating lower overheads in comparison with the existing protocols. Also, the protocol is secure against man-in-the-middle attacks, redirection attacks, impersonation attacks, and denial-of-service attacks. Moreover, our protocol provides a complete resistance against flood-based denial-of-service attacks

Security in Key Agreement: Two-Party Certificateless Schemes

The main goal of cryptography is to enable secure communication over a public channel; often a secret shared among the communicating parties is used to achieve this. The process by which these parties agree on such a shared secret is called key agreement. In this thesis, we focus on two-party key agreement protocols in the public-key setting and study the various methods used to establish and validate public keys. We pay particular attention to certificateless key agreement schemes and attempt to formalize a relevant notion of security. To that end, we give a possible extension of the existing extended Canetti-Krawzcyk security model applicable to the certificateless setting. We observe that none of the certificateless protocols we have seen in the literature are secure in this model; it is an open question whether such schemes exist. We analyze several published certificateless key agreement protocols, demonstrating the existence of key compromise impersonation attacks and even a man-in-the-middle attack in one case, contrary to the claims of the authors. We also briefly describe weaknesses exhibited by these protocols in the context of our suggested security model

Still Wrong Use of Pairings in Cryptography

Several pairing-based cryptographic protocols are recently proposed with a wide variety of new novel applications including the ones in emerging technologies like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), e-health systems and wearable technologies. There have been however a wide range of incorrect use of these primitives. The paper of Galbraith, Paterson, and Smart (2006) pointed out most of the issues related to the incorrect use of pairing-based cryptography. However, we noticed that some recently proposed applications still do not use these primitives correctly. This leads to unrealizable, insecure or too inefficient designs of pairing-based protocols. We observed that one reason is not being aware of the recent advancements on solving the discrete logarithm problems in some groups. The main purpose of this article is to give an understandable, informative, and the most up-to-date criteria for the correct use of pairing-based cryptography. We thereby deliberately avoid most of the technical details and rather give special emphasis on the importance of the correct use of bilinear maps by realizing secure cryptographic protocols. We list a collection of some recent papers having wrong security assumptions or realizability/efficiency issues. Finally, we give a compact and an up-to-date recipe of the correct use of pairings.Comment: 25 page

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

Key management for beyond 5G mobile small cells: a survey

The highly anticipated 5G network is projected to be introduced in 2020. 5G stakeholders are unanimous that densification of mobile networks is the way forward. The densification will be realized by means of small cell technology, and it is capable of providing coverage with a high data capacity. The EU-funded H2020-MSCA project “SECRET” introduced covering the urban landscape with mobile small cells, since these take advantages of the dynamic network topology and optimizes network services in a cost-effective fashion. By taking advantage of the device-to-device communications technology, large amounts of data can be transmitted over multiple hops and, therefore, offload the general network. However, this introduction of mobile small cells presents various security and privacy challenges. Cryptographic security solutions are capable of solving these as long as they are supported by a key management scheme. It is assumed that the network infrastructure and mobile devices from network users are unable to act as a centralized trust anchor since these are vulnerable targets to malicious attacks. Security must, therefore, be guaranteed by means of a key management scheme that decentralizes trust. Therefore, this paper surveys the state-of-the-art key management schemes proposed for similar network architectures (e.g., mobile ad hoc networks and ad hoc device-to-device networks) that decentralize trust. Furthermore, these key management schemes are evaluated for adaptability in a network of mobile small cells

Survey and Taxonomy of Key Management Protocols for Wired and Wireless Networks

ABSTRACT Number of keys used to convert plaintext to ciphertext. For example, symmetric/single or asymmetric/two key/public key. Key is an element which can be either numeric or non-numeric, which when applied to a given message results in a encrypted message. Key can be implicitly or explicitly derived from plaintext. Implicit key derivation is also known as auto keying, where the derived key is a part of the plaintext. Explicit key or individual key is a key that is not a part of the plaintext. For a secure communication to take place, the life cycle of key involves: initialization, agreement, distribution and cancellation. This entire process is also known as key management

Cryptanalysis of Three Certificate-Based Authenticated Key Agreement Protocols and a Secure Construction

Certificate-based cryptography is a new public-key cryptographic paradigm that has very appealing features, namely it simplifies the certificate management problem in traditional public key cryptography while eliminating the key escrow problem in identity-based cryptography. So far, three authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocols in the setting of certificate-based cryptography have been proposed in the literature. Unfortunately, none of them are secure under the public key replacement (PKR) attack. In this paper, we first present a security model for certificate-based AKA protocols that covers the PKR attacks. We then explore the existing three certificate-based AKA protocols and show the concrete attacks against them respectively. To overcome the weaknesses in these protocols, we propose a new certificate-based AKA protocol and prove its security strictly in the random oracle model. Performance comparison shows that the proposed protocol outperforms all the previous certificate-based AKA protocols