MAKE-IT—A Lightweight Mutual Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol for Industrial Internet of Things

Continuous development of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has opened up enormous opportunities for the engineers to enhance the efficiency of the machines. Despite the development, many industry administrators still fear to use Internet for operating their machines due to untrusted nature of the communication channel. The utilization of internet for managing industrial operations can be widespread adopted if the authentication of the entities are performed and trust is ensured. The traditional schemes with their inherent security issues and other complexities, cannot be directly deployed to resource constrained network devices. Therefore, we have proposed a strong mutual authentication and secret key exchange protocol to address the vulnerabilities of the existing schemes. We have used various cryptography operations such as hashing, ciphering, and so forth, for providing secure mutual authentication and secret key exchange between different entities to restrict unauthorized access. Performance and security analysis clearly demonstrates that the proposed work is energy efficient (computation and communication inexpensive) and more robust against the attacks in comparison to the traditional scheme

Authentication and Key Management Automation in Decentralized Secure Email and Messaging via Low-Entropy Secrets

We revisit the problem of entity authentication in decentralized end-to-end encrypted email and secure messaging to propose a practical and self-sustaining cryptographic solution based on password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE). This not only allows users to authenticate each other via shared low-entropy secrets, e.g., memorable words, without a public key infrastructure or a trusted third party, but it also paves the way for automation and a series of cryptographic enhancements; improves security by minimizing the impact of human error and potentially improves usability. First, we study a few vulnerabilities in voice-based out-of-band authentication, in particular a combinatorial attack against lazy users, which we analyze in the context of a secure email solution. Next, we propose solving the problem of secure equality test using PAKE to achieve entity authentication and to establish a shared high-entropy secret key. Our solution lends itself to offline settings, compatible with the inherently asynchronous nature of email and modern messaging systems. The suggested approach enables enhancements in key management such as automated key renewal and future key pair authentications, multi-device synchronization, secure secret storage and retrieval, and the possibility of post-quantum security as well as facilitating forward secrecy and deniability in a primarily symmetric-key setting. We also discuss the use of auditable PAKEs for mitigating a class of online guess and abort attacks in authentication protocols

A Multi-User, Single-Authentication Protocol for Smart Grid Architectures

open access articleIn a smart grid system, the utility server collects data from various smart grid devices. These data play an important role in the energy distribution and balancing between the energy providers and energy consumers. However, these data are prone to tampering attacks by an attacker, while traversing from the smart grid devices to the utility servers, which may result in energy disruption or imbalance. Thus, an authentication is mandatory to efficiently authenticate the devices and the utility servers and avoid tampering attacks. To this end, a group authentication algorithm is proposed for preserving demand–response security in a smart grid. The proposed mechanism also provides a fine-grained access control feature where the utility server can only access a limited number of smart grid devices. The initial authentication between the utility server and smart grid device in a group involves a single public key operation, while the subsequent authentications with the same device or other devices in the same group do not need a public key operation. This reduces the overall computation and communication overheads and takes less time to successfully establish a secret session key, which is used to exchange sensitive information over an unsecured wireless channel. The resilience of the proposed algorithm is tested against various attacks using formal and informal security analysis

Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical-layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical-layer message authentication is also introduced briefly. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, 303 refs. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.1609 by other authors. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 201

HMAKE: Legacy-Compliant Multi-factor Authenticated Key Exchange from Historical Data

In this paper, we introduce two lightweight historical data based multi-factor authenticated key exchange (HMAKE) protocols in the random oracle model. Our HMAKE protocols use a symmetric secret key, as their first authentication factor, together with their second authentication factor, historical data exchanged between the two parties in the past, and the third authentication factor, a set of secret tags associated with the historical data, to establish a secure communication channel between the client and the server. A remarkable security feature of HMAKE is bounded historical tag leakage resilience, which means that (informally speaking) if a small portion of the secret tags is leaked to an adversary, it will not affect the security of one HMAKE protocol with an overwhelming probability. Our first HMAKE protocol can provide static bounded leakage resilience, meaning that the secret tags are leaked at the beginning of the security game. To enhance its security, our second HMAKE protocol makes use of our first protocol as a compiler to transform any passively secure two-message key exchange protocol to an actively secure HMAKE protocol with perfect forward secrecy, and therefore it can be secure even if the historical tags are compromised adaptively by an attacker. In addition to the strong security properties we achieved, our protocols can potentially have great impacts in practice: they are efficient in computation, and they are compatible with legacy devices in cyber-physical systems

A Computational Analysis of ECC Based Novel Authentication Scheme in VANET

A recent development in the adhoc network is a vehicular network called VANET (Vehicular Adhoc Network). Intelligent Transportation System is the Intelligent application of VANET. Due to open nature of VANET attacker can launch various kind of attack. As VANET messages are deal with very crucial information’s which may save the life of passengers by avoiding accidents, save the time of people on a trip, exchange of secret information etc., because of this security is must be in the VANET. To ensure the highest level of security the network should be free from attackers, there by all information pass among nodes in the network must be reliable i.e. should be originated by an authenticated node. Authentication is the first line of security in VANET; it avoids nonregistered vehicle in the network. Previous research come up with some Cryptographic, Trust based, Id based, Group signature based authentication schemes. A speed of authentication and privacy preservation is important parameters in VANET authentication. This paper addresses the computational analysis of authentication schemes based on ECC. We started analysis from comparing plain ECC with our proposed AECC (Adaptive Elliptic Curve Cryptography) and EECC (Enhanced Elliptic Curve Cryptography). The result of analysis shows proposed schemes improve speed and security of authentication. In AECC key size is adaptive i.e. different sizes of keys are generated during key generation phase. Three ranges are specified for key sizes small, large and medium. In EECC we added an extra parameter during transmission of information from the vehicle to RSU for key generation. Schemes of authentications are evaluated by comparative analysis of time required for authentication and key breaking possibilities of keys used in authentication

Authenticated tree parity machine key exchange

The synchronisation of Tree Parity Machines (TPMs), has proven to provide a valuable alternative concept for secure symmetric key exchange. Yet, from a cryptographer's point of view, authentication is at least as important as a secure exchange of keys. Adding an authentication via hashing e.g. is straightforward but with no relation to Neural Cryptography. We consequently formulate an authenticated key exchange within this concept. Another alternative, integrating a Zero-Knowledge protocol into the synchronisation, is also presented. A Man-In-The-Middle attack and even all currently known attacks, that are based on using identically structured TPMs and synchronisation as well, can so be averted. This in turn has practical consequences on using the trajectory in weight space. Both suggestions have the advantage of not affecting the previously observed physics of this interacting system at all.Comment: This work directly relates to cond-mat/0202112 (see also http://arxiv.org/find/cond-mat/1/au:+Kinzel/0/1/0/all/0/1