3,151 research outputs found

    An Authentication Protocol for Future Sensor Networks

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    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

    The Meeting of Acquaintances: A Cost-efficient Authentication Scheme for Light-weight Objects with Transient Trust Level and Plurality Approach

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    Wireless sensor networks consist of a large number of distributed sensor nodes so that potential risks are becoming more and more unpredictable. The new entrants pose the potential risks when they move into the secure zone. To build a door wall that provides safe and secured for the system, many recent research works applied the initial authentication process. However, the majority of the previous articles only focused on the Central Authority (CA) since this leads to an increase in the computation cost and energy consumption for the specific cases on the Internet of Things (IoT). Hence, in this article, we will lessen the importance of these third parties through proposing an enhanced authentication mechanism that includes key management and evaluation based on the past interactions to assist the objects joining a secured area without any nearby CA. We refer to a mobility dataset from CRAWDAD collected at the University Politehnica of Bucharest and rebuild into a new random dataset larger than the old one. The new one is an input for a simulated authenticating algorithm to observe the communication cost and resource usage of devices. Our proposal helps the authenticating flexible, being strict with unknown devices into the secured zone. The threshold of maximum friends can modify based on the optimization of the symmetric-key algorithm to diminish communication costs (our experimental results compare to previous schemes less than 2000 bits) and raise flexibility in resource-constrained environments.Comment: 27 page

    Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

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    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

    Resource Efficient Authentication and Session Key Establishment Procedure for Low-Resource IoT Devices

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    open access journalThe Internet of Things (IoT) can includes many resource-constrained devices, with most usually needing to securely communicate with their network managers, which are more resource-rich devices in the IoT network. We propose a resource-efficient security scheme that includes authentication of devices with their network managers, authentication between devices on different networks, and an attack-resilient key establishment procedure. Using automated validation with internet security protocols and applications tool-set, we analyse several attack scenarios to determine the security soundness of the proposed solution, and then we evaluate its performance analytically and experimentally. The performance analysis shows that the proposed solution occupies little memory and consumes low energy during the authentication and key generation processes respectively. Moreover, it protects the network from well-known attacks (man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks, impersonation attacks, key compromission attacks and denial of service attacks)

    Securing Cyber-Physical Social Interactions on Wrist-worn Devices

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    Since ancient Greece, handshaking has been commonly practiced between two people as a friendly gesture to express trust and respect, or form a mutual agreement. In this article, we show that such physical contact can be used to bootstrap secure cyber contact between the smart devices worn by users. The key observation is that during handshaking, although belonged to two different users, the two hands involved in the shaking events are often rigidly connected, and therefore exhibit very similar motion patterns. We propose a novel key generation system, which harvests motion data during user handshaking from the wrist-worn smart devices such as smartwatches or fitness bands, and exploits the matching motion patterns to generate symmetric keys on both parties. The generated keys can be then used to establish a secure communication channel for exchanging data between devices. This provides a much more natural and user-friendly alternative for many applications, e.g., exchanging/sharing contact details, friending on social networks, or even making payments, since it doesn’t involve extra bespoke hardware, nor require the users to perform pre-defined gestures. We implement the proposed key generation system on off-the-shelf smartwatches, and extensive evaluation shows that it can reliably generate 128-bit symmetric keys just after around 1s of handshaking (with success rate >99%), and is resilient to different types of attacks including impersonate mimicking attacks, impersonate passive attacks, or eavesdropping attacks. Specifically, for real-time impersonate mimicking attacks, in our experiments, the Equal Error Rate (EER) is only 1.6% on average. We also show that the proposed key generation system can be extremely lightweight and is able to run in-situ on the resource-constrained smartwatches without incurring excessive resource consumption

    Seamless key agreement framework for mobile-sink in IoT based cloud-centric secured public safety sensor networks

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    Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a significant advancement for Internet and mobile networks with various public safety network applications. An important use of IoT-based solutions is its application in post-disaster management, where the traditional telecommunication systems may be either completely or partially damaged. Since enabling technologies have restricted authentication privileges for mobile users, in this paper, a strategy of mobile-sink is introduced for the extension of user authentication over cloud-based environments. A seamless secure authentication and key agreement (S-SAKA) approach using bilinear pairing and elliptic-curve cryptosystems is presented. It is shown that the proposed S-SAKA approach satisfies the security properties, and as well as being resilient to nodecapture attacks, it also resists significant numbers of other well-known potential attacks related with data confidentiality, mutual authentication, session-key agreement, user anonymity, password guessing, and key impersonation. Moreover, the proposed approach can provide a seamless connectivity through authentication over wireless sensor networks to alleviate the computation and communication cost constraints in the system. In addition, using Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic, it is demonstrated that the proposed S-SAKA framework offers proper mutual authentication and session key agreement between the mobile-sink and the base statio

    Seamless key agreement framework for mobile-sink in IoT based cloud-centric secured public safety sensor networks

    Get PDF
    Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a significant advancement for Internet and mobile networks with various public safety network applications. An important use of IoT-based solutions is its application in post-disaster management, where the traditional telecommunication systems may be either completely or partially damaged. Since enabling technologies have restricted authentication privileges for mobile users, in this paper, a strategy of mobile-sink is introduced for the extension of user authentication over cloud-based environments. A seamless secure authentication and key agreement (S-SAKA) approach using bilinear pairing and elliptic-curve cryptosystems is presented. It is shown that the proposed S-SAKA approach satisfies the security properties, and as well as being resilient to nodecapture attacks, it also resists significant numbers of other well-known potential attacks related with data confidentiality, mutual authentication, session-key agreement, user anonymity, password guessing, and key impersonation. Moreover, the proposed approach can provide a seamless connectivity through authentication over wireless sensor networks to alleviate the computation and communication cost constraints in the system. In addition, using Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic, it is demonstrated that the proposed S-SAKA framework offers proper mutual authentication and session key agreement between the mobile-sink and the base statio
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