Efficient Authentication Algorithm for Secure Remote Access in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks convey mission critical data that calls for adequate privacy and security protection. To accomplish this objective, numerous intrusion detection schemes based on machine learning approaches have been developed. In addition, authentication and key agreements techniques have been developed using techniques such as elliptic curve cryptography, bilinear pairing operations, biometrics, fuzzy verifier and Rabin cryptosystems. However, these schemes have either high false positive rates, high communication, computation, storage or energy requirements, all of which are not ideal for battery powered sensor nodes. Moreover, majority of these algorithms still have some security and privacy challenges that render them susceptible to various threats. In this paper, a WSN authentication algorithm is presented that is shown to be robust against legacy WSN privacy and security attacks such as sidechannel, traceability, offline guessing, replay and impersonations. From a performance perspective, the proposed algorithm requires the least computation overheads and average computation costs among its peers

Efficient Feature Selection and ML Algorithm for Accurate Diagnostics

Machine learning algorithms have been deployed in numerous optimization, prediction and classification problems. This has endeared them for application in fields such as computer networks and medical diagnosis. Although these machine learning algorithms achieve convincing results in these fields, they face numerous challenges when deployed on imbalanced dataset. Consequently, these algorithms are often biased towards majority class, hence unable to generalize the learning process. In addition, they are unable to effectively deal with high-dimensional datasets. Moreover, the utilization of conventional feature selection techniques from a dataset based on attribute significance render them ineffective for majority of the diagnosis applications. In this paper, feature selection is executed using the more effective Neighbour Components Analysis (NCA). During the classification process, an ensemble classifier comprising of K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN), Naive Bayes (NB), Decision Tree (DT) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) is built, trained and tested. Finally, cross validation is carried out to evaluate the developed ensemble model. The results shows that the proposed classifier has the best performance in terms of precision, recall, F-measure and classification accuracy

Provably secure and efficient audio compression based on compressive sensing

The advancement of systems with the capacity to compress audio signals and simultaneously secure is a highly attractive research subject. This is because of the need to enhance storage usage and speed up the transmission of data, as well as securing the transmission of sensitive signals over limited and insecure communication channels. Thus, many researchers have studied and produced different systems, either to compress or encrypt audio data using different algorithms and methods, all of which suffer from certain issues including high time consumption or complex calculations. This paper proposes a compressing sensing-based system that compresses audio signals and simultaneously provides an encryption system. The audio signal is segmented into small matrices of samples and then multiplied by a non-square sensing matrix generated by a Gaussian random generator. The reconstruction process is carried out by solving a linear system using the pseudoinverse of Moore-Penrose. The statistical analysis results obtaining from implementing different types and sizes of audio signals prove that the proposed system succeeds in compressing the audio signals with a ratio reaching 28% of real size and reconstructing the signal with a correlation metric between 0.98 and 0.99. It also scores very good results in the normalized mean square error (MSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio metrics (PSNR), and the structural similarity index (SSIM), as well as giving the signal a high level of security

Fast Multi-User Searchable Encryption with Forward and Backward Private Access Control

Untrusted servers are servers or storage entities lacking complete trust from the data owner or users. This characterization implies that the server hosting encrypted data may not enjoy full trust from data owners or users, stemming from apprehensions related to potential security breaches, unauthorized access, or other security risks. The security of searchable encryption has been put into question by several recent attacks. Currently, users can search for encrypted documents on untrusted cloud servers using searchable symmetric encryption (SSE). This study delves deeply into two pivotal concepts of privacy within dynamic searchable symmetric encryption (DSSE) schemes: forward privacy and backward privacy. The former serves as a safeguard against the linkage of recently added documents to previously conducted search queries, whereas the latter guarantees the irretrievability of deleted documents in subsequent search inquiries. However, the provision of fine-grained access control is complex in existing multi-user SSE schemes. SSE schemes may also incur high computation costs due to the need for fine-grained access control, and it is essential to support document updates and forward privacy. In response to these issues, this paper suggests a searchable encryption scheme that uses simple primitive tools. We present a multi-user SSE scheme that efficiently controls access to dynamically encrypted documents to resolve these issues, using an innovative approach that readily enhances previous findings. Rather than employing asymmetric encryption as in comparable systems, we harness low-complexity primitive encryption tools and inverted index-based DSSE to handle retrieving encrypted files, resulting in a notably faster system. Furthermore, we ensure heightened security by refreshing the encryption key after each search, meaning that users are unable to conduct subsequent searches with the same key and must obtain a fresh key from the data owner. An experimental evaluation shows that our scheme achieves forward and Type II backward privacy and has much faster search performance than other schemes. Our scheme can be considered secure, as proven in a random oracle model

A Lightweight Hybrid Scheme for Hiding Text Messages in Colour Images Using LSB, Lah Transform and Chaotic Techniques

Data security can involve embedding hidden images, text, audio, or video files within other media to prevent hackers from stealing encrypted data. Existing mechanisms suffer from a high risk of security breaches or large computational costs, however. The method proposed in this work incorporates low-complexity encryption and steganography mechanisms to enhance security during transmission while lowering computational complexity. In message encryption, it is recommended that text file data slicing in binary representation, to achieve different lengths of string, be conducted before text file data masking based on the lightweight Lucas series and mod function to ensure the retrieval of text messages is impossible. The steganography algorithm starts by generating a random key stream using a hybrid of two low-complexity chaotic maps, the Tent map and the Ikeda map. By finding a position vector parallel to the input image vector, these keys are used based on the previously generated position vector to randomly select input image data and create four vectors that can be later used as input for the Lah transform. In this paper, we present an approach for hiding encrypted text files using LSB colour image steganography by applying a low-complexity XOR operation to the most significant bits in 24-bit colour cover images. It is necessary to perform inverse Lah transformation to recover the image pixels and ensure that invisible data cannot be retrieved in a particular sequence. Evaluation of the quality of the resulting stego-images and comparison with other ways of performing encryption and message concealment shows that the stego-image has a higher PSNR, a lower MSE, and an SSIM value close to one, illustrating the suitability of the proposed method. It is also considered lightweight in terms of having lower computational overhead

Lightweight, Secure, Similar-Document Retrieval over Encrypted Data

Applications for document similarity detection are widespread in diverse communities, including institutions and corporations. However, currently available detection systems fail to take into account the private nature of material or documents that have been outsourced to remote servers. None of the existing solutions can be described as lightweight techniques that are compatible with lightweight client implementation, and this deficiency can limit the effectiveness of these systems. For instance, the discovery of similarity between two conferences or journals must maintain the privacy of the submitted papers in a lightweight manner to ensure that the security and application requirements for limited-resource devices are fulfilled. This paper considers the problem of lightweight similarity detection between document sets while preserving the privacy of the material. The proposed solution permits documents to be compared without disclosing the content to untrusted servers. The fingerprint set for each document is determined in an efficient manner, also developing an inverted index that uses the whole set of fingerprints. Before being uploaded to the untrusted server, this index is secured by the Paillier cryptosystem. This study develops a secure, yet efficient method for scalable encrypted document comparison. To evaluate the computational performance of this method, this paper carries out several comparative assessments against other major approaches

Lightweight, Secure, Similar-Document Retrieval over Encrypted Data

Applications for document similarity detection are widespread in diverse communities, including institutions and corporations. However, currently available detection systems fail to take into account the private nature of material or documents that have been outsourced to remote servers. None of the existing solutions can be described as lightweight techniques that are compatible with lightweight client implementation, and this deficiency can limit the effectiveness of these systems. For instance, the discovery of similarity between two conferences or journals must maintain the privacy of the submitted papers in a lightweight manner to ensure that the security and application requirements for limited-resource devices are fulfilled. This paper considers the problem of lightweight similarity detection between document sets while preserving the privacy of the material. The proposed solution permits documents to be compared without disclosing the content to untrusted servers. The fingerprint set for each document is determined in an efficient manner, also developing an inverted index that uses the whole set of fingerprints. Before being uploaded to the untrusted server, this index is secured by the Paillier cryptosystem. This study develops a secure, yet efficient method for scalable encrypted document comparison. To evaluate the computational performance of this method, this paper carries out several comparative assessments against other major approaches

Lightweight Integrity Preserving Scheme for Secure Data Exchange in Cloud-Based IoT Systems

The information obtained from external sources within the cloud and the resulting computations are not always reliable. This is attributed to the absence of tangible regulations and information management on the part of the information owners. Although numerous techniques for safeguarding and securing external information have been developed, security hazards in the cloud are still problematic. This could potentially pose a significant challenge to the effective adoption and utilization of cloud technology. In terms of performance, many of the existing solutions are affected by high computation costs, particularly in terms of auditing. In order to reduce the auditing expenses, this paper proposes a well-organised, lightweight system for safeguarding information through enhanced integrity checking. The proposed technique implements a cryptographic hash function with low-cost mathematic operations. In addition, this paper explores the role of a semi-trusted server with regard to smart device users. This facilitates the formal management of information prior to distribution through the IoT-cloud system. Essentially, this facilitates the validation of the information stored and exchanged in this environment. The results obtained show that the proposed system is lightweight and offers features such as a safeguarding capability, key management, privacy, decreased costs, sufficient security for smart device users, one-time key provision, and high degree of accuracy. In addition, the proposed method exhibits lower computation complexity and storage expenses compared with those of other techniques such as bilinear map-based systems

Energy Efficient Dynamic Symmetric Key Based Protocol for Secure Traffic Exchanges in Smart Homes

Highly sensitive information about people’s social life and daily activities flows in smart home networks. As such, if attackers can manage to capture or even eavesdrop on this information, the privacy of the users can be compromised. The consequences can be far-reaching, such as knowing the status of home occupancy that can then facilitate burglary. To address these challenges, approaches such as data aggregation and signcryption have been utilized. Elliptic curve cryptography, bilinear pairing, asymmetric key cryptosystem, blockchain, and exponential operations are among the most popular techniques deployed to design these security solutions. However, the computational, storage and communication complexities exhibited by the majority of these techniques are too high. This renders these techniques unsuitable for smart home components such as smart switches and sensors. Some of these schemes have centralized architectures, which present some single points of failure. In this paper, symmetric key authentication procedures are presented for smart home networks. The proposed protocol leverages on cryptographic primitives such as one-way hashing and bitwise exclusive-Or operations. The results indicate that this scheme incurs the lowest communication, storage, and computation costs compared to other related state-of-the-art techniques. Empirically, our protocol reduces the communication and computation complexities by 16.7% and 57.7%, respectively. In addition, it provides backward key secrecy, robust mutual authentication, anonymity, forward key secrecy, and unlinkability. Moreover, it can effectively prevent attacks such as impersonation, session hijacking, denial of service, packet replays, man-in-the-middle, and message eavesdropping

Session-Dependent Token-Based Payload Enciphering Scheme for Integrity Enhancements in Wireless Networks

Wireless networks have continued to evolve to offer connectivity between users and smart devices such as drones and wireless sensor nodes. In this environment, insecure public channels are deployed to link the users to their remote smart devices. Some of the application areas of these smart devices include military surveillance and healthcare monitoring. Since the data collected and transmitted to the users are highly sensitive and private, any leakages can have adverse effects. As such, strong entity authentication should be implemented before any access is granted in these wireless networks. Although numerous protocols have been developed for this purpose, the simultaneous attainment of robust security and privacy at low latencies, execution time and bandwidth remains a mirage. In this paper, a session-dependent token-based payload enciphering scheme for integrity enhancements in wireless networks is presented. This protocol amalgamates fuzzy extraction with extended Chebyshev chaotic maps to boost the integrity of the exchanged payload. The security analysis shows that this scheme offers entity anonymity and backward and forward key secrecy. In addition, it is demonstrated to be robust against secret ephemeral leakage, side-channeling, man-in-the-middle and impersonation attacks, among other security threats. From the performance perspective, the proposed scheme requires the least communication overheads and a relatively low execution time during the authentication process