Three-factor mutually authenticated key agreement protocols for multi-server environments have gained momentum in recent times due to advancements in wireless technologies and associated constraints. Several authors have put forward various authentication protocols for multi-server environment during the past decade. Wang et al. recently proposed a biometric-based authentication with key agreement protocol for multi-server environment and claimed that their protocol is efficient and resistant to prominent security attacks. The careful investigation of this paper shows that Wang et al. protocol's users are sharing personal identifiable information with the application servers during the registration and authentication process. This nature of disclosing credentials leads to severe threats particularly insider attacks, user impersonation attacks, and server impersonation attacks. As a remedy of the aforementioned problems, this paper proposes a novel biometric-based mutually authenticated key agreement protocols for multi-server architecture based on elliptic curve cryptography. We prove that the proposed protocol achieves secure mutual authentication property using the broadly used Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic. The formal security of the proposed protocol is verified using the widely accepted automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications tool to show that our protocol can withstand active and passive attacks including the replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. The proposed protocol is robust and efficient compared with the existing related protocols.
Three-factor mutually authenticated key agreement protocols for multi-server environments have gained momentum in recent times due to advancements in wireless technologies and associated constraints. Several authors have put forward various authentication protocols for multi-server environment during the past decade. Wang et al. recently proposed a biometric-based authentication with key agreement protocol for multi-server environment and claimed that their protocol is efficient and resistant to prominent security attacks. The careful investigation of this paper shows that Wang et al. protocol's users are sharing personal identifiable information with the application servers during the registration and authentication process. This nature of disclosing credentials leads to severe threats particularly insider attacks, user impersonation attacks, and server impersonation attacks. As a remedy of the aforementioned problems, this paper proposes a novel biometric-based mutually authenticated key agreement protocols for multi-server architecture based on elliptic curve cryptography. We prove that the proposed protocol achieves secure mutual authentication property using the broadly used Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic. The formal security of the proposed protocol is verified using the widely accepted automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications tool to show that our protocol can withstand active and passive attacks including the replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. The proposed protocol is robust and efficient compared with the existing related protocols.
With the recent advancements in wireless communications, Tactile Internet (TI) has witnessed a major blow. TI is considered the next big evolution that will provide real-time control in industrial setups, particularly in the domain of tele-surgery. However, in remote-surgery ecosystems the transmission of data is prone to different attack vectors. Thus, to realize the true potential of secure tele-surgery under the umbrella of TI, it is required to design a secure authentication and key agreement protocol for tele-surgery. In this paper, we present an effective and secure mutual authentication and session establishment protocol for TI-driven remote surgery setups. The designed protocol enables secure communications between the surgeon, robotic arm, and the trusted authority (TA); where the protocol leverages the advantages of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and biometrics. The protocol operates along the following three phases: i) setup phase, ii) registration phase, and iii) mutual authentication and key agreement phase. During the third phase, the surgeon and the robotic arm mutually authenticate each other with the help of the TA. Further, the security features of the designed protocol have been established using formal and informal means. The obtained results indicate the resiliency of the protocol against offline password guessing attacks, replay attacks, impersonation attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, denial of service attacks, etc.
In this article, the authors have proposed a secure two-factor remote user authentication and session key agreement protocol. As they have shown in the presented scheme, is precise and secure according to both formal and informal security analysis. For formal security analysis, they have applied BAN (Burrows-Abadi-Needham) logic which certifies that the presented scheme provides the amenity of mutual authentication and session key agreement safely. The informal security verification has shown that the proposed scheme is more vigorous against various sort of cruel threats. Moreover, the authors have simulated the presented scheme using broadly accepted AVISPA tool, whose simulation results make sure that the protocol is not dangerous from active and passive attacks together with replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. In addition, the performance evaluation and the security comparison have revealed that the presented scheme gives strong security as well as better complexity in the context of smart card memory requirement, communication cost and computation cost.
With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), maintaining data confidentiality and protecting user privacy have become increasingly challenging. End devices in the IoT are often deployed in unattended environments and connected to open networks, making them vulnerable to physical tampering and other security attacks. Different authentication key agreement (AKA) schemes have been used in practice; several of them do not cover the necessary security features or are incompatible with resource-constrained end devices. Their security proofs have been performed under the Random-Oracle model. We present an AKA protocol for end devices and servers. The proposal leverages the ECC-based key exchange mechanism and one-way hash function-based message authentication method to achieve mutual authentication, user anonymity, and forward security. A formal security proof of the proposed scheme is performed under the standard model and the eCK model with the elliptic curve encryption computational assumptions, and formal verification is performed with ProVerif. According to the performance comparison, it is revealed that the proposed scheme offers user anonymity, perfect forward security, and mutual authentication, and resists typical attacks such as ephemeral secret leakage attacks, impersonation attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, and key compromise impersonation attacks. Moreover, the proposed scheme has the lowest computational and communication overhead compared to existing schemes.
Unlike traditional power networks, the smart grid power system has the ability to arrange the power supply in real time to the customer for active power consumption. Therefore, it can avoid excess electricity generation. In addition, based on the current power consumption, the power service providers can measure the expected power generation amount to stabilize the power system. Compared with traditional power networks, the characteristics of the smart grid power system make it easier to suffer from several types of security threats and attacks such as impersonation, eavesdropping and message modification etc. In order to strength the security of smart grid networks, a robust and efficient authentication protocol should provide to mutual authentication and session key agreement. Since the communications between the control center and the substation is protected by the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system, we focus on the secure communication between the substation and the smart appliances. In this paper, a robust and efficient authentication protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography is proposed to achieve mutual authentication and key agreement between the substation and the smart appliances. In addition, the proposed protocol not only resists replay attacks, impersonation attacks, and man-in-middle attacks, but also provides the session key security and the known-key security.
In this modern era, the need for key agreement protocols equipped with high-speed Internet has become necessary in information/network security. An authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocol is a technique that negotiates a secret session key among various users in a network and is used in many scenarios like mutual authentication, data integrity, and many more. The current state-of-the-art include many AKA protocols that are either vulnerable to different attacks or incur massive communication and computational costs. This paper proposes an identity-based three-party authenticated key agreement (ID-3PAKA) protocol using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The proposed ID-3PAKA protocol generates a shared secret session key among three users. The security of the proposed ID-3PAKA protocol relies on the hardness assumption of the ECDLP and the CDH problems. The proposed ID-3PAKA protocol is safe against active and passive attacks, which is proved through the simulation of the OFMC and Cl-AtS back-ends of the AVISPA tool.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is among the most promising technologies of the future, and its development has garnered attention worldwide. However, the rise of the IoT has been accompanied by a proportionate increase in security concerns regarding communication between IoT entities. Recently, Alzahrani et al. proposed an identity-based authentication and key agreement protocol for an IoT environment, wherein a physically unclonable function was employed. They claimed that their protocol can resist various types of attacks; however, after thorough analysis, we determined it to be ineffective against privileged internal attacks, physical IoT device capture attacks, stolen-verifier attacks, and known temporary information exposure attacks. To resolve these security weaknesses, we propose a new authentication and key agreement protocol. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed protocol is provably secure in real-or-random (ROR) model and Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, resisting known attacks while incurring low communication and computation costs.