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IEEE Access

An Unlinkable Authentication Scheme for Distributed IoT Application

Yousheng Zhou, Tong Liu, Fei Tang, Tinashe Magara

Published Jan 1, 2019• 36 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an enormous ubiquitous-network, which connects the objects through various sensors. The IoT technology promotes the interconnection and fusion between the physical world and information space, and it facilitates the day-to-day life of people. However, since a lot of equipped sensors are unattended and open, the IoT must face and overcome the main problems of security and privacy. Authentication is one of the paramount security concerns in the IoT environment, in which a user could directly access data from the sensors. Therefore, we propose an authentication and key agreement scheme providing unlinkability for the IoT environment based on bilinear pairings. The formal security proof demonstrates that the proposed protocol is unforgeable under the adaptively chosen message attack, and the session key exchange is semantic secure under the eCK model. In addition, the computation and communication costs of the proposed scheme are evaluated and compared with some existing similar schemes, which exhibits that it pleasantly addresses the needs of the IoT as far as security properties and computation expenses.

DOI
10.1109/access.2019.2893918

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is an enormous ubiquitous-network, which connects the objects through various sensors. The IoT technology promotes the interconnection and fusion between the physical world and information space, and it facilitates the day-to-day life of people. However, since a lot of equipped sensors are unattended and open, the IoT must face and overcome the main problems of security and privacy. Authentication is one of the paramount security concerns in the IoT environment, in which a user could directly access data from the sensors. Therefore, we propose an authentication and key agreement scheme providing unlinkability for the IoT environment based on bilinear pairings. The formal security proof demonstrates that the proposed protocol is unforgeable under the adaptively chosen message attack, and the session key exchange is semantic secure under the eCK model. In addition, the computation and communication costs of the proposed scheme are evaluated and compared with some existing similar schemes, which exhibits that it pleasantly addresses the needs of the IoT as far as security properties and computation expenses.
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.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is being applied to various environments such as telecare systems, smart homes, and intelligent transportation systems. The information generated from IoT devices is stored at remote servers, and external users authenticate to the server for requesting access to the stored data. In IoT environments, the authentication process is required to be conducted efficiently, and should be secure against various attacks and ensure user anonymity and untraceability to ensure sustainability of the network. However, many existing protocols proposed in IoT environments do not meet these requirements. Recently, Rajaram et al. proposed a paring-based user authentication scheme. We found that the Rajaram et al. scheme is vulnerable to various attacks such as offline password guessing, impersonation, privileged insider, and known session-specific temporary information attacks. Additionally, as their scheme uses bilinear pairing, it requires high computation and communication costs. In this study, we propose a novel authentication scheme that resolves these security problems. The proposed scheme uses only hash and exclusive-or operations to be applicable in IoT environments. We analyze the proposed protocol using informal analysis and formal analysis methods such as the BAN logic, real-or-random (ROR) model, and the AVISPA simulation, and we show that the proposed protocol has better security and performance compared with existing authentication protocols. Consequently, the proposed protocol is sustainable and suitable for real IoT environments.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has become an important technology which permits different devices and machines to interconnect with each other using heterogeneous networks. The integration of numerous techniques is expected to offer extraordinary growth in future and current promising applications of IoT. In these days, the secure communication among interconnected IoT components has become an important issue of concern. Therefore, it has become a foremost need to design such authentication protocol which can make the secure communication among IoT components. In this article, we proposed an identity-based authentication and key agreement protocol for the IoT environment in order to offer the secure communication between various IoT entities. The devised protocol utilizes the physically unclonable function which helps to robustly resist the physical attack on IoT components. We analyze the proposed protocol informally which clearly shows that the proposed protocol offers the perfect forward secrecy, device anonymity and untraceability and also resists the desynchronization, IoT node impersonation and server impersonation attacks. The security features of proposed protocol are also analyzed formally using well known Random Oracle Model (ROM). Moreover, the performance of the devised protocol has also been determined in terms of communication and computational overhead. The performance and security analysis shows the supremacy of the devised protocol over the various related protocols.
The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a dynamic infrastructure, leveraging sensing and network communication technology to establish ubiquitous connectivity among people, machines, and objects. Due to its end devices’ limited computing resources and storage space, it is not feasible to merely transpose traditional internet security technologies directly to IoT endpoints. Maintaining security while concurrently ensuring performance is a particularly challenging endeavor. This paper provides a review of key agreements and authentication protocols pivotal to the security of IoT. First, this survey discusses the applications that need authentication and key agreement to strengthen their security and current research on these application fields. Subsequently, this paper engages in an in-depth exploration of the phase involved in the scheme of authentication and key agreement, including an examination of the cryptographic techniques employed within these processes. This survey also thoroughly studies the scheme’s security services, potential attacks, formal analysis and informal analysis to ensure resilience against such threats. This study aims to provide a profound understanding of the recent research on authentication and key agreement in IoT applications. It strives to contribute towards strengthening security systems for IoT applications, ensuring their sustainability in the face of evolving threats.
The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has worsened the challenge of maintaining data and user privacy. IoT end devices, often deployed in unsupervised environments and connected to open networks, are susceptible to physical tampering and various other security attacks. Thus, robust, efficient authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols are essential to protect data privacy during exchanges between end devices and servers. The previous work in "Provably Secure ECC-Based Anonymous Authentication and Key Agreement for IoT" proposed a novel AKA scheme for secure IoT environments. They claimed their protocol offers comprehensive security features, guarding against numerous potential flaws while achieving session key security. However, this paper demonstrates through logical and mathematical analyses that the previous work is vulnerable to various attacks. We conducted a security analysis using the extended Canetti and Krawczyk (eCK) model, which is widely employed in security evaluations. This model considers scenarios where an attacker has complete control over the network, including the ability to intercept, modify, and delete messages, while also accounting for the potential exposure of ephemeral private keys. Furthermore, we show that their scheme fails to meet critical security requirements and relies on flawed security assumptions. We prove our findings using the automated validation of internet security protocols and applications, a widely recognized formal verification tool. To strengthen attack resilience, we propose several recommendations for the advancement of more robust and efficient AKA protocols specifically designed for IoT environments.
The advent of Internet of Things (IoT) ushers in a significant potential to integrate individuals, devices, and data, leading to a profound change in our professional and social environments. The small, resource-constrained IoT devices are usually deployed to collect various types of critical data in remote or unmonitored locations. Due to extensive interconnectivity, limited resources, and inadequate security design, IoT systems are vulnerable to communication-specific cyber threats, which aim to disrupt operations, steal sensitive information, or cause damage. To resolve the security concerns in IoT communications, many recent efforts have been devoted to designing authenticated key agreement protocols for IoT systems. However, not only most of the existing solutions fail to adopt cost-effective techniques for resource-limited IoT devices, but also they ignore the differentiation among various data types in the established session keys. A few approaches use traditional physical unclonable functions (PUFs) to address resource concerns, yet they introduce new security issues into IoT systems. Once the PUF cryptographic information is compromised by machine learning attacks, the entire authentication framework collapses. Therefore, in this paper we propose an authenticated key agreement protocol for device-to-gateway communication in IoT systems based on Chebyshev polynomial and probability-based PUF. We examine the proposed protocol’s security features through formal security validation. We also conduct performance evaluation through a simulation-oriented study, and the results clearly prove that the proposed protocol offers superior security and privacy, while maintaining low computational overhead.