In the ubiquitous networks, mobile nodes can obtain roaming service that enables them to get access to the services extended by their home networks in the field of foreign network. To provide secure and anonymous communication for legal mobile users in roaming services, there should be a mutual authentication between mobile user and foreign agent with the help of home agent. There are many roaming authentication schemes which have been proposed; however, with the progress of quantum computation, quantum attack poses security threats to many traditional public key cryptography-based authentication schemes; thus, antiquantum attack roaming authentication schemes need to be investigated. On account of the limitation of computational resources for mobile nodes, a lightweight anonymous and antiquantum authentication schemes need to be developed to enable mobile nodes to roam across multiple service domains securely and seamlessly. In consideration of the advantages of lattice in antiquantum, an NTRU-based authentication scheme with provable security and conditional privacy preservation is proposed to remedy these security weaknesses. Compared with the existing scheme, the proposed scheme not only improves efficiency but also can resist the quantum attack.
In the ubiquitous networks, mobile nodes can obtain roaming service that enables them to get access to the services extended by their home networks in the field of foreign network. To provide secure and anonymous communication for legal mobile users in roaming services, there should be a mutual authentication between mobile user and foreign agent with the help of home agent. There are many roaming authentication schemes which have been proposed; however, with the progress of quantum computation, quantum attack poses security threats to many traditional public key cryptography-based authentication schemes; thus, antiquantum attack roaming authentication schemes need to be investigated. On account of the limitation of computational resources for mobile nodes, a lightweight anonymous and antiquantum authentication schemes need to be developed to enable mobile nodes to roam across multiple service domains securely and seamlessly. In consideration of the advantages of lattice in antiquantum, an NTRU-based authentication scheme with provable security and conditional privacy preservation is proposed to remedy these security weaknesses. Compared with the existing scheme, the proposed scheme not only improves efficiency but also can resist the quantum attack.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are pervasively employed in critical domains such as smart healthcare, industrial automation, and environmental surveillance, where secure access control is essential. User authentication protocols are vital for thwarting unauthorized intrusions, yet the vast majority of existing schemes rely on conventional public-key cryptography (such as ECC, RSA), which is provably insecure in the post-quantum era due to Shor's algorithm. This motivates the design of post-quantum authentication that is also lightweight for resource-limited sensors. To address this challenge, we propose an efficient authentication and key agreement protocol based on Number Theory Research Unit (NTRU), a lattice-based cryptosystem offering proven resistance to quantum attacks. We have proven the correctness and security of our scheme through BAN logic and random oracle model and demonstrated through informal analysis that our scheme can resist various attack methods and possesses high security features. Moreover, we thoroughly evaluate our protocol against the most recent state-of-the-art schemes. The results indicate that our scheme has the lowest computational cost, and its communication cost is superior to that of most other schemes. Overall, our proposed protocol provides a robust, efficient, and future-proof authentication solution for WSNs, well-suited for deploying WSNs environments.
Public cloud computing provides a variety of services to consumers via high-speed internet. The consumer can access these services anytime and anywhere on a balanced service cost. Many traditional authentication protocols are proposed to secure public cloud computing. However, the rapid development of high-speed internet and organizations’ race to develop quantum computers is a nightmare for existing authentication schemes. These traditional authentication protocols are based on factorization or discrete logarithm problems. As a result, traditional authentication protocols are vulnerable in the quantum computing era. Therefore, in this article, we have proposed an authentication protocol based on the lattice technique for public cloud computing to resist quantum attacks and prevent all known traditional security attacks. The proposed lattice-based authentication protocol is provably secure under the Real-Or-Random (ROR) model. At the same time, the result obtained during the experiments proved that our protocol is lightweight compared to the existing lattice-based authentication protocols, as listed in the performance analysis section. The comparative analysis shows that the protocol is suitable for practical implementation in a quantum-based environment.
Abstract: In a secure roaming scenario, a user U travels to a foreign network and communicates with a foreign server V securely so that no one other than U and V can obtain the messages exchanged between them. U may also want to travel anonymously so that no one including V can find out its identity or trace its whereabouts except its home server H. There have been many key establishment protocols proposed for secure roaming. A typical application of these protocols is the mobile roaming service which may be deployed to interconnected WLAN and 3G networks. Despite the importance of these protocols, most of the protocols are analyzed heuristically. They are lack of formal security treatment. In this paper, we propose a formal key exchange definition and formalize secure roaming under the Canetti-Krawczyk (CK) model. We also propose a formal model for capturing the notions of user anonymity and untraceability. By using the modular approach supported by the CK-model, we construct an efficient key exchange protocol for roaming and then extend it to support user anonymity and untraceability. The protocols are efficient and each of them requires only four message flows among the three parties U, H and V. For building our protocols, we construct a one-pass counter based MT-authenticator and show its security under the assumption of a conventional MAC secure against chosen message attack.
Authentication has been adopted in many areas, but most of these authentication schemes are built using traditional cryptographic primitives. It is widely believed that such primitives are not resistant to quantum algorithms. To deal with those quantum attacks, lattice-based cryptography was introduced by Ajtai in 1996. To the best of our knowledge, the existing lattice-based authentication schemes are based on a lattice-based public key encryption called NTRU: a ring-based public key cryptosystem, proposed by Hoffstein, Pipher, and Silverman in 1998. However, these schemes only support the case of a single user. In view of the aforementioned issue, we propose the first lattice-based group authentication scheme. The proposed scheme is secure against replay attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks. Moreover, compared with the existing lattice-based authentication schemes, ours provides the most efficient method to agree upon a session key among a group of users after mutual authentication.
In cellular systems, user devices (UEs) establish secure sessions with each other through a trusted server such as the Home Subscriber Server (HSS) or Authentication Center (AuC). The proposed two-party authenticated key establishment allows two users to authenticate and exchange encrypted data with minimal involvement of the server -improving efficiency and scalability in mobile communication. Moreover, this paper presents a cryptanalysis of two post-quantum authentication and key agreement protocols proposed by Dabra et al. and Kumar et al. Our analysis identifies specific weaknesses, a design flaw in the registration phase of Dabra et al.’s protocol, and vulnerabilities to identity guessing and impersonation attacks in Kumar et al.’s scheme. Motivated by these findings, we propose a new communication framework for a two-party authenticated key establishment protocol assisted by a server. In the proposed model, user UA initiates communication by sending a request to a central server and receives a corresponding response to establish an authenticated session key with user UB. Notably, user UB does not need to interact with the server during session initiation or key derivation phases, thereby significantly reducing communication overhead and enhancing efficiency. Through extensive formal analysis and simulation, our protocol achieves 21.37% and 19.99% improvement in computational efficiency and 35.13% and 21.05% reduction in communication overhead compared to the lattice-based authenticated key agreement protocols of Dabra et al. and Kumar et al., respectively. Furthermore, the proposed scheme ensures key freshness, meaning that each session key is unique and has never been used in any prior communication session. This guarantees that every session remains protected by a distinct cryptographic key, even when the same users communicate repeatedly. Additionally, user UA can establish a secure session with user UB without revealing its identity to either UB or any intermediate server, thereby preserving user anonymity. Overall, the proposed protocol offers strong privacy guarantees while enabling secure, authenticated communication with a minimal number of message exchanges.
Currently, space information network (SIN) has become an increasingly important role in real life. As a large heterogeneous wireless network, SIN can better provide global mobile services to users anytime and anywhere, even in extreme geographic environments. In addition, there is no need to build the communication base-stations every few kilometers on the ground to ensure high service quality, which greatly reduces the construction costs and can be used as an economical communication method in sparsely populated areas. So there is a trend that more and more end users are more likely to get SIN services than traditional terrestrial cellular networks. However, due to the openness and publicity of the satellite wireless channel and the limited resources of the satellite nodes, the privacy and security cannot be perfectly guaranteed and may even be vulnerable to attacks initiated by the adversary such as replay attacks, impersonation attacks, and eavesdropping attacks. To improve the access security of SIN, researchers have proposed a series of authentication protocols based on different cryptographic assumptions. Nevertheless, existing research shows that these protocols cannot meet the requirements of higher and higher security and short authentication delay. In addition, these protocols are mainly based on public key cryptography mechanisms such as DLP and ECDLP, which can be solved by postquantum computers in polynomial time, so these protocols will no longer be secure. To solve the vulnerability of these protocols, in this paper, we propose a new RLWE-based anonymous mutual authentication and key agreement protocol, which guarantees higher security with low computational overhead even in the postquantum era. Detailed security analysis shows that our protocol meets security requirements and is resistant to a variety of known attacks. Besides, combining security comparison and performance analysis, our proposed protocol is more practical than other protocols in SIN.