A quantum computer is a paradigm of information processing that can show remarkable possibilities of exponentially improved information processing. However, this paradigm could disrupt the current cryptosystem, which is called quantum computing attacks, by calculating factoring problem and discrete logarithm problem. Recently, NTRU is applied to various security systems, because it provides security against to provide secu-rity against quantum computing attacks. Furthermore, NTRU provides similar security level and efficient computation time of encryption/decryption compared to traditional PKC. In 2018, Jeong et al. proposed an user authentication and key distribution scheme using NTRU. They claimed that their scheme provides various security properties and secure against quantum comput-ing attacks. In this paper, we demonstrate that their scheme has security pitfalls and incorrectness in login and authentication phase. We also suggest countermeasures to fix the incorrectness and provide security against various attacks.
A quantum computer is a paradigm of information processing that can show remarkable possibilities of exponentially improved information processing. However, this paradigm could disrupt the current cryptosystem, which is called quantum computing attacks, by calculating factoring problem and discrete logarithm problem. Recently, NTRU is applied to various security systems, because it provides security against to provide secu-rity against quantum computing attacks. Furthermore, NTRU provides similar security level and efficient computation time of encryption/decryption compared to traditional PKC. In 2018, Jeong et al. proposed an user authentication and key distribution scheme using NTRU. They claimed that their scheme provides various security properties and secure against quantum comput-ing attacks. In this paper, we demonstrate that their scheme has security pitfalls and incorrectness in login and authentication phase. We also suggest countermeasures to fix the incorrectness and provide security against various attacks.
The forthcoming of the Internet of Things has opened the gates for numerous applications in several domains. Unfortunately, it also has brought along with it several security challenges. IoT devices, being compact in size has several constraints. Therefore, it becomes a challenging task to define security protocols suitable for such constrained devices. Also, the significant strides made towards the development of Quantum computers pose a huge threat to traditionally used cryptosystems. It is known that a sufficiently large Quantum Computer running Shor’s Algorithm can solve the integer factorization problem and the discrete logarithm problem. Thus, in our research, we provide an authentication protocol that utilizes Gate Way Node for high-end processing and suggest the usage of NTRU cryptosystem as the cipher suite. We suggest our authentication protocol in terms of cloud computing, as the number of IoT devices would be immense and cloud computing is better suited for processing and storing such large volumes of data. We also suggest the use of One Time Password, for adding another layer of security on top of the public key cryptosystem. We analyze our authentication protocol and find that it is safe.
In order to build a secure and an efficient scheme even in the presence of quantum computers, we propose an improved authenticated key agreement scheme based on NTRU for applications in e-health platforms. In fact, user authentication and key agreement are important cryptographic primitives that allow two entities to establish a secure and an authenticated channel over insecure networks. Currently, the security of the most of these primitives relies on RSA or ECC standards, which ensure high security levels. Unfortunately, all cryptosystems based on factorization problems (e.g., RSA) or the discrete logarithm problem in finite groups (e.g., ECC) will be vulnerable to quantum attacks in the next few years due to Shor’s algorithm. Security and efficiency analysis show that the proposed scheme can resist various attacks, including quantum attacks while preserving efficiency.
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.
As a non-contact identification technology, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is widely used in various Internet of Things applications. However, RFID systems are highly vulnerable to diverse attacks due to the openness of communication links between readers and tags, leading to serious security and privacy concerns. Numerous RFID authentication protocols have been designed that employ hash functions and symmetric cryptography to secure communications. Despite these efforts, such schemes generally exhibit limitations in key management flexibility and scalability, which significantly restricts their applicability in large-scale RFID deployments. Confronted with this challenge, public key cryptography offers an effective solution. Taking into account factors such as parameter size, computational complexity, and resistance to quantum attacks, the NTRU algorithm emerges as one of the most promising choices. Since the NTRU signature algorithm is highly complex and requires large parameters, there are currently only a few NTRU encryption-based RFID authentication protocols available, all of which exhibit significant security flaws-such as supporting only one-way authentication, failing to address public key distribution, and so on. Moreover, performance evaluations of the algorithm in these contexts are often incomplete. This paper proposes a mutual authentication protocol for RFID based on the NTRU encryption algorithm to address security and privacy issues. The security of the protocol is analyzed using the BAN-logic tools and some non-formalized methods, and it is further validated through simulation with the AVISPA tool. With the parameter set (N, p, q) = (443, 3, 2048), the NTRU algorithm can provide 128 bits of post-quantum security strength. This configuration not only demonstrates greater foresight at the theoretical security level but also offers significant advantages in practical energy consumption and computation time when compared to traditional algorithms such as ECC, making it a highly competitive candidate in the field of post-quantum cryptography.
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.