Computationally lightweight and unconditionally secure key agreement protocols are very useful for secure communication in public networks. Recently, Guan et al. proposed a key agreement protocol whose security is based on the unpredictability of channel noise rather than computationally hard problems. These protocols are efficient, computationally lightweight, and unconditionally secure. However, authentication was not integrated into these protocols. In this article, we propose a new protocol with authentication capability that enables two nodes in the network to establish a secret session key for secure communication. It is more efficient, and it also preserves the lightweight and unconditional secure features of the key agreement protocols proposed by Guan et al. Therefore, it is more suitable for devices with limited computing power, such as sensors in Internet of Things (IoT).
Computationally lightweight and unconditionally secure key agreement protocols are very useful for secure communication in public networks. Recently, Guan et al. proposed a key agreement protocol whose security is based on the unpredictability of channel noise rather than computationally hard problems. These protocols are efficient, computationally lightweight, and unconditionally secure. However, authentication was not integrated into these protocols. In this article, we propose a new protocol with authentication capability that enables two nodes in the network to establish a secret session key for secure communication. It is more efficient, and it also preserves the lightweight and unconditional secure features of the key agreement protocols proposed by Guan et al. Therefore, it is more suitable for devices with limited computing power, such as sensors in Internet of Things (IoT).
In the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, more types of devices than ever before are connected to the internet to provide IoT services. Smart devices are becoming more intelligent and improving performance, but there are devices with little computing power and low storage capacity. Devices with limited resources will have difficulty applying existing public key cryptography systems to provide security. Therefore, communication protocols for various kinds of participating devices should be applicable in the IoT environment, and these protocols should be lightened for resources-restricted devices. Security is an essential element in the IoT environment, so for secure communication, it is necessary to perform authentication between the communication objects and to generate the session key. In this paper, we propose two kinds of lightweight authentication and key agreement schemes to enable fast and secure authentication among the objects participating in the IoT environment. The first scheme is an authentication and key agreement scheme with limited resource devices that can use the elliptic curve Qu-Vanstone (ECQV) implicit certificate to quickly agree on the session key. The second scheme is also an authentication and key agreement scheme that can be used more securely, but slower than first scheme using certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC). In addition, we compare and analyze existing schemes and propose new schemes to improve security requirements that were not satisfactory.
The rapid development of Internet of things (IoT) technology has made the IoT applicable in many areas of life and has contributed to the IoT’s improvement. IoT devices are equipped with various sensors that enable them to perform the tasks they were designed for. The use of such devices is associated with securing communication between devices and users. The key stages of communication are the processes of authentication and the process of agreeing on session keys because they are the basis of the subsequent communication phases. The specially designed security protocols are used to secure communication. These protocols define the course of communication and cryptographic techniques employed for securing. In this article, we have reviewed the latest communication protocols designed to secure authentication processes and agree on session keys in IoT environments. We analyzed the proposed protocols’ security level, vulnerability, and computational and communication costs. We showed our observations, describing the requirements that a secure protocol should meet.
Data security and privacy are important to prevent the reveal, modification and unauthorized usage of sensitive information. The introduction of using critical power devices for internet of things (IoTs), e-commerce, e-payment, and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has brought a new challenge of security due to the low computation capability of sensors. Therefore, the lightweight authenticated key agreement protocols are important to protect their security and privacy. Several researches have been published about authenticated key agreement. However, there is a need of lightweight schemes that can fit with critical capability devices. Addition to that, a malicious key generation center (KGC) can become a threat to watch other users, i.e impersonate user by causing the key escrow problem. Therefore, we propose a lightweight certificateless Authenticated Key Agreement (AKA) based on the computation Diffie-Hellman problem (CDHP). The proposed protocol maintains the characteristics of certificateless public key cryptography. The protocol is split into two combined phases. In the first phase, our protocol establishes a session key between users (sender and receiver). In the second phase, we use a lightweight proxy blind signature based on elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP). The used proxy signature has small computation costs, and can fit for small devices such sensors and protects against un-authentication and un-authorization on decentralized system. Compared to the existing AKA schemes, our scheme has small computation costs. The protocol achieves the well known security features compared to the related protocols.
Data security and privacy are important to prevent the reveal, modification and unauthorized usage of sensitive information. Theintroduction of using critical power devices for internet of things (IoTs),e-commerce, e-payment, and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has broughta new challenge of security due to the low computation capability of sensors. Therefore, the lightweight authenticated key agreement protocolsare important to protect their security and privacy. Several researcheshave been published about authenticated key agreement. However, thereis a need of lightweight schemes that can fit with critical capability devices. Addition to that, a malicious key generation center (KGC) canbecome a threat to watch other users, i.e impersonate user by causingthe key escrow problem. Therefore, we propose a lightweight certificateless Authenticated Key Agreement (AKA) based on the computation
The rapid proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has connected billions of devices that continuously exchange sensitive data over public wireless channels, making secure authentication a critical requirement. However, most IoT end devices are severely resource-constrained, which renders conventional public-key infrastructures based on RSA, bilinear pairings, or digital certificates impractical. Although many authentication and key agreement schemes have been proposed, recent cryptanalytic studies show that they often either omit essential security properties such as perfect forward secrecy or resistance to ephemeral secret leakage or incur overhead that is unacceptable for low-power nodes. To address this gap, this paper proposes a lightweight Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-based authentication and key agreement protocol for a three-tier IoT architecture consisting of a user, a semi-trusted gateway server, and an IoT sensor. The protocol relies solely on elliptic-curve scalar multiplication, one-way hash functions, and bitwise XOR operations, avoiding bilinear pairings and certificate management. It achieves mutual authentication among all three parties through timestamped, hash-based authenticators and establishes a contributory session-key derived from fresh ephemeral keys, ensuring perfect forward secrecy. The security of the protocol is established through a detailed informal analysis, demonstrating resistance to major attacks, and is formally verified using the AVISPA tool, where both the OFMC and CL-AtSe back-ends report the protocol as SAFE under the Dolev–Yao adversary model. A comparative performance evaluation against several recent ECC-based authentication schemes shows that the proposed protocol maintains low cost requirements suitable for constrained IoT devices, and resulting in a communication overhead of 1828 bits, which is competitive with most recent ECC-based schemes evaluated, and imposing a minimal storage burden on end devices. The results demonstrate that the proposed protocol achieves a favorable balance between security and efficiency, making it well suited to resource-constrained IoT environments.
Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of objects which enables them to collect vital information. As a result, privacy and anonymity in IoT are the most important issues. So far, many protocols have been proposed to provide authentication mechanism in IoT networks. Recently, Amin et al proposed a three-factor authenticated protocol for IoT networks that is claimed to be secure. In this paper, we challenge this claim and show that this protocol is vulnerable against the replay attack and DoS attack. Moreover, inspired by this protocol, we propose a secure authenticated key exchange protocol with the same assumptions. Our analysis shows that our proposed protocol is more efficient than Amin et al protocol.