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.
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 an emerging technology that has become popular in many applications, such as transportation, agriculture, healthcare, industrial automation, robotics, etc. IoT devices are interconnected via the Internet, and secure message communication between them is a challenging task. An authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocol can solve such an issue. This article designed and implemented an identity-based three-party AKA (IoT-ID3PAKA) protocol to establish a shared session key among three IoT devices. The current state-of-the-art identity-based 3PAKA (ID-3PAKA) protocols are unsuitable for resource-constrained IoT devices because almost all of them undergo various security attacks and require higher execution and communication overheads. The provable security of the proposed IoT-ID3PAKA protocol relies on the hardness assumption of the elliptic curve-based computational Diffie–Hellman problem. The execution time of IoT-ID3PAKA for the security levels: 80, 112, 128, 192, and 256 bits on a Raspberry Pi 4 device is estimated and compared with the existing ID-3PAKA protocols.
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.
Recently, Cao et al. proposed an identity-based pairing-free two-party authenticated key agreement (ID-2PAKA) protocol using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). We have shown that Cao's protocol is vulnerable to two attacks called known session-specific temporary information attack (KSTIA) and key off-set attack (KOA). In this paper, we proposed an improved paring-free ID-2PAKA protocol based on ECC that not only eliminates the weaknesses of Cao et al.’s protocol, but also provides resilience against other known attacks, the detail security of which are provided. Our protocol requires minimal message exchanges and minimum computational overheads. Finally, the proposed protocol has been compared with other relevant protocols and expected outcome has been found.
With the significant development of the Internet, Internet of Things (IoT) has become an emerging technology in many industries. To support security and privacy in the Industrial IoT environment, a user may interact with another user on the Internet to share confidential information, which requires an authenticated communication channel. To meet this demand, in this article the authors developed an identity-based two-party authenticated key agreement (ID-2PAKA) protocol that allows two users to communicate securely and share sensitive data across IoT-enabled regions. Similar protocols found in the literature either proven to be insecure or carry the burden of high communication and computational costs. The proposed ID-2PAKA protocol is analyzed in the random oracle model to achieve provable security based on the hardness assumptions of computational Diffie-Hellman and bilinear Diffie-Hellman problems. The performance analysis of the proposed ID-2PAKA protocol is performed using the pairing-based cryptography library. The comparative results from the perspective of the computation and communication costs against the competing protocols showed that the proposed ID-2PAKA protocol is secure and efficient.
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 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.