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Security and Communication Networks

Enhanced Authentication Protocol for the Internet of Things Environment

Chien‐Ming Chen, Xuanang Li, Shuangshuang Liu, Mu‐En Wu, Saru Kumari

Published Mar 11, 2022• 23 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is among the most promising technologies of the future, and its development has garnered attention worldwide. However, the rise of the IoT has been accompanied by a proportionate increase in security concerns regarding communication between IoT entities. Recently, Alzahrani et al. proposed an identity-based authentication and key agreement protocol for an IoT environment, wherein a physically unclonable function was employed. They claimed that their protocol can resist various types of attacks; however, after thorough analysis, we determined it to be ineffective against privileged internal attacks, physical IoT device capture attacks, stolen-verifier attacks, and known temporary information exposure attacks. To resolve these security weaknesses, we propose a new authentication and key agreement protocol. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed protocol is provably secure in real-or-random (ROR) model and Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, resisting known attacks while incurring low communication and computation costs.

DOI
10.1155/2022/8543894

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is among the most promising technologies of the future, and its development has garnered attention worldwide. However, the rise of the IoT has been accompanied by a proportionate increase in security concerns regarding communication between IoT entities. Recently, Alzahrani et al. proposed an identity-based authentication and key agreement protocol for an IoT environment, wherein a physically unclonable function was employed. They claimed that their protocol can resist various types of attacks; however, after thorough analysis, we determined it to be ineffective against privileged internal attacks, physical IoT device capture attacks, stolen-verifier attacks, and known temporary information exposure attacks. To resolve these security weaknesses, we propose a new authentication and key agreement protocol. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed protocol is provably secure in real-or-random (ROR) model and Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, resisting known attacks while incurring low communication and computation costs.
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) 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 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.
Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) is a developing technology in our time that is prone to security problems as it uses wireless and shared networks. A challenging scenario in IoT environments is Device-to-Device (D2D) communication that an authentication server as a trusted third-party, does not involve in the authentication and key agreement process. It is only involved in the process of allocating long-term secret keys and their update. A lot of authentication protocols have been suggested for such situations. This article demonstrated that three state-of-the-art related protocols failed to remain anonymous, insecure against key compromise impersonation (KCI) attack, and clogging attack. To counter the pitfalls of them, a new D2D mutual authentication and key agreement protocol is designed here. The proposed protocol is anonymous, untraceable, and highly secure. Moreover, there is no need for a secure channel to generate a pair of private and public keys in the registration phase.) Formal security proof and security analysis using BAN logic, Real-Or-Random (ROR) model, and Scyther tool showed that our proposed protocol satisfied security requirements. Furthermore, communication cost, computation cost, and energy consumption comparisons denoted our schema has better performance, compared to other protocols.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is the application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the industrial field. IIoT allows users to remotely access industrial equipment and the data in it, which also brings certain challenges to the security of industrial data. Authentication and key agreement protocols are very effective security technologies in the matter of protecting industrial data. There is a large amount of research work on authentication protocols in IIoT, but most of the protocols have security weaknesses. Recently, Rafique et al. proposed a multi-factor protocol in IIoT that can accomplish authentication and session key establishment through a gateway. Rafique et al. claimed that their protocol is secure, unfortunately, we carefully analyze the protocol of Rafique et al. and find some security flaws, i.e., it is vulnerable to insider attack and known session-specific temporary information (KSSTI) attack, and unable to provide forward security. We explore the factors of insecurity and propose an enhanced multi-factor secure authentication and key agreement protocol in IIoT. The new protocol improves the security of the protocol while using only symmetric cryptography, hash function, and XOR operation. Formal security analysis and informal security discussions demonstrate that the new protocol is resistant to a variety of known attacks. After performance analysis, our protocol has lower computational cost, and increases no significant communication cost, while providing more secure and robust properties.
With the increasing demand for drones in diverse tasks, the Internet of Drones (IoD) has recently emerged as a significant technology in academia and industry. The IoD environment enables various services, such as traffic and environmental monitoring, disaster situation management, and military operations. However, IoD communication is vulnerable to security threats due to the exchange of sensitive information over insecure public channels. Moreover, public key-based cryptographic schemes are impractical for communication with resource-constrained drones due to their limited computational capability and resource capacity. Therefore, a secure and lightweight key agreement scheme must be developed while considering the characteristics of the IoD environment. In 2024, Alzahrani proposed a secure key agreement protocol for securing the IoD environment. However, Alzahrani’s protocol suffers from high computational overhead due to its reliance on elliptic curve cryptography and is vulnerable to drone and mobile user impersonation attacks and session key disclosure attacks by eavesdropping on public-channel messages. Therefore, this work proposes a lightweight and security-enhanced key agreement scheme for the IoD environment to address the limitations of Alzahrani’s protocol. The proposed protocol employs a physical unclonable function and simple cryptographic operations (XOR and hash functions) to achieve high security and efficiency. This work demonstrates the security of the proposed protocol using informal security analysis. This work also conducted formal security analysis using the Real-or-Random (RoR) model, Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, and Automated Verification of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation to verify the proposed protocol’s session key security, mutual authentication ability, and resistance to replay and MITM attacks, respectively. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that the proposed protocol offers better performance and security by comparing the computational and communication costs and security features with those of relevant protocols.