Real-time and high-efficient communication becomes a vital property for IoT-enabled equipment, since the application range of the Internet of Things has extended widely. At the same time, the centralized characterization of the cloud computing is gradually unable to meet the demand for both low latency and high computing efficiency. To resolve these issues, new computing paradigms have been introduced, such as edge, dew, and fog computing. Recently, Saurabh et al. introduced a mutual authentication protocol, which was claimed to resist various attacks without the requirement of a trusted server, for dew-assisted IoT devices. However, this paper will show that Saurabh et al.’s scheme lacks forward security and user anonymity. Then, a new authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocol, named e-SMDAS, will be put forward and formally proven secure under the eCK security model. Further, the analysis results of BAN logic and Scyther tool will also confirm the security of e-SMDAS. Finally, the comparative analysis of security features and computation efficiency between e-SMDAS and several recent schemes will be demonstrated at the end of this paper.
Real-time and high-efficient communication becomes a vital property for IoT-enabled equipment, since the application range of the Internet of Things has extended widely. At the same time, the centralized characterization of the cloud computing is gradually unable to meet the demand for both low latency and high computing efficiency. To resolve these issues, new computing paradigms have been introduced, such as edge, dew, and fog computing. Recently, Saurabh et al. introduced a mutual authentication protocol, which was claimed to resist various attacks without the requirement of a trusted server, for dew-assisted IoT devices. However, this paper will show that Saurabh et al.’s scheme lacks forward security and user anonymity. Then, a new authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocol, named e-SMDAS, will be put forward and formally proven secure under the eCK security model. Further, the analysis results of BAN logic and Scyther tool will also confirm the security of e-SMDAS. Finally, the comparative analysis of security features and computation efficiency between e-SMDAS and several recent schemes will be demonstrated at the end of this paper.
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.
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.
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.
Internet of Things (IoT) applications have been increasingly developed. Authenticated key agreement (AKA) plays an essential role in secure communication in IoT applications. Without the PKI certificate and high time-complexity bilinear pairing operations, identity-based AKA (ID-AKA) protocols without pairings are more suitable for protecting the keys in IoT applications. In recent years, many pairing-free ID-AKA protocols have been proposed. Moreover, these protocols have some security flaws or relatively extensive computation and communication efficiency. Focusing on these problems, the security analyses of some recently proposed protocols have been provided first. We then proposed a family of eCK secure ID-AKA protocols without pairings to solve these security problems, which can be applied in IoT applications to guarantee communication security. Meanwhile, the security proofs of these proposed ID-AKA protocols are provided, which show they can hold provable eCK security. Some more efficient instantiations have been provided, which show the efficient performance of these proposed ID-AKA protocols. Moreover, comparisons with similar schemes have shown that these protocols have the least computation and communication efficiency at the same time.
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 integration of IoT with the cloud infrastructure is essential for designing smart applications. However, such integration may lead to security issues. Authentication and session key establishment is an essential security requirement for secure communication between IoT devices and cloud servers. For evaluating authentication key agreement schemes, the extended Canetti–Krawczyk (eCK) adversary model is regarded to be a more strict and relevant adversary model. Many schemes for authenticated key exchange between IoT devices and cloud servers have been proposed in the literature but have been assessed under Dolev and Yoa (DY) adversary model. Recently, Rostampour et al. introduced an ECC‐based approach for enabling authentication between IoT devices and cloud servers that is secure and robust to various attacks under the Dolev and Yoa adversary model. In this paper, a detailed review and the automated security verification of the Rostampour et al. scheme are carried out under the eCK adversary model using Scyther‐Compromise. The validation indicates that the scheme is not secure and is susceptible to various attacks under the eCK adversary model. To overcome the limitation of the Rostampour et al. scheme, a design of an ECC‐based scheme for authentication between IoT devices and cloud servers under the eCK adversary model is proposed. The Scyther verification indicates that the scheme is safe under the eCK adversary model. The soundness of the correctness of the proposed scheme has been analyzed using BAN logic. Comparative analysis indicates that the scheme is resilient under the eCK adversary model with an energy overhead of 278.16 mJ for a resource constraint IoT device and a communication overhead of 1,408 bits.