Anonymity, robust synchronization, and perfect forward secrecy are the most important security properties of authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocols. Designing AKA protocols that simultaneously achieve these security properties and availability in the IoT environment is a challenging task. AKA protocols built using public key cryptographic primitives have advantages in achieving these critical security properties, but performing expensive public-key cryptographic operations is inefficient for resource-constrained IoT devices. The authentication protocols based on symmetric cryptographic primitives are often subject to various attacks. This paper proposes a secure lightweight AKA protocol with critical security properties (called CS-LAKA) for IoT environments without using public-key cryptographic primitives. LAKA cleverly achieves the security goals of anonymity, robust synchronization, and perfect forward secrecy by embedding dynamic identities in authenticators, and a few additional exchange messages are added. This enables LAKA to have both robust security and high efficiency. Subsequently, we perform a formal security analysis to prove that LAKA is secure, and compared with existing related schemes, LAKA has obvious advantages in terms of security, functionality and running performance.
Anonymity, robust synchronization, and perfect forward secrecy are the most important security properties of authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocols. Designing AKA protocols that simultaneously achieve these security properties and availability in the IoT environment is a challenging task. AKA protocols built using public key cryptographic primitives have advantages in achieving these critical security properties, but performing expensive public-key cryptographic operations is inefficient for resource-constrained IoT devices. The authentication protocols based on symmetric cryptographic primitives are often subject to various attacks. This paper proposes a secure lightweight AKA protocol with critical security properties (called CS-LAKA) for IoT environments without using public-key cryptographic primitives. LAKA cleverly achieves the security goals of anonymity, robust synchronization, and perfect forward secrecy by embedding dynamic identities in authenticators, and a few additional exchange messages are added. This enables LAKA to have both robust security and high efficiency. Subsequently, we perform a formal security analysis to prove that LAKA is secure, and compared with existing related schemes, LAKA has obvious advantages in terms of security, functionality and running performance.
Due to the openness of communication channels and the sensitivity of the data being collected and transmitted, securing data access and communication in IoT systems requires robust ECC-based authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols. However, designing an AKA protocol for IoT presents significant challenges, as most IoT sensors are deployed in resource-constrained, unattended environments with limited computational power, connectivity, and storage. To achieve anonymous authentication, existing solutions typically rely on shared temporary public keys to mask device IDs or validate sender certificates, which increases the computational overhead. Furthermore, these protocols often fail to address crucial security concerns, such as nonresistance to ephemeral secret leakage (ESL) attacks and a lack of perfect forward security. To mitigate the computational burden, we propose a dynamic authenticated credentials (DACs) synchronization framework for anonymous authentication. Then, we introduce an ECC-based AKA scheme that employs DACs in place of temporary public keys or sender credentials, enabling efficient and secure anonymous authentication. The security of the proposed protocol was rigorously verified under the Real-or-Oracle model and validated using ProVerif. Performance comparisons demonstrate that our scheme offered significant improvements in security, with an over 37% reduction in communication cost and computational overhead.
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.
Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) is the basis of Industry 4.0, which extends Internet connectivity beyond traditional computing devices like computers and smartphones to the physical world for improving efficiency and accuracy while reducing the production cost. However, there are tremendous security threats to IIoT, such as IIoT device hijacking and data leaks. Therefore, a lightweight authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocol is commonly applied to establish a session key for securing the communication between IIoT devices. To protect the previous session keys from being compromised, perfect forward secrecy (PFS) has been one of the most important security properties of AKA. In this article, we present an efficient PFS-enabled AKA protocol for IIoT systems, which is developed based on a new dynamic authentication credential (DAC) framework, without using any public-key cryptographic primitives. It is worth noting that our protocol is also faster than the state-of-the-art DAC-based AKA protocols with PFS. Moreover, we give the formal security result of the proposed protocol in the random oracle model.
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.
The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has created many problems. A wise example is presented by the design of secure, efficient authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols. A novel three-factor AKA protocol for the IoT is presented in this paper. The scheme integrates password, biometric, and device-based factors that achieved strong security, which gives anonymity to the user, achieves forward secrecy, and makes the scheme resilient to various attacks like replay, impersonation, and de-synchronization. It also adds a safe lost-password-reset functionality, which makes the protocol more usable. Security analysis proves its strength against the typical adversary, while performance evaluation shows that the solution is better than existing solutions in terms of computational and communication efficiency. The work proposes a practical and scalable security solution for IoT systems, which satisfies the high security standard but within the constraints of an IoT system.