In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained immense popularity in various aspects of work, learning, and daily life. Within the IoT realm, there is a growing concern regarding communication security issues between users and servers. However, addressing the communication security between servers is equally imperative, which has not received as much attention. To this end, we propose a certificateless anonymous authenticated key agreement (AKA) algorithm based on learning with errors (LWEs) and inhomogeneous small integer solution (ISIS) security assumptions. Our scheme provides strong resistance to quantum attacks and protects the privacy of communication servers. It also has constant communication costs and lower computational requirements than existing lattice-based anonymous AKA algorithms on the broadcast channel. Additionally, the proposed scheme eliminates the resource consumption of managing complex certificates and addresses the security risks associated with key escrow in the key generation center (KGC). Through security and performance analysis, we demonstrate that our approach can enhance the security of IoT-based healthcare systems while significantly improving communication efficiency. Our proposed scheme provides a promising solution to security issues related to server communication in IoT systems.
In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained immense popularity in various aspects of work, learning, and daily life. Within the IoT realm, there is a growing concern regarding communication security issues between users and servers. However, addressing the communication security between servers is equally imperative, which has not received as much attention. To this end, we propose a certificateless anonymous authenticated key agreement (AKA) algorithm based on learning with errors (LWEs) and inhomogeneous small integer solution (ISIS) security assumptions. Our scheme provides strong resistance to quantum attacks and protects the privacy of communication servers. It also has constant communication costs and lower computational requirements than existing lattice-based anonymous AKA algorithms on the broadcast channel. Additionally, the proposed scheme eliminates the resource consumption of managing complex certificates and addresses the security risks associated with key escrow in the key generation center (KGC). Through security and performance analysis, we demonstrate that our approach can enhance the security of IoT-based healthcare systems while significantly improving communication efficiency. Our proposed scheme provides a promising solution to security issues related to server communication in IoT systems.
Abstract The authenticated key agreement (AKA) method used in the Internet of Things (IoT) provides identity authentication and agreed symmetric keys to encrypt large amounts of communication messages for devices and servers. With the development of the quantum computing techniques and corresponding algroithms, classical authenticated key agreement methods based on public key, such as RSA and ECC become vulnerable. Many scholars have proposed lattice-based authenticated key agreement schemes to achieve post-quantum security and address this issue. However, these scheme's security models (such as BR, CK, and ROR) only can capture limited types of adversary attacks and require many communication rounds. To this end, we propose a lower communication rounds lattice-based anonymous authenticated key agreement (LA-AKA) protocol under the seCK model, which can capture a wider range of adversary attacks. The LA-AKA scheme utilizes an identity-based public key system for key agreement, and this system avoids complex resource consumption caused by certificate verification. During the identity authentication and key agreement phase, the communication entities do not need to transmit static public keys; they only need to engage in two communication rounds to generate the session key. Furthermore, the LA-AKA scheme can resist signal leakage attacks caused by key reuse in the ring learning with errors (RLWE) security assumption. The LA-AKA scheme provides higher security, as security analysis proves. The performance evaluation shows that as the number of devices and servers in the system increases, the computational advantage of the LA-AKA scheme in the broadcast channel becomes more significant.
Cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled smart healthcare plays a vital role in modern society, yet security and privacy challenges remain unavoidable. The authenticated key agreement (AKA) process, which serves as the foundation of secure communication, is widely recognized as a key solution to these challenges. However, many existing AKA methods in the literature either involve high communication and computational costs or fail to withstand quantum attacks. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) introduces a new class of cryptographic algorithms designed to resist future quantum computer threats. In this article, we present a quantum-secure, lattice-based three-party AKA scheme for smart IoT healthcare applications, leveraging the computationally complex Ring-Learning With Errors (Ring-LWE) problem. Our approach integrates secure big-data analytics with blockchain technology by utilizing authentication procedures for secure data aggregation before storing it in the blockchain. A comprehensive security evaluation including formal and informal analysis, demonstrates the scheme's strong resilience against both classical and quantum attacks. Additionally, experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme is well-suited for real-time smart healthcare applications.
Abstract The increasing interconnectedness of devices via the Internet of Things (IoT) highlights the growing importance of addressing IoT security issues. Authenticated Key Agreement (AKA) protocols ensure secure communication between IoT devices, users, and central servers. Preserving anonymity in AKA protocols is especially crucial given privacy issues and user preferences. The emergence of Shor's algorithm in 1994 and recent advancements in quantum computing have posed a threat to the security of classical AKA schemes relying on integer factorization, discrete logarithm, and other number theory problems. Consequently, researchers have turned their attention to developing quantum-resistant AKA schemes. In this context, Rana and Mishra introduced a lattice-based key agreement protocol under ring-LWE problem for IoT-enabled smart devices. However, a thorough security assessment uncovered vulnerabilities in their protocol, specifically susceptibility to replay and Key Compromise Impersonation (KCI) attacks. Furthermore, their approach reveals potential weaknesses in user impersonation if the user's identity is compromised.
Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most representative application scenarios in the 5G and 6G era. The concurrent access of massive IoT devices definitely poses enormous communication, computation, and certificate management challenges to the wireless authentication. Moreover, the emergence of quantum computing makes classical cryptography-based authentication protocols, such as 5G-AKA, more easier to be broken. Facing the challenges posed by the massive concurrent authentication and quantum attacks, this paper proposes a lattice cryptography based group authentication scheme, where lattice-based aggregate signature algorithm and identity-based encryption (IBE) are leveraged to achieve simultaneous authentication of concurrent accessed devices. The proposed authentication scheme eliminates the process of public key certificate management, greatly reducing the storage overhead of core network. Moreover, the utilization of lattice cryptography enables the resistance of quantum attacks. The proposed solution does not rely on additional security assumptions such as security channel or trusted group center, making it more flexible to be deployed in actual network scenario. Finally, formal security analysis of the proposed protocol is provided with the tool ProVerif. It is demonstrated that the proposed protocol can satisfy the goals of identity privacy, authentication, data confidentiality and forward secrecy. In addition, compared with existing advanced solutions, the outperformance of the proposed scheme in terms of computation overhead, signaling overhead, communication overhead, and security properties is validated with simulations.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) integrates control systems with IoT technology to enable automation and intelligent operations in industrial environments. As IIoT deployments expand, reliance on wireless communication channels increases the attack surface and exposes systems to various security and privacy threats. Moreover, the limited computational capabilities of IIoT devices and the need to preserve device anonymity introduce additional security requirements. Insufficient protection against these challenges can result in operational disruption and significant economic losses. Existing symmetric-key and hash-based schemes are lightweight but lack scalability for large IIoT deployments, whereas public-key methods provide stronger security. However, the emergence of quantum computing threatens the long-term security of such protocols, as quantum algorithms can efficiently break conventional number-theoretic cryptosystems. To address these challenges, we propose a quantum-resistant three-party authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol for the IIoT. The ring learning with errors (RLWE)-based protocol provides quantum-safe and efficient mutual authentication and secure session key establishment between workers and devices. Comprehensive security and performance analyses demonstrate that the proposed protocol is robust against security attacks. Performance evaluations confirm lower computational and communication overhead than existing post-quantum schemes, proving its practicality for IIoT.
The enormous benefits of Internet of Things (IoT) technology have driven its deployment in various applications. Additionally, the development of quantum computers has directed attention towards lattice-based cryptography. Consequently, the computational capabilities of quantum computers pose a threat to the security of the existing IoT signature mechanisms. Quantum computers are proficient at unraveling the complexity bound of computationally hard problems like the integer factorization problem (IFP) and the discrete logarithm problem (DLP). As a result, security is an essential requirement for the IoT communication network against quantum attacks. The amalgamation of certificateless public key cryptosystems (CL-PKC) and lattice-based cryptography (LBC) is one of the solution for alleviating these security menaces. Lucidly, CL-PKC prevents key escrow issues and key management problems; LBC prevents quantum attacks. The Shortest Integer Solution (SIS) problem, which the NTRU lattices offer, serves as the basis for this paper’s introduction of a certificateless signature mechanism for IoT environments. By adopting the Random Oracle Model, we demonstrated the security of the suggested mechanism against Type 1 and Type 2 attackers. Furthermore, security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate robust communication, as evidenced by metrics such as the computational cost of CL-Sign and CL-Verify phases at 536μs, 376.81μs and communication cost of KGC at 418 bits, CL-Sign at 532 bits and CL-Verify at 446 bits. Also, we calculate the cost of single-message signature generation and verification on an IoT device. These results show that the suggested mechanism’s security and computational efficiency are more reliable, and efficient than other relevant competing frameworks.