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.
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 rapid proliferation of IoT technology has brought billions of devices into play that need to operate in a variety of diverse, resource-constrained environments. Secure authentication among these devices is a critical challenge, as traditional certificate-based public key infrastructures incur heavy computation and management overhead. Moreover, recent breakthroughs in quantum computing put at risk the security of classical cryptographic algorithms commonly used in IoT systems. This paper proposes a post-quantum certificateless authentication framework designed to address the efficiency-long-term security requirements of IoT environments. The proposed framework uses lattice-based cryptography to resist quantum-enabled adversaries while eliminating the need for digital certificates. The certificateless approach evades the problem of key escrow of identity-based cryptography and simplifies the key management process. A lightweight authentication protocol, which is suitable for constrained IoT devices, is developed. Security analyses prove that our proposed framework resists common attacks such as impersonation, replay, and man-in-the-middle attacks. The performance evaluation shows that our proposed framework reduces the communication and computational overheads compared with the traditional certificatebased authentication schemes. In this way, it is appropriate for large-scale and futureproof deployments of IoT systems.
The Edge-enabled Industrial Internet of Things (Edge-IIoT) has emerged as a fundamental architecture for intelligent manufacturing by enabling low-latency data collection, processing, and communication among distributed industrial devices. However, the open and distributed nature of Edge-IIoT introduces significant challenges to secure data authentication and privacy preservation. Meanwhile, conventional public key infrastructure incurs considerable certificate management overhead and is not well suited for future industrial environments in the presence of quantum computing. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a lattice-based certificateless blind signature scheme for secure and privacy-preserving authentication in Edge-IIoT. The proposed scheme integrates the Dilithium signature algorithm with certificateless public key cryptography and blind signature techniques to simultaneously provide anonymous authentication, data integrity, conditional identity revocation, and post-quantum security while eliminating the certificate management overhead associated with traditional public key infrastructures. Furthermore, the proposed construction improves existing lattice-based certificateless blind signature schemes by addressing identified security weaknesses and strengthening resistance against forgery attacks, while effectively avoiding the key escrow problem inherent in identity-based cryptography. The correctness, blindness, and unforgeability of the proposed scheme are formally proved in the random oracle model based on the hardness of the Module Short Integer Solution (MSIS) problem. In addition, theoretical performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme incurs acceptable computational, communication, and storage overhead while providing comprehensive security properties, including certificateless operation, identity anonymity, no key escrow, conditional revocation, and post-quantum security. Overall, the proposed scheme achieves an effective balance between security, privacy preservation, and efficiency, which exhibits favorable theoretical security-efficiency trade-offs for secure industrial data authentication in resource-constrained Edge-IIoT environments. Practical implementation is left for future investigation.
The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to an unprecedented scale of data exchange across heterogeneous and resource-constrained devices. Ensuring confidentiality and secure key management in such environments is challenging. Traditional public-key infrastructures require heavy certificate-handling overhead. Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) offers a lightweight alternative by deriving public keys directly from device identities, making it attractive for IoT deployments. However, IoT devices are highly vulnerable to side-channel and key-extraction attacks, motivating the need for Forward-Secure IBE(FS-IBE), where the compromise of a current secret key does not threaten past communications. Existing FS-IBE constructions based on classical hardness assumptions are not secure in the era of post-quantum, while the lattice-based (LWE-based) forward-secure scheme suffer from large key and ciphertext sizes, limiting their suitability for constrained IoT systems. Here, we propose a new lattice-based fs-IBE scheme in the ring setting, relying on the RLWE assumption to achieve post-quantum security and significant efficiency gains. Our design uses trapdoor delegation with a minimal-cover mechanism over a binary tree. It results in compact public parameters and efficient per-epoch key updates. Compared to prior LWE-based constructions, our scheme reduces public key, secret key, and ciphertext sizes, and thus, making it better suited for practical IoT environments.
The narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) system has become an integral part of the future fifth generation (5G) network. Although the NB-IoT system has gradually been improved in the traditional LTE network currently, the NB-IoT system does not have an effective access authentication scheme in the future 5G network. According to the current 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard, NB-IoT devices still use the traditional access authentication method to perform mutual authentication with the network, which may bring a large amount of signaling and communication overhead. This problem will be magnified in a large-scale device environment in the future 5G network. In this article, a quantum resistance access authentication and data distribution scheme is proposed for large-scale NB-IoT devices. The scheme can simultaneously implement access authentication and data transmission of a group of NB-IoT devices based on the lattice-based homomorphic encryption technology. Our scheme not only greatly reduce the network burden but also achieve strong security, including privacy protection and anti-quantum attacks. The performance analysis results show that our scheme has the ideal efficiency.
The Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) system has become an important branch of the Internet of Everything and is an indispensable part in future fifth Generation (5G) network. However, there is currently no effective access authentication scheme for the NB-IoT system in the future 5G network. According to the current 3GPP standard, NB-IoT devices still use the traditional access authentication method to perform the mutual authentication with the network, which may bring a lot of signaling and communication overheads. This problem will be more prominent when sea of NB-IoT devices simultaneously are activated in the 5G network. In this paper, we propose a quantum-resistance access authentication and data distribution scheme for massive NB-IoT devices. This scheme can implement access authentication and data transmission for a group of NB-IoT devices at the same time based on the lattice-based homomorphic encryption technology. Our scheme can not only greatly reduce the network burden, but also can achieve the strong security including privacy protection and resisting quantum attacks. Performance analysis results show that our solution has the desired efficiency.
The Edge-computing era presents opportunities for the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), where identity authentication is fundamental to ensuring IoT security. However, under post-quantum attacks, traditional identity authentication schemes that rely on signcryption to generate node keys face challenges due to the high number of IoT nodes. These schemes consume significant resources, making it difficult to meet the low-cost requirements of IoT. Against the backdrop of the rapid development of new media and the increasingly growing security demands for resource-constrained consumer electronic edge devices, a lightweight group signcryption authentication scheme based on lattice cryptography is proposed. During the key generation phase, an improved trapdoor diagonal matrix is designed, optimizing the preimage sampling algorithm required for key generation and reducing the total time needed to generate multiple keys. In the identity authentication phase, based on the leftover hash lemma and the properties of signcryption, the scheme allows for simultaneous signing and encryption of messages in a single logical step. A low-interaction protocol combining dot products and hash operations is proposed, enabling group leaders to perform access authentication on behalf of group members. Simulation results show that the scheme reduces the number of interactions required for IoT device access, lowers computational costs during identity authentication, and reduces the total cost of signcryption and un-signcryption by at least 7% compared to existing schemes. Additionally, it is demonstrated that this scheme can resist post-quantum attacks in IoT environments.