As Internet of Things (IoT) technologies become increasingly embedded within cyber-physical systems (CPS), safeguarding communications and protecting data have emerged as significant challenges. Existing authenticated key agreement protocols play a fundamental role in securing these systems, but many fail to provide adequate protection against evolving security threats, particularly in terms of forward secrecy. This paper conducts an in-depth cryptanalysis of a newly introduced authentication protocol, highlighting its failure to provide forward secrecy-a crucial feature that maintains communication confidentiality even in the event that the long-term key is exposed. Through detailed analysis, we identify several vulnerabilities within the protocol, particularly its inability to withstand attacks targeting session key exposure. Building on these findings, we propose a new authenticated key agreement protocol specifically designed to enhance security in CPS environments. Our proposed protocol integrates forward secrecy, ensuring that even if an attacker gains access to a device's long-term key, communications remain protected. The protocol aims to deliver robust security assurances with minimal computational demands, rendering it particularly wellsuited for IoT devices with limited resources. Our evaluation assesses its security, efficiency, and scalability, and the results indicate that it outperforms current alternatives. The proposed protocol offers a robust, forward secrecy-enabled solution for securing CPS communications, providing a solid foundation for the future of secure IoT networks in critical applications.
As Internet of Things (IoT) technologies become increasingly embedded within cyber-physical systems (CPS), safeguarding communications and protecting data have emerged as significant challenges. Existing authenticated key agreement protocols play a fundamental role in securing these systems, but many fail to provide adequate protection against evolving security threats, particularly in terms of forward secrecy. This paper conducts an in-depth cryptanalysis of a newly introduced authentication protocol, highlighting its failure to provide forward secrecy-a crucial feature that maintains communication confidentiality even in the event that the long-term key is exposed. Through detailed analysis, we identify several vulnerabilities within the protocol, particularly its inability to withstand attacks targeting session key exposure. Building on these findings, we propose a new authenticated key agreement protocol specifically designed to enhance security in CPS environments. Our proposed protocol integrates forward secrecy, ensuring that even if an attacker gains access to a device's long-term key, communications remain protected. The protocol aims to deliver robust security assurances with minimal computational demands, rendering it particularly wellsuited for IoT devices with limited resources. Our evaluation assesses its security, efficiency, and scalability, and the results indicate that it outperforms current alternatives. The proposed protocol offers a robust, forward secrecy-enabled solution for securing CPS communications, providing a solid foundation for the future of secure IoT networks in critical applications.
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.
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.
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) represents a dynamic infrastructure, leveraging sensing and network communication technology to establish ubiquitous connectivity among people, machines, and objects. Due to its end devices’ limited computing resources and storage space, it is not feasible to merely transpose traditional internet security technologies directly to IoT endpoints. Maintaining security while concurrently ensuring performance is a particularly challenging endeavor. This paper provides a review of key agreements and authentication protocols pivotal to the security of IoT. First, this survey discusses the applications that need authentication and key agreement to strengthen their security and current research on these application fields. Subsequently, this paper engages in an in-depth exploration of the phase involved in the scheme of authentication and key agreement, including an examination of the cryptographic techniques employed within these processes. This survey also thoroughly studies the scheme’s security services, potential attacks, formal analysis and informal analysis to ensure resilience against such threats. This study aims to provide a profound understanding of the recent research on authentication and key agreement in IoT applications. It strives to contribute towards strengthening security systems for IoT applications, ensuring their sustainability in the face of evolving threats.
The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems has introduced significant security challenges due to resource-constrained devices, heterogeneous network architectures, and largescale connectivity. Traditional authentication and key exchange mechanisms, primarily based on classical cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and ECC, are vulnerable to future quantum computing attacks. The emergence of quantum algorithms, particularly Shor’s algorithm, threatens the long-term confidentiality and integrity of IoT communications. This paper proposes a Quantum-Resistant Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol specifically designed for secure IoT architectures. The proposed framework integrates post-quantum cryptographic primitives, including lattice-based key exchange mechanisms and hash-based authentication schemes, optimized for low computational overhead suitable for constrained IoT devices. The protocol ensures mutual authentication, forward secrecy, and resistance against quantum adversaries while maintaining minimal communication latency. Security analysis demonstrates robustness against replay, man-in-the-middle, and key-compromise attacks. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed solution achieves a balance between quantum security strength and resource efficiency, making it suitable for next-generation IoT deployments in smart cities, healthcare systems, and industrial automation.
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.