The Internet of Things (IoT) cloud model provides an efficient scheme for rapid collection, storage, processing, and analysis of massive node data, and its application has gradually expanded to key areas such as healthcare and transportation. However, the security issues of open channel transmission in IoT still persist. Researchers have proposed a lot of solutions, but the forward secrecy, session key security, and other aspects have not been effectively solved. This paper proposes a provably secure authenticated key agreement scheme, which constructs a secure channel between endpoint, gateway, and cloud server (CS). Compared with other schemes, this scheme has three characteristics: (1) According to the different computing resources of devices, gateways and CSs, a segmented differential authentication and secret key negotiation protocol is designed by using cryptographic primitives with different computing overheads; (2) after verification with the ProVerif tool, rigorous proof with the real‐or‐random (ROR) model, and informal analysis, the protocol has been proven to be secure, effectively guarding against typical threats; and (3) compared with the five most recent schemes, it can be seen that the protocol is at least 35% superior to other schemes in endpoint computational overhead, and it meets 10 security objectives, making it very suitable for application scenarios where endpoint resources are limited.
The Internet of Things (IoT) cloud model provides an efficient scheme for rapid collection, storage, processing, and analysis of massive node data, and its application has gradually expanded to key areas such as healthcare and transportation. However, the security issues of open channel transmission in IoT still persist. Researchers have proposed a lot of solutions, but the forward secrecy, session key security, and other aspects have not been effectively solved. This paper proposes a provably secure authenticated key agreement scheme, which constructs a secure channel between endpoint, gateway, and cloud server (CS). Compared with other schemes, this scheme has three characteristics: (1) According to the different computing resources of devices, gateways and CSs, a segmented differential authentication and secret key negotiation protocol is designed by using cryptographic primitives with different computing overheads; (2) after verification with the ProVerif tool, rigorous proof with the real‐or‐random (ROR) model, and informal analysis, the protocol has been proven to be secure, effectively guarding against typical threats; and (3) compared with the five most recent schemes, it can be seen that the protocol is at least 35% superior to other schemes in endpoint computational overhead, and it meets 10 security objectives, making it very suitable for application scenarios where endpoint resources are limited.
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 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.
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.
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.
Device authentication and key exchange are essential issues for Internet of Things (IoT) which plays an indispensable role in modern life. Many sensor devices in IoT, with limited resources and poor self-protection capabilities, are deployed in the unattended and open places, making them vulnerable to physical attacks while facing traditional security threats. Despite several researches have been conducted by using the physical unclonable function (PUF) to immune the communication between IoT devices from the security threats above, as per the knowledge of the authors, current solutions rely on the participation of the server to distribute the key parameters, which requires high message overhead and markedly influences the efficiency. To fill this gap, this article proposes an end-to-end mutual authentication and key exchange protocol for IoT by combining PUF with certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) on elliptic curve, which only needs “three handshakes” without the real-time participation of the server. The security analysis shows that the proposed protocol can not only secure the IoT devices from various attacks, but also provide perfect forward secrecy. Moreover, the experimental validation and performance analysis show the proposed protocol outperforms existing related protocols in terms of security features, protocol rounds and communication cost.
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.