As smart home devices become more widely available, their limited resources and potential exposure to various types of cyber-attacks make it difficult for the traditional security protocols to remain effective. Cloud-enabled smart home IoT platforms have helped to improve device intelligence and overall efficiency when controlling them, but the additional use of cloud computing has also created additional complexity in controlling these devices through user-defined automated rules and remote access via vendor apps. Conventional security schemes do not consider these types of control models, nor do they provide a reasonable balance of the additional computational overhead introduced, the efficiency of communications, and the level of security provided. Additionally, with the introduction of quantum computing, current public key cryptography primitives will become obsolete, necessitating the requirement for an adoption of post-quantum security measures. To overcome these issues, this paper presents a proposal for a lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement scheme that employs post-quantum cryptography primitives to facilitate a secure interaction between the user’s cloud platforms, smart home devices, and the user. The protocol also supports remote secure control, while providing the resistance to both classical and quantum attacks. The proposed protocol has been thoroughly evaluated through formal verification using the ProVerif tool and multiple heuristic evaluation techniques. Additionally, the security features of the proposed protocol have been compared to those of several existing methods, providing evidence that it offers improved security features, forward secrecy, and quantum resistance while maintaining a lightweight profile compatible with the limitations of modern smart homes.
As smart home devices become more widely available, their limited resources and potential exposure to various types of cyber-attacks make it difficult for the traditional security protocols to remain effective. Cloud-enabled smart home IoT platforms have helped to improve device intelligence and overall efficiency when controlling them, but the additional use of cloud computing has also created additional complexity in controlling these devices through user-defined automated rules and remote access via vendor apps. Conventional security schemes do not consider these types of control models, nor do they provide a reasonable balance of the additional computational overhead introduced, the efficiency of communications, and the level of security provided. Additionally, with the introduction of quantum computing, current public key cryptography primitives will become obsolete, necessitating the requirement for an adoption of post-quantum security measures. To overcome these issues, this paper presents a proposal for a lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement scheme that employs post-quantum cryptography primitives to facilitate a secure interaction between the user’s cloud platforms, smart home devices, and the user. The protocol also supports remote secure control, while providing the resistance to both classical and quantum attacks. The proposed protocol has been thoroughly evaluated through formal verification using the ProVerif tool and multiple heuristic evaluation techniques. Additionally, the security features of the proposed protocol have been compared to those of several existing methods, providing evidence that it offers improved security features, forward secrecy, and quantum resistance while maintaining a lightweight profile compatible with the limitations of modern smart homes.
In smart home environments, Harvest Now and Decrypt Later (HNDL) attacks pose a significant threat to long-term privacy. Traditional elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)-based authentication systems can be neutralized using the Shor algorithm on quantum computers, making it difficult to mitigate these threats. In this study, we propose a hybrid authentication and key exchange protocol designed to address the resource constraints of smart home systems, while introducing the NIST standard post quantum cryptography (PQC) to defend against HNDL attacks. The proposed protocol operates through four concise steps: (1) Setup and Registration for identities and pre-shared keys (PSK); (2) Key Agreement between the user and gateway using ML-KEM; (3) Session Key Distribution from the gateway to the smart device (SD) using the PSK; and (4) Mutual Authentication to verify the established key across all nodes. Formal verification using ProVerif and Scyther confirms the security of the proposed protocol, which achieved a communication cost of 7424 bits, representing a 44–82% reduction compared to existing PQC protocols. Furthermore, the proposed protocol demonstrated an execution time of 0.3205 ms, achieving a 74–90% and 60–74% improvement over existing ECC-based and PQC-based methods, respectively. Consequently, this study presents a quantum-resistant authentication protocol for smart-home environments that achieves a practical balance between security and efficiency.
In emerging environments such as cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), secure authentication and key negotiation play a crucial role in protecting data transmitted over public networks. However, many existing authentication protocols are still designed based on classical public-key cryptography primitives, and quantum computing may threaten their security. To address this challenge, we propose a post-quantum authentication and key agreement protocol that uses the lattice-based Kyber key encapsulation mechanism (KEM). Our proposed protocol integrates cryptographic authentication, smart card protection, and post-quantum key encapsulation mechanisms, enabling mutual authentication between users and servers and securely establishing session keys. The security of the protocol is formally analyzed in the Real-or-Random (ROR) model under the random oracle assumption and the IND-CCA security of the underlying KEM scheme. Furthermore, through informal security analysis, we have further demonstrated that the protocol possesses important security properties, including anonymity, untraceability, perfect forward confidentiality, and resistance to known attacks. In addition, the computational cost and communication overhead of the proposed scheme are evaluated and compared with several representative authentication protocols. The results show that the proposed protocol can provide strong security while maintaining low computational cost and communication overhead.
In the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, more types of devices than ever before are connected to the internet to provide IoT services. Smart devices are becoming more intelligent and improving performance, but there are devices with little computing power and low storage capacity. Devices with limited resources will have difficulty applying existing public key cryptography systems to provide security. Therefore, communication protocols for various kinds of participating devices should be applicable in the IoT environment, and these protocols should be lightened for resources-restricted devices. Security is an essential element in the IoT environment, so for secure communication, it is necessary to perform authentication between the communication objects and to generate the session key. In this paper, we propose two kinds of lightweight authentication and key agreement schemes to enable fast and secure authentication among the objects participating in the IoT environment. The first scheme is an authentication and key agreement scheme with limited resource devices that can use the elliptic curve Qu-Vanstone (ECQV) implicit certificate to quickly agree on the session key. The second scheme is also an authentication and key agreement scheme that can be used more securely, but slower than first scheme using certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC). In addition, we compare and analyze existing schemes and propose new schemes to improve security requirements that were not satisfactory.
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.
Abstract In internet of things (IOT) healthcare systems, sensitive patient information is transmitted over the network to medical professionals. Numerous lightweight authentication protocols have been proposed; however, most of them remain vulnerable to various cyberattacks, allowing attackers to eavesdrop on or manipulate transmitted data. We examine several recently proposed lightweight authentication schemes for healthcare systems. Our security analysis demonstrates that these schemes remain vulnerable to malicious gateway attacks, desynchronization attacks, and key screw attacks. .To address these issues and ensure post- quantum security in healthcare IoT, we propose a post-quantum key establishment protocol based on lattice- based cryptography (LWE). the proposed scheme prevents the gateway from accessing both the secret keys and their parameters, thereby eliminating the possibility of malicious gateway attacks. The proposed protocol ensures user anonymity, forward secrecy, and resistance to impersonation, key screw, and desynchronization attacks.. The proposed protocol ensures secure and efficient establishment of three-round key establishment among entities . Our performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme achieves lower computation and communication overhead compared to recent related works. The security of the protocol is thoroughly analyzed through informal reasoning, Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, and ProVerif, confirming its robustness and suitability for resource-constrained IoT-based healthcare environments.
The IoT-enabled Smart Grid uses IoT smart devices to collect the private electricity data of consumers and send it to service providers over the public network, which leads to some new security problems. To ensure the communication security in a smart grid, many researches are focusing on using authentication and key agreement protocols to protect against cyber attacks. Unfortunately, most of them are vulnerable to various attacks. In this paper, we analyze the security of an existent protocol by introducing an insider attacker, and show that their scheme cannot guarantee the claimed security requirements under their adversary model. Then, we present an improved lightweight authentication and key agreement protocol, which aims to enhance the security of IoT-enabled smart grid systems. Furthermore, we proved the security of the scheme under the real-or-random oracle model. The result shown that the improved scheme is secure in the presence of both internal attackers and external attackers. Compared with the original protocol, the new protocol is more secure, while keeping the same computation efficiency. Both of them are 0.0552 ms. The communication of the new protocol is 236 bytes, which is acceptable in smart grids. In other words, with similar communication and computation cost, we proposed a more secure protocol for smart grids.