To meet the requirement of doctors’ comprehensive diagnosis and treatment across multiple servers in smart healthcare, and to address the lack of efficient switching mechanisms in existing post-quantum authentication schemes, a post-quantum password authentication and fast-switching key agreement protocol for multi-server smart healthcare environments was proposed. With ML-KEM as the core cryptographic primitive, a mechanism combining initial authentication and fast switching authentication was designed. In the initial authentication phase, full authentication was performed, and a master session key and a service session key were established. During multi-server access, fast switching authentication was performed, and a new service session key was independently negotiated with the target server. In terms of security, the session key semantic security of the proposed protocol was proved under the ROR model, and resistance to common attacks was analyzed. In terms of performance, when a user continuously accessed five servers, compared with the repeated full-authentication approach in Wen’s and Chen’s post-quantum schemes, the proposed protocol reduced the cumulative computational overhead by more than 70.34% and the cumulative communication overhead by more than 27.53%. The performance gap increases as the number of servers grows, which shows that the proposed protocol has significant efficiency advantages and good scalability in large-scale deployment scenarios.
To meet the requirement of doctors’ comprehensive diagnosis and treatment across multiple servers in smart healthcare, and to address the lack of efficient switching mechanisms in existing post-quantum authentication schemes, a post-quantum password authentication and fast-switching key agreement protocol for multi-server smart healthcare environments was proposed. With ML-KEM as the core cryptographic primitive, a mechanism combining initial authentication and fast switching authentication was designed. In the initial authentication phase, full authentication was performed, and a master session key and a service session key were established. During multi-server access, fast switching authentication was performed, and a new service session key was independently negotiated with the target server. In terms of security, the session key semantic security of the proposed protocol was proved under the ROR model, and resistance to common attacks was analyzed. In terms of performance, when a user continuously accessed five servers, compared with the repeated full-authentication approach in Wen’s and Chen’s post-quantum schemes, the proposed protocol reduced the cumulative computational overhead by more than 70.34% and the cumulative communication overhead by more than 27.53%. The performance gap increases as the number of servers grows, which shows that the proposed protocol has significant efficiency advantages and good scalability in large-scale deployment scenarios.
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.
With the digitization and networking of medical and health data, intelligent medical devices are widely used to monitor patient health status and provide personalized medical services. However, these devices involve a large amount of personal health data and must ensure data security. The data security and privacy protection in the new complex network environment has become one of the important challenges in the field of healthcare. This study aims to propose a post quantum attribute based authentication key agreement protocol applicable to intelligent healthcare, to address the security risks and risks of medical data communication under traditional cryptographic systems. This new protocol is based on attribute authentication encryption technology without certificates on the grid, which completes mutual authentication and establishes secure communication through attribute and access control policies, and can optimize the deployment of certificate system components in public key infrastructure. Meanwhile, this scheme belongs to the post quantum cryptography protocol and has the ability to resist quantum computing attacks. Based on comprehensive analysis, this scheme can achieve certain advantages in execution efficiency and security, and can provide a more reliable choice for secure communication in the field of intelligent healthcare.
ABSTRACT The rapid advancement of quantum computers poses a significant threat to classical cryptographic techniques used to distributed and multi‐server environments. This paper focuses on development of quantum‐resistant framework for authenticated multi‐server networking, designed to ensure confidentiality and integrity in the presence of quantum‐capable adversaries. We have developed a practical three‐party authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol for multi‐server environments, leveraging the Ring Learning With Errors (RLWE) problem for robust post‐quantum security. After finding weaknesses in Pursharthi and Mishra's work, such as inadequate session key verification and insider attack vulnerabilities, we designed our protocol to address real‐world threats like stolen devices, rogue central authorities, and replay attacks. It features an efficient preparation phase, a secure registration process, and a reliable mutual authentication mechanism, guarding against quantum, side‐channel, and replay attacks. Our detailed security analysis and performance tests confirm its resilience and efficiency, making it a scalable solution for applications like healthcare and IoT (Internet of Things). This protocol provides a structured framework for achieving secure and quantum‐resistant communication.
Key agreement in open networks must not only resist quantum computing threats but also establish keys and authenticate counterparties without explicitly revealing identities. Existing solutions often rely on additional certificates or explicit signature-based authentication or require multiple rounds of interaction and complex state management, thereby imposing burdens on deployment and scalability. To address this, we propose a key agreement protocol based on a post-quantum identity-matching scheme, which unifies identity binding, implicit authentication, and session key establishment into a single key agreement process. Specifically, the initiator generates a ciphertext based on the peer’s identity and embeds session-related information within it, enabling the recipient to verify the peer’s identity and confirm the consistency of the key while decrypting and recovering the shared material. Additionally, bidirectional confirmation messages are used to eliminate negotiation deviations such as the sharing of unknown keys. Furthermore, a version control mechanism is introduced as a synchronization tag for key evolution, allowing the session key to be naturally updated within a predetermined time window. Concurrently, a revocation list maintained by a blockchain is established, enabling distributed verification and auditing of revocation status. This supports key update and revocation management without increasing the number of negotiation rounds. Performance evaluations and security analyses indicate that the protocol incurs a single-end computational overhead of less than 100 μs and a communication overhead of approximately 17.1 KB, trading moderate performance overhead for strong security semantics.
Advancements in 5G are largely driven by its adoption across a variety of applications, including smart homes, smart healthcare, autonomous vehicles, transportation, and Industry 5.0. However, this widespread usage raises significant security and privacy concerns, particularly regarding authentication. To secure 5G communications, 3GPP has standardised the 5G-Authentication and Key Agreement (5G-AKA) protocol. Despite this, state-of-the-art research has revealed that 5G-AKA suffers from several vulnerabilities. In response, numerous alternative authentication schemes have been proposed. Nevertheless, many of these protocols continue to be susceptible to classical security threats, such as malicious serving network (SN) attacks, ephemeral secret leakage, traceability, anonymity violations, and, most critically, a lack of Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). Additionally, recent advancements in quantum computing pose a substantial risk to the security of 5G-AKA and its variants, rendering them insecure in the post-quantum era. Although a few post-quantum cryptography-based protocols have been introduced, studies show that they are either computationally expensive or still vulnerable to quantum attacks. In order to tackle these challenges, we propose two versions of a novel authentication protocol that not only provide comprehensive security guarantees but are also computationally efficient. Version 1 utilises a hybrid cryptographic approach (AES + KEM) and achieves the lowest computational cost—even lower than Version 2, which relies solely on KEM. Both versions offer the same level of security, but Version 1 is significantly more efficient in terms of resource usage. We have validated our proposed protocols using the Real-Or-Random (ROR) model and the Scyther tool. Furthermore, we evaluated their performance against existing protocols under both known and unknown attack scenarios. The results show that our protocols incur lower computational, communication, and energy overhead, as well as strong resilience against unknown attacks, outperforming several existing authentication schemes. Furthermore, we implement a testbed to demonstrate the real-time applicability of both proposed versions.
The emergence of quantum computing is expected to break many conventional cryptographic algorithms currently used for authentication and secure communication. Existing security mechanisms in Next Generation Networks (NGNs), including 5G, IoT, smart healthcare, and cloud-based systems, are increasingly vulnerable to future quantum attacks. This research presents a lightweight and efficient Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) based authentication framework specifically designed for next generation network environments. The proposed framework combines quantum-resistant cryptographic techniques with optimized authentication procedures to provide secure identity verification, confidential communication, and attack resistance with minimal computational complexity. The model emphasizes reduced overhead, faster authentication response, and scalability for resource-constrained devices. Security analysis shows that the framework can effectively defend against replay attacks, impersonation attacks, session hijacking, and quantum-based cryptanalytic threats. Experimental evaluation indicates that the proposed approach achieves improved security performance while maintaining low latency and reduced resource consumption, making it suitable for practical deployment in future intelligent communication networks.