A provably secure authentication framework for quantum-safe message transmission in wireless sensor networks
Vincent Omollo Nyangaresi, Zaid Alaa Hussien, Vincent Omollo Nyangaresi, Ali Hasan Ali, Mustafa A. Al Sibahee, Mohammed Abdulridha Hussain, Iman Qays Abduljaleel, Junchao Ma, Abdulla J. Y. Aldarwish, Dhafer G. Honi, Maryam Mahdi Alhusseini
Abstract Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been heavily deployed to facilitate continuous monitoring of their environments as they collect the necessary data which enable autonomous decision making or predictive control. As such, these networks have found applications in fields such as smart agriculture, military, industrial automation, and healthcare. During the message transfers among sensors or between sensors and mobile sinks, public communication channels are deployed. This exposes the collected data to a myriad of security threats such as tampering, eavesdropping, and replay. Although the recent past has witnessed the development of numerous security frameworks for this ecosystem, most of the current solutions are defenseless against threats such as session hijacking, side-channeling, ephemeral secret leakages and quantum attacks. In this paper, we leverage on lattice cryptography to develop an effective authentication framework for the WSNs. Formal security analysis confirms the robustness of our protocol under the Random Oracle Model (ROM). In addition, extensive semantic security analyses demonstrate the resilience of the proposed framework against typical attacks such as denial of service, key compromise and forgery. In terms of performance, we show that the developed framework incurs slightly lower computation and energy overheads when compared with its peers.
Abstract Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been heavily deployed to facilitate continuous monitoring of their environments as they collect the necessary data which enable autonomous decision making or predictive control. As such, these networks have found applications in fields such as smart agriculture, military, industrial automation, and healthcare. During the message transfers among sensors or between sensors and mobile sinks, public communication channels are deployed. This exposes the collected data to a myriad of security threats such as tampering, eavesdropping, and replay. Although the recent past has witnessed the development of numerous security frameworks for this ecosystem, most of the current solutions are defenseless against threats such as session hijacking, side-channeling, ephemeral secret leakages and quantum attacks. In this paper, we leverage on lattice cryptography to develop an effective authentication framework for the WSNs. Formal security analysis confirms the robustness of our protocol under the Random Oracle Model (ROM). In addition, extensive semantic security analyses demonstrate the resilience of the proposed framework against typical attacks such as denial of service, key compromise and forgery. In terms of performance, we show that the developed framework incurs slightly lower computation and energy overheads when compared with its peers.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are pervasively employed in critical domains such as smart healthcare, industrial automation, and environmental surveillance, where secure access control is essential. User authentication protocols are vital for thwarting unauthorized intrusions, yet the vast majority of existing schemes rely on conventional public-key cryptography (such as ECC, RSA), which is provably insecure in the post-quantum era due to Shor's algorithm. This motivates the design of post-quantum authentication that is also lightweight for resource-limited sensors. To address this challenge, we propose an efficient authentication and key agreement protocol based on Number Theory Research Unit (NTRU), a lattice-based cryptosystem offering proven resistance to quantum attacks. We have proven the correctness and security of our scheme through BAN logic and random oracle model and demonstrated through informal analysis that our scheme can resist various attack methods and possesses high security features. Moreover, we thoroughly evaluate our protocol against the most recent state-of-the-art schemes. The results indicate that our scheme has the lowest computational cost, and its communication cost is superior to that of most other schemes. Overall, our proposed protocol provides a robust, efficient, and future-proof authentication solution for WSNs, well-suited for deploying WSNs environments.
Abstract Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play a crucial role in various applications, ranging from environmental monitoring to industrial automation that require high levels of security. With the development of quantum technologies, many security mechanisms may be hacked due to the promising capabilities of quantum computation. To address this challenge, quantum protocols have emerged as a promising solution for enhancing the security of wireless sensor communications. One of the common types of quantum protocols is quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols, which are investigated to allow two participants with fully quantum capabilities to share a random secret key, while semi-quantum key distribution (SQKD) protocols are designed to perform the same task using fewer quantum resources to make quantum communications more realizable and practical. Quantum walk (QW) plays an essential role in quantum computing, which is a universal quantum computational paradigm. In this work, we utilize the advantages of QW to design three authenticated quantum cryptographic protocols to establish secure channels for data transmission between sensor nodes: the first one is authenticated quantum key distribution (AQKD), the second one is authenticated semi-quantum key distribution (ASQKD) with one of the two participants having limited quantum capabilities, and the last one is ASQKD but both legitimate users possess limited quantum resources. The advantages of the proposed protocols are that the partners can exchange several different keys with the same exchanged qubits, and the presented protocols depend on a one-way quantum communication channel. In contrast, all previously designed SQKD protocols rely on two-way quantum communication. Security analyses prove that the presented protocols are secure against various well-known attacks and highly efficient. The utilization of the presented protocols in wireless sensor communications opens up new avenues for secure and trustworthy data transmission, enabling the deployment of resilient WSNs in critical applications. This work also paves the way for future exploration of quantum-based security protocols and their integration into WSNs for enhanced data protection.
Quantum computing poses a significant threat to Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) by undermining traditional cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). This work proposes a quantum-safe architecture for WSNs that integrates post-quantum cryptography (PQC) with lightweight IoT protocols to ensure long-term confidentiality, authenticity, and resilience. The framework leverages ML-KEM for key encapsulation and ML-DSA/SLH-DSA for signatures, and seamlessly integrates with EDHOC, OSCORE, and COSE. A novel Efficient Adaptive Parameter Selection (EAPS) mechanism dynamically adjusts cryptographic strength to balance security, energy consumption, and latency under varying network conditions. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that ciphertext fragmentation (8–27 pieces) results in manageable completion times of 4–10 seconds, while join operations consume only 0.005–0.03 J per cryptographic handshake event, while system-level energy consumption including network overhead is higher (~1.0–1.4 J per join cycle depending on hop count and retransmissions). Battery lifetime projections under steady-state sensing workloads range from approximately 115–280 months for low-duty-cycle operation, whereas realistic deployment conditions with periodic communication yield effective lifetimes of 11.5–24 months. Security analysis confirms robust resistance against downgrade attacks and Harvest-Now-Decrypt-Later (HNDL) threats. Moreover, EAPS reduces risk scores by over 50% compared to fixed schemes with less than 10% additional energy overhead, and batch signature verification improves scalability by increasing throughput from ~1,600 to ~2,800 verifications per second. Overall, the proposed framework demonstrates that WSNs can achieve quantum-resistant security with minimal performance trade-offs, ensuring readiness for the post-quantum era.
The requirement of efficient security protocols to protect confidential information from ever evolving cyber threat has been highlighted by the fast implementation of wireless sensor network (WSN) in numerous important domains, including healthcare monitoring, environmental surveillance and military operations. Despite their feasibility, traditional cryptographic approaches are utilized behind the computing capability of recent attackers, including the possibility of future quantum computer attacks. In order to revolutionize WSN security, this study proposes utilizing quantum cryptography and other concepts from quantum computing into the existing framework. This research leads to develop a communication protocol that is extremely safe and against the cyber-attacks. This protocol utilizes the quantum key distribution (QKD) to protect data and granting its confidential. In addition to improving security, the new architectures begin with change that makes WSN more capable of dependable and secure operations in environment where data protection is essential. A complete framework for protecting WSNs from new cyber threats in the future while keeping data transmissions and efficient process with reliability is discussed in this study. This proposed method enhances the dependencies in WSN installation across various industries, which is important for applications that need strong security measures. Evaluation results shows that the proposed method outperformed all existing methods in terms of relevant metrics.
Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs) have rapidly developed to allow real-time health monitoring and remote medical diagnostics with better patient care. However, due to the sensitive nature of the data transferred within WBSNs, more integrated security mechanisms are mandatory, especially against possible attacks by both classical and quantum adversaries. The developments in quantum computing may break the conventional encryption schemes, so it is very important to explore quantum-resistant systems. The paper proposes a new scheme for lattice-based high-security authentication in WBSNs. Lattice-based cryptography provides post-quantum security as it has inherent resistance against quantum attacks and assumptions about the hardness of the computational problem, especially the Learning with Errors problem and the SVP. The architecture proposed strengthens defenses against man-in-the-middle, impersonation, and eavesdropping attacks by authenticating and ensuring that a safe key exchange takes place and that data integrity is achieved. It analyzes the performance, security overhead, and energy economy of LBQC to make sure it is appropriate for such low-power, low-resource contexts. The experimental outcomes validate the applicability of this technique, highlighting how well it will protect WBSNs against attacks from methods developed by quantum computing, and, at the same time, the system will remain resilient and the data confidential.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are of prominent use in unmanned surveillance applications. This peculiar trait of WSNs is actually the underlying technology of various applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) such as smart homes, smart cities, smart shopping complexes, smart traffic, smart health, and much more. Over time, WSNs have evolved as a strong base for laying the foundations of IoT infrastructure. In order to address the scenario in which a user wants to access the real-time data directly from the sensor node in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), Das recently proposed an anonymity-preserving three-factor authentication protocol. Das's protocol is suitable for resource-constrained sensor nodes because it only uses lightweight cryptographic primitives such as hash functions and symmetric encryption schemes as building blocks. Das's protocol is claimed to be secure against different known attacks by providing formal security proof and security verification using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool. However, we find that Das's protocol has the following security loopholes: (1) By using a captured sensor node, an adversary can impersonate a legal user to the gateway node, impersonate other sensor nodes to deceive the user, and the adversary can also decrypt all the cipher-texts of the user; (2) the gateway node has a heavy computational cost due to user anonymity and thus the protocol is vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks. We overcome the shortcomings of Das's protocol and propose an improved protocol. We also prove the security of the proposed protocol in the random oracle model. Compared with the other related protocols, the improved protocol enjoys better functionality without much enhancement in the computation and communication costs. Consequently, it is more suitable for applications in WSNs.