A Novel Certificateless Signature Scheme for Smart Objects in the Internet-of-Things

Efficient Certificate-Less Aggregate Signature Scheme with Conditional Privacy-Preservation for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks Enhanced Smart Grid System

Vehicular Ad hoc networks (VANETs) as spontaneous wireless communication technology of vehicles has a wide range of applications like road safety, navigation and other electric car technologies, however its practicability is greatly hampered by cyber-attacks. Due to message broadcasting in an open environment during communication, VANETs are inherently vulnerable to security and privacy attacks. However to address the cyber-security issues with optimal computation overhead is a matter of current security research challenge. So this paper designs a secure and efficient certificate-less aggregate scheme (ECLAS) for VANETs applicable in a smart grid scenario. The proposed scheme is based on elliptic curve cryptography to provide conditional privacy-preservation by incorporating usage of time validated pseudo-identification for communicating vehicles besides sorting out the KGC (Key Generation Center) escrow problem. The proposed scheme is comparatively more efficient to relevant related research work because it precludes expensive computation operations likes bilinear pairings as shown by the performance evaluation. Similarly, communication cost is within the ideal range to most related works while considering the security requirements of VANETs system applicable in a smart grid environment.

Security and Privacy in IoT-Cloud-Based e-Health Systems—A Comprehensive Review

When the Internet and other interconnected networks are used in a health system, it is referred to as “e-Health.” In this paper, we examined research studies from 2017–2020 to explore the utilization of intelligent techniques in health and its evolution over time, particularly the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and cloud computing. E-Health is defined as “the ability to seek, find, understand and appraise health information derived from electronic sources and acquired knowledge to properly solve or treat health problems. As a repository for health information as well as e-Health analysis, the Internet has the potential to protect consumers from harm and empower them to participate fully in informed health-related decision-making. Most importantly, high levels of e-Health integration mitigate the risk of encountering unreliable information on the Internet. Various research perspectives related to security and privacy within IoT-cloud-based e-Health systems are examined, with an emphasis on the opportunities, benefits and challenges of the implementation such systems. The combination of IoT-based e-Health systems integrated with intelligent systems such as cloud computing that provide smart objectives and applications is a promising future trend.

An Aggregate Signature Scheme Based on a Trapdoor Hash Function for the Internet of Things

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), it becomes challenging to ensure its security. Identity authentication and integrity verification can be achieved by secure hash functions and digital signature algorithms for IoT applications. In order to solve the issues of bandwidth limitation and computational efficiency of secure communication in IoT applications, an aggregate signature scheme based on multi- trapdoor hash function is proposed in this paper. Firstly, to prevent key exposition, based on the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP), we constructed a double trapdoor hash function (DTH) and proved its reliability. Secondly, the multi-trapdoor hash function (MTH) based on DTH is presented. Finally, an MTH-based aggregate signature scheme (MTH-AS) with constant signature length is proposed. Based on the assumption of ECDLP, the proposed scheme is proven unforgeable against adaptive chosen message attacks with the Forking Lemma. Different from the most signature schemes with bilinear mapping, the proposed scheme has higher computational efficiency and shorter aggregate signature length. Moreover, it is independent of the number of signers. Security analysis and performance evaluation has revealed that the proposed scheme is an ideal solution for secure IoT applications with limited computing power, storage capacity, or limited bandwidth, such as wireless sensor networks, vehicular ad hoc networks, or healthcare sensor networks.

A Strongly Unforgeable Certificateless Signature Scheme and Its Application in IoT Environments

With the widespread application of the Internet of Things (IoT), ensuring communication security for IoT devices is of considerable importance. Since IoT data are vulnerable to eavesdropping, tampering, forgery, and other attacks during an open network transmission, the integrity and authenticity of data are fundamental security requirements in the IoT. A certificateless signature (CLS) is a viable solution for providing data integrity, data authenticity, and identity identification in resource-constrained IoT devices. Therefore, designing a secure and efficient CLS scheme for IoT environments has become one of the main objectives of IoT security research. However, the existing CLS schemes rarely focus on strong unforgeability and replay attacks. Herein, we design a novel CLS scheme to protect the integrity and authenticity of IoT data. In addition to satisfying the strong unforgeability requirement, the proposed scheme also resists public key replacement attacks, malicious-but-passive key-generation-centre attacks, and replay attacks. Compared with other related CLS schemes without random oracles, our CLS scheme has a shorter private key, stronger security, and lower communication and computational costs.

A Strong Designated Verifier Proxy Re-Signature Scheme for IoT Environments

With the rapid popularization of the Internet of Things (IoT) in our daily lives, the communication security and identity privacy of IoT devices must be ensured. However, traditional authentication mechanisms utilized in IoT cannot completely ensure a user’s privacy when his/her messages are routed via an untrusted intermediate device. Strong designated-verifier proxy re-signature (SDVPRS) is a new cryptographic technology that combines the advantages of strong designated verifier signature and proxy re-signature. Therefore, SDVPRS is considered to be a better approach to maintain data integrity and protect the identity privacy of the signer in a resource-limited IoT device. Nevertheless, designing a secure SDVPRS scheme without random oracles is still a challenging task. In this paper, we mainly focus on such a construction by providing a new method. We first provide the formal definition of SDVPRS and its security model. Then, we present the first SDVPRS scheme, which is bidirectional, multi-use and non-transferable, and we prove its security under the standard complexity assumptions in the standard model. The analysis results show that our SDVPRS scheme can not only protect the privacy of the signer’s identity, but also provide non-delegatability for signature verification. We present an example of potential application to environmental monitoring systems using our SDVPRS scheme.

A Lightweight Continuous Authentication Protocol for the Internet of Things

Modern societies are moving toward an information-oriented environment. To gather and utilize information around people's modern life, tiny devices with all kinds of sensing devices and various sizes of gateways need to be deployed and connected with each other through the Internet or proxy-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Within this kind of Internet of Things (IoT) environment, how to authenticate each other between two communicating devices is a fundamental security issue. As a lot of IoT devices are powered by batteries and they need to transmit sensed data periodically, it is necessary for IoT devices to adopt a lightweight authentication protocol to reduce their energy consumption when a device wants to authenticate and transmit data to its targeted peer. In this paper, a lightweight continuous authentication protocol for sensing devices and gateway devices in general IoT environments is introduced. The concept of valid authentication time period is proposed to enhance robustness of authentication between IoT devices. To construct the proposed lightweight continuous authentication protocol, token technique and dynamic features of IoT devices are adopted in order to reach the design goals: the reduction of time consumption for consecutive authentications and energy saving for authenticating devices through by reducing the computation complexity during session establishment of continuous authentication. Security analysis is conducted to evaluate security strength of the proposed protocol. In addition, performance analysis has shown the proposed protocol is a strong competitor among existing protocols for device-to-device authentication in IoT environments.