A Survey of Authentication in Internet of Things-Enabled Healthcare Systems

The Internet of medical things (IoMT) provides an ecosystem in which to connect humans, devices, sensors, and systems and improve healthcare services through modern technologies. The IoMT has been around for quite some time, and many architectures/systems have been proposed to exploit its true potential. Healthcare through the Internet of things (IoT) is envisioned to be efficient, accessible, and secure in all possible ways. Even though the personalized health service through IoT is not limited to time or location, many associated challenges have emerged at an exponential pace. With the rapid shift toward IoT-enabled healthcare systems, there is an extensive need to examine possible threats and propose countermeasures. Authentication is one of the key processes in a system's security, where an individual, device, or another system is validated for its identity. This survey explores authentication techniques proposed for IoT-enabled healthcare systems. The exploration of the literature is categorized with respect to the technology deployment region, as in cloud, fog, and edge. A taxonomy of attacks, comprehensive analysis, and comparison of existing authentication techniques opens up possible future directions and paves the road ahead.

A Novel Privacy Preserving Scheme for Smart Grid-Based Home Area Networks

Despite the benefits of smart grids, concerns about security and privacy arise when a large number of heterogeneous devices communicate via a public network. A novel privacy-preserving method for smart grid-based home area networks (HAN) is proposed in this research. To aggregate data from diverse household appliances, the proposed approach uses homomorphic Paillier encryption, Chinese remainder theorem, and one-way hash function. The privacy in Internet of things (IoT)-enabled smart homes is one of the major concerns of the research community. In the proposed scheme, the sink node not only aggregates the data but also enables the early detection of false data injection and replay attacks. According to the security analysis, the proposed approach offers adequate security. The smart grid distributes power and facilitates a two-way communications channel that leads to transparency and developing trust.

GRA-PIN: A Graphical and PIN-Based Hybrid Authentication Approach for Smart Devices

In many smart devices and numerous digital applications, authentication mechanisms are widely used to validate the legitimacy of users’ identification. As a result of the increased use of mobile devices, most people tend to save sensitive and secret information over such devices. Personal Identification Number (PIN)-based and alphanumeric passwords are simple to remember, but at the same time, they are vulnerable to hackers. Being difficult to guess and more user-friendly, graphical passwords have grown in popularity as an alternative to all such textual passwords. This paper describes an innovative, hybrid, and much more robust user authentication approach, named GRA-PIN (GRAphical and PIN-based), which combines the merits of both graphical and pin-based techniques. The feature of simple arithmetic operations (addition and subtraction) is incorporated in the proposed scheme, through which random passwords are generated for each login attempt. In the study, we have conducted a comparative study between the GRA-PIN scheme with existing PIN-based and pattern-based (swipe-based) authentications approaches using the standard Software Usability Scale (SUS). The usability score of GRA-PIN was analyzed to be as high as 94%, indicating that it is more reliable and user friendly. Furthermore, the security of the proposed scheme was challenged through an experiment wherein three different attackers, having a complete understanding of the proposed scheme, attempted to crack the technique via shoulder surfing, guessing, and camera attack, but they were unsuccessful.

vTrust: An IoT-Enabled Trust-Based Secure Wireless Energy Sharing Mechanism for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is a modern concept that enables network nodes to communicate and disseminate information. VANET is a heterogeneous network, due to which the VANET environment exposes to have various security and privacy challenges. In the future, the automobile industry will progress towards assembling electric vehicles containing energy storage batteries employing these resources to travel as an alternative to gasoline/petroleum. These vehicles may have the capability to share their energy resources upon the request of vehicles having limited energy resources. In this article, we have proposed a trust management-based secure energy sharing mechanism, named vTrust, which computes the trust degree of nodes to authenticate nodes. The proposed mechanism is a multi-leveled centralized approach utilizing both the infrastructure and vehicles to sustain a secure environment. The proposed vTrust can aggregate and propagate the degree of trust to enhance scalability. The node that requests to obtain the energy resources may have to maintain a specified level of trust threshold for earning resources. We have also evaluated the performance of the proposed mechanism against several existing approaches and determine that the proposed mechanism can efficiently manage a secure environment during resource sharing by maintaining average malicious nodes detection of 91.3% and average successful energy sharing rate of 89.5%, which is significantly higher in comparison to the existing approaches.

AgriTrust-A Trust Management Approach for Smart Agriculture in Cloud-based Internet of Agriculture Things

Internet of Things (IoT) provides a diverse platform to automate things where smart agriculture is one of the most promising concepts in the field of Internet of Agriculture Things (IoAT). Due to the requirements of more processing power for computations and predictions, the concept of Cloud-based smart agriculture is proposed for autonomic systems. This is where digital innovation and technology helps to improve the quality of life in the area of urbanization expansion. For the integration of cloud in smart agriculture, the system is shown to have security and privacy challenges, and most significantly, the identification of malicious and compromised nodes along with a secure transmission of information between sensors, cloud, and base station (BS). The identification of malicious and compromised node among soil sensors communicating with the BS is a notable challenge in the BS to cloud communications. The trust management mechanism is proposed as one of the solutions providing a lightweight approach to identify these nodes. In this article, we have proposed a novel trust management mechanism to identify malicious and compromised nodes by utilizing trust parameters. The trust mechanism is an event-driven process that computes trust based on the pre-defined time interval and utilizes the previous trust degree to develop an absolute trust degree. The system also maintains the trust degree of a BS and cloud service providers using distinct approaches. We have also performed extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism against several potential attacks. In addition, this research helps to create friendlier environments and efficient agricultural productions for the migration of people to the cities.

An Energy Efficient and Secure IoT-Based WSN Framework: An Application to Smart Agriculture

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have demonstrated research and developmental interests in numerous fields, like communication, agriculture, industry, smart health, monitoring, and surveillance. In the area of agriculture production, IoT-based WSN has been used to observe the yields condition and automate agriculture precision using various sensors. These sensors are deployed in the agricultural environment to improve production yields through intelligent farming decisions and obtain information regarding crops, plants, temperature measurement, humidity, and irrigation systems. However, sensors have limited resources concerning processing, energy, transmitting, and memory capabilities that can negatively impact agriculture production. Besides efficiency, the protection and security of these IoT-based agricultural sensors are also important from malicious adversaries. In this article, we proposed an IoT-based WSN framework as an application to smart agriculture comprising different design levels. Firstly, agricultural sensors capture relevant data and determine a set of cluster heads based on multi-criteria decision function. Additionally, the strength of the signals on the transmission links is measured while using signal to noise ratio (SNR) to achieve consistent and efficient data transmissions. Secondly, security is provided for data transmission from agricultural sensors towards base stations (BS) while using the recurrence of the linear congruential generator. The simulated results proved that the proposed framework significantly enhanced the communication performance as an average of 13.5% in the network throughput, 38.5% in the packets drop ratio, 13.5% in the network latency, 16% in the energy consumption, and 26% in the routing overheads for smart agriculture, as compared to other solutions.