G. P. Biswas

A more efficient and secure ID-based remote mutual authentication with key agreement scheme for mobile devices on elliptic curve cryptosystem

Recently, Yang and Chang proposed an identity-based remote login scheme using elliptic curve cryptography for the users of mobile devices. We have analyzed the security aspects of the Yang and Changs scheme and identified some security flaws. Also two improvements of the Yang and Changs scheme have been proposed recently, however, it has been found that the schemes have similar security flaws as in the Yang and Changs scheme. In order to remove the security pitfalls of the Yang and Chang and the subsequent schemes, we proposed an enhanced remote user mutual authentication scheme that uses elliptic curve cryptography and identity-based cryptosystem with three-way challenge-response handshake technique. It supports flawless mutual authentication of participants, agreement of session key and the leaked key revocation capability. In addition, the proposed scheme possesses low power consumption, low computation cost and better security attributes. As a result, the proposed scheme seems to be more practical and suitable for mobile users for secure Internet banking, online shopping, online voting, etc.

A secure light weight scheme for user authentication and key agreement in multi-gateway based wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks can be deployed in any attended or unattended environments like environmental monitoring, agriculture, military, health care etc., where the sensor nodes forward the sensing data to the gateway node. As the sensor node has very limited battery power and cannot be recharged after deployment, it is very important to design a secure, effective and light weight user authentication and key agreement protocol for accessing the sensed data through the gateway node over insecure networks. Most recently, Turkanovic et?al. proposed a light weight user authentication and key agreement protocol for accessing the services of the WSNs environment and claimed that the same protocol is efficient in terms of security and complexities than related existing protocols. In this paper, we have demonstrated several security weaknesses of the Turkanovic et?al. protocol. Additionally, we have also illustrated that the authentication phase of the Turkanovic et?al. is not efficient in terms of security parameters. In order to fix the above mentioned security pitfalls, we have primarily designed a novel architecture for the WSNs environment and basing upon which a proposed scheme has been presented for user authentication and key agreement scheme. The security validation of the proposed protocol has done by using BAN logic, which ensures that the protocol achieves mutual authentication and session key agreement property securely between the entities involved. Moreover, the proposed scheme has simulated using well popular AVISPA security tool, whose simulation results show that the protocol is SAFE under OFMC and CL-AtSe models. Besides, several security issues informally confirm that the proposed protocol is well protected in terms of relevant security attacks including the above mentioned security pitfalls. The proposed protocol not only resists the above mentioned security weaknesses, but also achieves complete security requirements including specially energy efficiency, user anonymity, mutual authentication and user-friendly password change phase. Performance comparison section ensures that the protocol is relatively efficient in terms of complexities. The security and performance analysis makes the system so efficient that the proposed protocol can be implemented in real-life application.

A Novel User Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Accessing Multi-Medical Server Usable in TMIS

Telecare Medical Information System (TMIS) makes an efficient and convenient connection between patient(s)/user(s) at home and doctor(s) at a clinical center. To ensure secure connection between the two entities (patient(s)/user(s), doctor(s)), user authentication is enormously important for the medical server. In this regard, many authentication protocols have been proposed in the literature only for accessing single medical server. In order to fix the drawbacks of the single medical server, we have primarily developed a novel architecture for accessing several medical services of the multi-medical server, where a user can directly communicate with the doctor of the medical server securely. Thereafter, we have developed a smart card based user authentication and key agreement security protocol usable for TMIS system using cryptographic one-way hash function. We have analyzed the security of our proposed authentication scheme through both formal and informal security analysis. Furthermore, we have simulated the proposed scheme for the formal security verification using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool and showed that the scheme is secure against the replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. The informal security analysis is also presented which confirms that the protocol has well security protection on the relevant security attacks. The security and performance comparison analysis confirm that the proposed protocol not only provides security protection on the above mentioned attacks, but it also achieves better complexities along with efficient login and password change phase.

Design of an anonymity-preserving three-factor authenticated key exchange protocol for wireless sensor networks

We observed that Farash et?al.s authentication protocol for WSN is susceptible to many security attacks.The protocol is also unable to preserve user anonymity.We designed an anonymity preserving authentication scheme for WSN.We analyze the security of the proposed protocol using AVISPA S/W.The proposed protocol is secure against active and passive attacks and more efficient than other protocols. Recently, Farash et?al. pointed out some security weaknesses of Turkanovic et?al.s protocol, which they extended to enhance its security. However, we found some problems with Farash et?al.s protocol, such as a known session-specific temporary information attack, an off-line password-guessing attack using a stolen-smartcard, a new-smartcard-issue attack, and a user-impersonation attack. Additionally, their protocol cannot preserve user-anonymity, and the secret key of the gateway node is insecure. The main intention of this paper is to design an efficient and robust smartcard-based user authentication and session key agreement protocol for wireless sensor networks that use the Internet of Things. We analyze its security, proving that our protocol not only overcomes the weaknesses of Farash et?al.s protocol, but also preserves additional security attributes, such as the identity change and smartcard revocation phases. Moreover, the results of a simulation using AVISPA show that our protocol is secure against active and passive attacks. The security and performance of our work are also compared with a number of related protocols.

A pairing-free identity-based authenticated group key agreement protocol for imbalanced mobile networks

The secure and reliable group communication gains popularity in imbalanced mobile networks due to the increase demand of the group-oriented applications such as teleconferences, collaborative workspaces, etc. For acquiring the group security objectives, many authenticated group key agreement (AGKA) protocols exploiting the public key infrastructure have been proposed, which require additional processing and storage space for validation of the public keys and the certificates. In addition, the most of the AGKA protocols are implemented using bilinear pairing and a map-to-point (MTP) hash function. The relative computation cost of the bilinear pairing is approximately two to three times more than the elliptic curve point multiplication (ECPM) and the MTP function has higher computation cost than an ECPM. Due to the limitation of communication bandwidth, computation ability, and storage space of the low-power mobile devices, these protocols are not suitable especially for insecure imbalanced mobile networks. To cope with the aforementioned problems, in this paper, we proposed a pairing-free identity-based authenticated group key agreement protocol using elliptic curve cryptosystem. It is found that the proposed protocol, compared with the related protocols, not only improves the computational efficiencies, but also enhances the security features.

A Secure Three-Factor User Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for TMIS With User Anonymity

Telecare medical information system (TMIS) makes an efficient and convenient connection between patient(s)/user(s) and doctor(s) over the insecure internet. Therefore, data security, privacy and user authentication are enormously important for accessing important medical data over insecure communication. Recently, many user authentication protocols for TMIS have been proposed in the literature and it has been observed that most of the protocols cannot achieve complete security requirements. In this paper, we have scrutinized two (Mishra et al., Xu et al.) remote user authentication protocols using smart card and explained that both the protocols are suffering against several security weaknesses. We have then presented three-factor user authentication and key agreement protocol usable for TMIS, which fix the security pitfalls of the above mentioned schemes. The informal cryptanalysis makes certain that the proposed protocol provides well security protection on the relevant security attacks. Furthermore, the simulator AVISPA tool confirms that the protocol is secure against active and passive attacks including replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. The security functionalities and performance comparison analysis confirm that our protocol not only provide strong protection on security attacks, but it also achieves better complexities along with efficient login and password change phase as well as session key verification property.

Design and Analysis of Bilinear Pairing Based Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol Usable in Multi-server Environment

Abstract With the increasing popularity and demand for various applications, the internet user accesses remote server by performing remote user authentication protocol using smart card over the insecure channel. In order to resist insider attack, most of the users remember a set of identity and password for accessing different application servers. Therefore, remembering set of identity and password is an extra overhead to the user. To avoid the mentioned shortcoming, many remote user authentication and key agreement protocols for multi-server architecture have been proposed in the literature. Recently, Hsieh–Leu proposed an improve protocol of Liao et al. scheme and claimed that the improve protocol is applicable for practical implementation. However, through careful analysis, we found that Hsieh–Leu scheme is still vulnerable to user anonymity, password guessing attack, server masquerading attack and the password change phase is inefficient. Therefore, the main aim of this paper was to design a bilinear pairing based three factors remote user authentication scheme using smart card for providing security weaknesses free protocol. In order to validate security proof of the proposed protocol, this paper uses BAN logic which ensures that the same protocol achieves mutual authentication and session key agreement property securely. Furthermore, this paper also informally illustrates that the proposed protocol is well protected against all the relevant security attacks. The performance analysis and comparison with other schemes are also made, and it has been found that the proposed protocol achieves complete security requirements with comparatively lesser complexities.

An Improved RSA Based User Authentication and Session Key Agreement Protocol Usable in TMIS

Recently, Giri et al.’s proposed a RSA cryptosystem based remote user authentication scheme for telecare medical information system and claimed that the protocol is secure against all the relevant security attacks. However, we have scrutinized the Giri et al.’s protocol and pointed out that the protocol is not secure against off-line password guessing attack, privileged insider attack and also suffers from anonymity problem. Moreover, the extension of password guessing attack leads to more security weaknesses. Therefore, this protocol needs improvement in terms of security before implementing in real-life application. To fix the mentioned security pitfalls, this paper proposes an improved scheme over Giri et al.’s scheme, which preserves user anonymity property. We have then simulated the proposed protocol using widely-accepted AVISPA tool which ensures that the protocol is SAFE under OFMC and CL-AtSe models, that means the same protocol is secure against active and passive attacks including replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. The informal cryptanalysis has been also presented, which confirmed that the proposed protocol provides well security protection on the relevant security attacks. The performance analysis section compares the proposed protocol with other existing protocols in terms of security and it has been observed that the protocol provides more security and achieves additional functionalities such as user anonymity and session key verification.

A light weight authentication protocol for IoT-enabled devices in distributed Cloud Computing environment

Abstract With the widespread popularity and usage of Internet-enabled devices, Internet of things has become one of the most popular techniques of the modern era. However, data generated from various smart devices in IoT environment is one of the biggest concerns. To process such a large database repository generated from different types of devices in IoT environment, Cloud Computing (CC) has emerged as a key technology. But, the private information from IoT devices is stored in distributed private cloud server so that only legitimate users are allowed to access the sensitive information from the cloud server. Keeping focus on all these points, this article first shows security vulnerabilities of the multi-server cloud environment of the protocols proposed by Xue et al. and Chuang et al. Then, we propose an architecture which is applicable for distributed cloud environment and based on it, an authentication protocol using smartcard has been proposed, where the registered user can access all private information securely from all the private cloud servers. To strengthen the proposed protocol, we have used AVISPA tool and BAN logic model in this article. Moreover, an informal cryptanalysis confirms that the protocol is protected against all possible security threats. The performance analysis and comparison confirm that the proposed protocol is superior than its counterparts with respect to various parameters.

Cryptanalysis and Enhancement of Anonymity Preserving Remote User Mutual Authentication and Session Key Agreement Scheme for E-Health Care Systems

The E-health care systems employ IT infrastructure for maximizing health care resources utilization as well as providing flexible opportunities to the remote patient. Therefore, transmission of medical data over any public networks is necessary in health care system. Note that patient authentication including secure data transmission in e-health care system is critical issue. Although several user authentication schemes for accessing remote services are available, their security analysis show that none of them are free from relevant security attacks. We reviewed Das et al.’s scheme and demonstrated their scheme lacks proper protection against several security attacks such as user anonymity, off-line password guessing attack, smart card theft attack, user impersonation attack, server impersonation attack, session key discloser attack. In order to overcome the mentioned security pitfalls, this paper proposes an anonymity preserving remote patient authentication scheme usable in E-health care systems. We then validated the security of the proposed scheme using BAN logic that ensures secure mutual authentication and session key agreement. We also presented the experimental results of the proposed scheme using AVISPA software and the results ensure that our scheme is secure under OFMC and CL-AtSe models. Moreover, resilience of relevant security attacks has been proved through both formal and informal security analysis. The performance analysis and comparison with other schemes are also made, and it has been found that the proposed scheme overcomes the security drawbacks of the Das et al.’s scheme and additionally achieves extra security requirements.