L. Jegatha Deborah

Computationally Efficient Privacy Preserving Anonymous Mutual and Batch Authentication Schemes for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In the near future, it is envisioned that vehicular Ad hoc networks (VANETs) will be making use of long-distance communication techniques, such as cellular networks and Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), to get instant Internet access for making the communication between vehicles and fixed road side infrastructure. Moreover, VANETs will also make use of short-distance communication methods, such as Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) and Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) to perform short range communication between vehicles in an ad hoc manner. This Internet connection can provide facility to other vehicles to send traffic related messages, collisions, infotainment messages other useful safety alerts. In such a scenario, providing authentication between vehicle to infrastructure and vehicle to vehicle is a challenging task. In order to provide this facility, in this paper, we propose a computationally efficient privacy preserving anonymous authentication scheme based on the use of anonymous certificates and signatures for VANETs in making them an important component of Internet of Things (IoT) and the development of smart cities. Even though there are several existing schemes available to provide such anonymous authentication based on anonymous certificates and signatures in VANETs, the existing schemes suffer from high computational cost in the certificate revocation list (CRL) checking process and in the certificate and the signature verification process. Therefore, it is not possible to meet the requirement of verifying a large number of messages per second in VANETs which would lead to increased message loss. Hence, we use a computationally efficient anonymous mutual authentication scheme to validate the message source as well as to ensure the integrity of messages along with a conditional tracking mechanism to trace the real identity of misbehaving vehicles and revoke them from VANET in the case of dispute. In this paper, we also introduce an efficient anonymous batch authentication protocol to be used in IoT for Road Side Units (RSUs) to authenticate multiple vehicles simultaneously rather than one after the other such that the total authentication time can be dramatically reduced. This proposed scheme is implemented and the performance analysis shows that our scheme is more efficient in terms of certificate and signature verification cost, while preserving conditional privacy in VANETs.

Computationally efficient privacy preserving authentication and key distribution techniques for vehicular ad hoc networks

The incorporation of electronics by embedding the relevant sensors in the physical devices in home and office, vehicles of all types, buildings in the smart cities and in all possible spheres of life form a network of devices termed as internet of things (IoT). It is being realized that vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) which are responsible for the reliable and secure communication among vehicles is a primary area of research in IoT and hence ensuring security in this area is essential. Thus, this work introduces a novel approach to improve the existing authentication support to VANETs. In this proposed framework, first an anonymous authentication approach for preserving the privacy is proposed which not only performs the vehicle user’s anonymous authentication but preserves the message integrity of the transmitting messages as well. Although many anonymous authentication schemes have been proposed in VANETs until now, the existing schemes suffer from a high computation cost during the signature and certificate verification process which leads to delayed authentication. Consequently, the vehicles and roadside units (RSUs) cannot authenticate more number of vehicles per second in VANETs. Second, an efficient anonymous group key distribution protocol is proposed in this paper for securely distributing the group key to the group of vehicles in the communication range of an RSU. The RSUs can send location based information to the group of vehicles in a secure manner using this group key. Experimental analysis portrays that the results of this new privacy preserving anonymous authentication and key management schemes are promising and efficient with regard to signature verification cost and computational cost in comparison with the existing schemes.

An efficient secure communication for healthcare system using wearable devices

Abstract In the present healthcare scenario, mobile phones play a vital role in performing secure text communications between different entities such as doctors, patients, hospitals, ambulances and other healthcare systems. Therefore, an efficient alert system for sending the private and confidential SMS messages has been proposed in this research work to send SMS alerts to healthcare entities from a heart patient. Very few research works have been proposed for multicast communication in SMS and each research work exposes some drawbacks as well. Since the proposed approach needs only one mod operation, the computational overhead of the proposed protocol is very low. Thus, the main advantage of this proposed work is that the messages are sent in a computationally efficient way and the experimental results confirm that the proposed work ensures end-to-end security with lower computational and communication overheads than the recent works in the literature.

A new SmartSMS protocol for secure SMS communication in m-health environment

Abstract In the present m-health scenario, a patient and a doctor may engage in an SMS conversation regarding the sensitive medical information about the body of a patient and the corresponding treatment for it. Hence, designing a secure protocol for SMS communication for this context of m-health has become mandatory. Though a number of protocols have been defined in the literature, each protocol exposes some drawbacks which makes it unsuitable for the secure SMS communication. Protocols proposed earlier such as SMSSec, PK-SIM have more computation and communication overheads. Despite being secure, EasySMS protocol suffers from Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Thus, an efficient protocol called SmartSMS to ensure the end-to-end secure SMS communication in m-health environment while being resistant to attacks has been proposed in this work. The main contribution of this proposed SmartSMS protocol is to minimize the computational complexity of the Mobile Station (MS) and the Authentication Server (AS). In addition, the proposed work also minimizes the communication complexity involved in secure SMS communications. Through extensive simulations, it has been proved that the proposed protocol shows lower computational and communication overheads compared to other protocols in the literature and shows promising results.

CPAV: Computationally Efficient Privacy Preserving Anonymous Authentication Scheme for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we propose a computationally efficient privacy preserving anonymous authentication scheme based on the use of anonymous certificates and signatures for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Even though there were many existing schemes to provide anonymous authentication based on anonymous certificates and signatures in VANETs, the existing schemes suffer from high computation cost in the certificate revocation list (CRL) checking process and in the certificate and the signature verification process. Therefore, it is not possible to verify a large number of messages per second in VANETs which would lead to high message loss. Hence, we use a computationally efficient anonymous mutual authentication mechanism to validate the message source and anonymous signatures in order to guarantee the integrity of messages. Moreover, a conditional tracking mechanism is introduced to trace the real identity of vehicles and revoke them from VANET in the case of dispute. This proposed scheme is implemented and performance analysis shows that our scheme is more efficient in terms of certificate and signature verification delay, while keeping conditional privacy in VANETs.

Key management and key distribution for secure group communication in mobile and cloud network

Abstract With the computing systems becoming more and more pervasive and ubiquitous due to the invention of cloud computing and mobile phone based applications, secure data transmission is the pressing need for a real time perspective of the technologies. Examples of the need for secure key management and distribution environments include secure transmission of health related SMS, telecare medicine provisioning for critical applications such as heart disorders, secure agriculture monitoring, data transmission in surveillance scenarios, secure military networks, etc. In the context of key exchange for secure group communication, the computational complexities need to be addressed in particular due to the advent of resource constrained mobile phones, sensors and other embedded devices. This special issue introduces some of the novel approaches for enabling secure group communication in the contexts related to cloud and mobile computing.

Attacks on the Anti-collusion Data Sharing Scheme for Dynamic Groups in the Cloud

As the hype of the evolution of cloud computing has become a real possibility in the modern day outsourcing scenarios, users can benefit from cloud computing by uploading documents into the cloud servers for sharing it among a group of legitimate users. But, though cloud is a viable present day option for elastic storage facilities, its security is still a grave concern. Hence, in order to improve the secure communication among group members, Zhu and Jiang have proposed a protocol and claimed that key distribution to the group users can be done without any secure communication channels. They have claimed that their scheme is resistant to collusion attack and all the other attacks, thereby ensuring forward and backward secrecies as well. Firstly, in this research work, after extensive analysis, we have identified several issues in the protocol proposed by Zhu and Jiang which make it vulnerable to various attacks. Secondly, we have proved that an attacker can use the man-in-the-middle attack and break the protocol thereby getting the secret keys shared between the group manager and the group user. Thirdly, we have given enough proof that the scheme is vulnerable to message modification attack too. Finally, we claim that the earlier proposed protocol is not secure and a new protocol with improved security is the need of the hour.

A Secure Gesture Based Authentication Scheme to Unlock the Smartphones

In the recent times, the smart phones have become versatile that they are used for sensitive applications such as m-banking, m-commerce, m-governance, m-health, digital marketing, SMS and have become a vital gadget to share posts in social networking applications such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and others. It is also used for online gaming, surfing, chatting and also used for storing the personal information like photos, videos, documents and other important files. In this scenario, it is no surprise that the basic demand for utilizing a smart phone is secure authentication. Though a number of authentication schemes have been proposed in the literature through PIN numbers, passwords and patterns, they are susceptible for shoulder surfing or smudging attacks. Thus, combing gestures with such authentication schemes prove to be more successful in the present times and hence a new kind of pattern has been proposed with essential gestures such as finger pressure and inclination of the phone while it is being unlocked. This work is different from the previous works in two dimensions. First, the proposed pattern is secure against both shoulder surfing and smudging attacks. Second, the computational complexity of authentication scheme has been reduced. Through extensive experiments it can be proved that this work outperforms many works in the recent literature and hence it would be an ideal candidate for the secure authentication of smart phones.