Abstract

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are increasingly commonplace, partly due to the popularity of electric vehicles and the digitalization of cities. Data collected and shared in VANETs include traffic-related information, such as those relating to real-time traffic situations and road works. In recent times, there has been a trend of moving away from a centralized approach to a decentralized approach, for example, using Blockchain to facilitate secure data sharing and traceability of critical information. Hence, in this paper, we comprehensively survey the existing literature on blockchain-based VANET systems, focusing on the application of different blockchain technologies in different contexts, as well as the associated challenges and research opportunities.

Abstract

The recent surge in development of smart homes and smart cities can be observed in many developed countries. While the idea to control devices that are in home (embedded with the Internet of Things (IoT) smart devices) by the user who is outside the home might sound fancy, but it comes with a lot of potential threats. There can be many attackers who will be trying to take advantage of this. So, there is a need for designing a secure scheme which will be able to distinguish among genuine/authorized users of the system and attackers. And knowing about the details of when and what IoT devices are used by the user, the attacker can trace the daily activities of user and can plan an attack accordingly. Thus, the designed security scheme should guarantee confidentiality, anonymity and un-traceability. Most of the schemes proposed in the literature are either non-blockchain based which involves inherent problems of storing data in a single-server or assuming weaker attack models. In this work, we propose a novel scheme based on blockchain technology, assuming a stronger Canetti and Krawczyk (CK)-threat model. Through the formal and informal security, and comparative analysis, we show that the proposed scheme provides a superior security and more functionality features, with less communication cost and comparable computational cost as compared to other competent schemes. Moreover, the blockchain based simulation study on the proposed scheme has been conducted to show its feasibility in real-life application. Keywords: Internet of things (IoT); smart home; ubiquitous computing; blockchain; security

Abstract

Blockchain technology has a significant application in smart farming due to its immutability, decentralization and transparency properties. Data exchanged in an Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart agriculture can be used to remotely monitor the fields and regulate the crop needs for optimal productivity. However, such data is sensitive to several attacks, such as man-in- the-middle attack, replay attack, ephemeral secret leakage attack, impersonation attack and denial of service (DoS) attack. The existing solutions to counter these attacks are either costly or lack significant security features. To mitigate these issues, we design a novel lightweight blockchain based authentication scheme based on a fully decentralized and distributed architecture. The designed scheme is subjected to a rigorous security analysis and also a formal security verification using the widely-used Auto- mated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool, and it is shown that the scheme is robust and secure against various passive and active attacks. A detailed comparative analysis shows that the proposed scheme has the low communication cost and significantly lower computation cost while satisfying all the security and functionality features as compared to those for other existing relevant schemes. Index Terms—Smart agriculture, authentication, blockchain technology, Internet of Things (IoT), security.

Abstract

Smart transportation or Internet of Vehicles (IoV)-enabled transportation extends the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication network. Smart transportation is a real-time application that helps enhance driving aids with the help of vehicle’s Artificial Intelligence (AI), awareness of other vehicles, and their actions giving out the best on-road experience. Smart transportation also protects life and saves cost by avoiding life-threatening instances like collisions, accidents, and thefts on the road. Since the communication among various entities involved in the IoV environment is via an open channel (e.g., vehicles, pedestrians, fleet management systems, and roadside infrastructure), it allows a passive/active adversary to intercept, modify, delete, or even insert fake information during communication. It is then a severe concern for the vehicles

Abstract

Over the last few years, with the massive growth of smartphone technology and mobile Internet, the use of vari- ous online social networks (OSNs) have increased rapidly. This ever-growing use of social networks leverages cyber-attackers to exploit various phishing schemes, spoofed accounts, and other threats to steal users’ credentials. Phishing is an online crime that employs both technical subterfuge and social engineering to steal consumers’ personal identity, financial account credentials, and other sensitive information. In general, a phishing attack is carried out by the exercise of sending fraudulent communications (like a fake email with harmful uniform resource locators), that pretends to come from a reputable source. The problem of designing user authentication protocol for mitigating phishing attacks in OSNs is a challenging research problem. In this article, we propose a secure and lightweight cryptography-based authentication scheme, called authentication scheme for phishing attack (ASPA)-mobile online social network (mOSN), that provides resistance to phishing and other related attacks in OSNs. The security of the proposed scheme is explained using both informal security analysis and formal security analysis through the widely recognized real-or- random model and ProVerif simulation tool. Finally, we compare the security, functionality, computation, and communication costs of the proposed ASPA-mOSN with related schemes. The compar- ison results show that ASPA-mOSN outperforms other existing competing schemes. Index Terms—Authentication, mobile online social networks (mOSN), phishing attacks, random oracle, security

Abstract

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a unification of smart healthcare devices, tools, and software, which connect various patients and other users to the healthcare information system through the networking technology. It further reduces unnecessary hospital visits and the burden on healthcare systems by connecting the patients to their healthcare experts (i.e., doctors) and allows secure transmission of healthcare data over an insecure channel (e.g., the Internet). Since Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a great impact on the performance and usability of an information system, it is important to include its modules in a healthcare information system, which will be very helpful for the prediction of some phenomena, such as chances of getting a heart attack and possibility of a tumor, from the collected and analysed healthcare data. To mitigate these issues, in this paper, a new AI-enabled lightweight, secure communication scheme for an IoMT environment has been designed and named as ASCP-IoMT, in short. The security analysis of ASCP-IoMT is performed in different ways, such as an informal way and a formal way (through the random oracle model). ASCP-IoMT performs better than other similar schemes and provides superior security with extra functionality features as compared those for the existing state of art solutions. A practical implementation of ASCP-IoMT is also performed in order to measure its impact on various network performance parameters. The end to end delay values of ASCP-IoMT are 0.01587, 0.07440 and 0.17097 seconds and the throughput values of ASCP-IoMT are 5.05, 10.88 and 16.41 bits per second (bps) under the different considered cases, respectively. For AI-based Big data analytics phase, the values of computation time (seconds) for decision tree, support vector machine (SVM), and logistic regression are measured as 0.19, 0.23, and 0.27, respectively. Moreover, the different values of accuracy for decision tree, SVM and logistic regression are 84.24%, 87.57%, and 85.20%, respectively. From these values, it is clear that decision tree method requires less time than the other considered techniques, whereas accuracy is high in case of SVM.

Abstract

Fog computing-based Internet of Things (IoT) architecture is useful for various types of delay efficient net- work communications and services, like digital healthcare. However, there are privacy and security issues with the fog computing-based healthcare systems, which can further increase the risk of leakage of sensitive healthcare data. Therefore, a secu- rity mechanism, such as access control for fog computing-based healthcare systems, is needed to protect its data against various potential attacks. Moreover, the blockchain technology can be used to solve the digital healthcare’s data integrity related problems. The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) further makes the system more effective in case of prediction of health related diseases. In this paper, an AI-enabled secure communication mechanism in fog computing-based healthcare system (in short, AISCM-FH) has been proposed. The security analysis of the proposed AISCM-FH is provided using the standard random oracle model and also with the heuristic (non-mathematical) security analysis. A pragmatic study determines the impact of the proposed AISCM-FH on key performance indicators. Moreover, we include a detailed performance comparison of AISCM-FH with other relevant existing schemes to show that it has low communication and computation costs, and provides superior security and extra functionality attributes as compared to those for other competing existing approaches.

Abstract

Sustainable smart healthcare applications are those in which health services can be provided to remotely located patients through the Internet without placing extra burden on environmental resources. They should be operated with minimum power consumption using biodegradable, recyclable, and environmentally friendly healthcare equipment and products. In an Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)-enabled sustainable smart healthcare environment, all the health services are capable of producing informative data whenever some raw information is provided as the input or are capable of performing work on their own with less intervention from humans. As a result, they provide great advantages over the traditional healthcare system. As sustainable smart healthcare devices are operated through the Internet, it is possible that they could be attacked by various hackers. To mitigate these issues, in this paper, we propose a new access control along with a key-establishment mechanism for a sustainable smart healthcare system. The results of the security analysis showed that the proposed scheme was highly robust against a variety of passive and active attacks. In comparison to existing competing schemes, the proposed scheme is lightweight, as well as delivers high security and additional functionality. Finally, a practical demonstration of the proposed scheme is provided to show its impact on the key network performance parameters. Keywords: sustainability; smart healthcare; Internet of Medical Things (IoMT); authentication; security

Abstract

The emergence of contemporary technologies like cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the trends in the cyber world to serve humanity. There are plenty of applications in which they are being used, especially in smart cities and their constituents, Maritime Transportation System (MTS) is one of them. The IoT-enabled MTS has the potential to entertain the growing challenges of modern-day ship transportation. Secure real-time data access from numerous smart IoT devices is the most critical and crucial exercise for Big Data acquisition in IoT-enabled MTS. Therefore, we have developed a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) based authenticated key agreement solution to deal with this challenge. This solution enables the mobile user and IoT node to mutually authenticate each other via Cloud-Gateway before real-time data exchange and transmission in IoT-enabled MTS. The use of PUF in our solution brings invincibility against physical security threats. An inclusive security analysis under the assumption of the specified threat model is carried out to substantiate the security resilience of our solution. The conduct of our solution is realized through security features, communication, and computation cost and It has been observed that our solution achieves efficiency of 37.3% and 9.7% in communication and computation overhead, respectively. Moreover, the network performance effectiveness of our solution is demonstrated

Abstract

Medical image security includes copyright protection, authentication, data integrity and confidentiality simultaneously. In this article, a new robust and fragile medical image security scheme has been introduced. The Beddington, Free and Lawton (BFL) map and the Hénon map based image encryption scheme is brought out for confidentiality. Further, a Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT)-based image watermarking scheme is developed for copyright protection, authentication and data integrity. The proposed scheme is essentially robust and retrievable in terms of the watermark; however, it is highly sensitive and irretrievable with reference to the host image. The scheme separates the host image in Region of Interest (ROI) and Region of Non-Interest (RONI) parts, and it embeds the encoded message inside the RONI part. In addituon, the proposed scheme does not need any side information for message