Abstract

Recent advanced technology enables the telecare medicine information system (TMIS) for the patients to gain the health monitoring facility at home and also to access medical services over the Internet of mobile networks. Several remote user authentication schemes have been proposed in the literature for TMIS. However, most of them are either insecure against various known attacks or they are inefficient. Recently, Tan proposed an efficient user anonymity preserving three-factor authentication scheme for TMIS. In this paper, we show that though Tan’s scheme is efficient, it has several security drawbacks such as (1) it fails to provide proper authentication during the login phase, (2) it fails to provide correct updation of password and biometric of a user during the password and biometric update phase, and (3) it fails to protect against replay attack. In addition, Tan’s scheme lacks the formal security analysis and verification. Later, Arshad and Nikooghadam also pointed out some security flaws in Tan’s scheme and then presented an improvement on Tan’s s scheme. However, we show that Arshad and Nikooghadam’s scheme is still insecure against the privileged-insider attack through the stolen smart-card attack, and it also lacks the formal security analysis and verification. In order to withstand those security loopholes found in both Tan’s scheme, and Arshad and Nikooghadam’s scheme, we aim to propose an effective and more secure three-factor remote user authentication scheme for TMIS. Our scheme provides the user anonymity property. Through the rigorous informal and formal security analysis using random oracle models and the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool, we show that our scheme is secure against various known attacks, including the replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. Furthermore, our scheme is also efficient as compared to other related schemes.Recent advanced technology enables the telecare medicine information system (TMIS) for the patients to gain the health monitoring facility at home and also to access medical services over the Internet of mobile networks. Several remote user authentication schemes have been proposed in the literature for TMIS. However, most of them are either insecure against various known attacks or they are inefficient. Recently, Tan proposed an efficient user anonymity preserving three-factor authentication scheme for TMIS. In this paper, we show that though Tan’s scheme is efficient, it has several security drawbacks such as (1) it fails to provide proper authentication during the login phase, (2) it fails to provide correct updation of password and biometric of a user during the password and biometric update phase, and (3) it fails to protect against replay attack. In addition, Tan’s scheme lacks the formal security analysis and verification. Later, Arshad and Nikooghadam also pointed out some security flaws in Tan’s scheme and then presented an improvement on Tan’s s scheme. However, we show that Arshad and Nikooghadam’s scheme is still insecure against the privileged-insider attack through the stolen smart-card attack, and it also lacks the formal security analysis and verification. In order to withstand those security loopholes found in both Tan’s scheme, and Arshad and Nikooghadam’s scheme, we aim to propose an effective and more secure three-factor remote user authentication scheme for TMIS. Our scheme provides the user anonymity property. Through the rigorous informal and formal security analysis using random oracle models and the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool, we show that our scheme is secure against various known attacks, including the replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. Furthermore, our scheme is also efficient as compared to other related schemes.

Abstract

Several biometric-based remote user authentication schemes using smart cards have been proposed in the literature in order to improve the security weaknesses in user authentication system. In 2012, An proposed an enhanced biometric-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards. It was claimed that the proposed scheme is secure against the user impersonation attack, the server masquerading attack, the password guessing attack, and the insider attack and provides mutual authentication between the user and the server. In this paper, we first analyze the security of An’s scheme and we show that this scheme has three serious security flaws in the design of the scheme: (i) flaw in user’s biometric verification during the login phase, (ii) flaw in user’s password verification during the login and authentication phases, and (iii) flaw in user’s password change locally at any time by the user. Due to these security flaws, An’s scheme cannot support mutual authentication between the user and the server. Further, we show that An’s scheme cannot prevent insider attack. In order to remedy the security weaknesses found in An’s scheme, we propose a new robust and secure anonymous biometric-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards. Through the informal and formal security analysis, we show that our scheme is secure against all possible known attacks including the attacks found in An’s scheme. The simulation results of our scheme using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool ensure that our scheme is secure against passive and active attacks. In addition, our scheme is also comparable in terms of the communication and computational overheads with An’s scheme and other related existing schemes. As a result, our scheme is more appropriate for practical applications compared to other approaches.

Abstract

An integrated EPR (Electronic Patient Record) information system of all the patients provides the medical institutions and the academia with most of the patients’ information in details for them to make corrective decisions and clinical decisions in order to maintain and analyze patients’ health. In such system, the illegal access must be restricted and the information from theft during transmission over the insecure Internet must be prevented. Lee et al. proposed an efficient password-based remote user authentication scheme using smart card for the integrated EPR information system. Their scheme is very efficient due to usage of one-way hash function and bitwise exclusive-or (XOR) operations. However, in this paper, we show that though their scheme is very efficient, their scheme has three security weaknesses such as (1) it has design flaws in password change phase, (2) it fails to protect privileged insider attack and (3) it lacks the formal security verification. We also find that another recently proposed Wen’s scheme has the same security drawbacks as in Lee at al.’s scheme. In order to remedy these security weaknesses found in Lee et al.’s scheme and Wen’s scheme, we propose a secure and efficient password-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards for the integrated EPR information system. We show that our scheme is also efficient as compared to Lee et al.’s scheme and Wen’s scheme as our scheme only uses one-way hash function and bitwise exclusive-or (XOR) operations. Through the security analysis, we show that our scheme is secure against possible known attacks. Furthermore, we simulate our scheme for the formal security verification using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool and show that our scheme is secure against passive and active attacks.

Abstract

The authentication protocols are trusted components in a communication system in order to protect sensitive information against a malicious adversary in the client-server environment by means of providing a variety of services including users' privacy and authentication. In the cryptographic protocols, understanding the security failures is the key for both patching to the existing protocols and designing the future protocols. Recently, in 2014, Wang proposed an improved Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) based anonymous remote authentication scheme using smart card and claimed that the proposed scheme is secure against password guessing attack, smart card lost/stolen verifier attack, and also preserves user anonymity and prevents credential leakage. However, in this paper, we show that Wang's scheme fails to preserve the user anonymity and does not prevent the off-line password guessing attack, credential leakage and smart card lost/stolen verifier attack. In order to withstand those security pitfalls found in Wang's scheme, we aim to propose a new secure privacy-preserving ECC-based client authentication with key agreement protocol using smart card. Through the formal and informal security analysis we show that our scheme is secure against possible known attacks including the off-line password guessing attack, credential leakage attack and smart card lost/stolen verifier attack. Our scheme also preserves the user anonymity property. In addition, we simulate our scheme for the formal security verification using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool and show that our scheme is secure against passive and active attacks. Our scheme provides high security along with low computational and communication costs. As a result, our scheme is practically suitable for mobile devices in the client-server environment as compared to other related schemes in the literature.

Abstract

In real-life applications, ensuring secure transmission of data over public network channels to prevent malicious eavesdropping of the data is an important issue in distributed network environment. There are several potential security risks in protecting data and providing access control over the data. It is a challenging problem to manage dynamically the access rights to the resources and protect them from unauthorized access.Several migration access control mechanisms have been proposed in the literature using hierarchical structure to manage the cryptographic keys to prevent from unauthorized access of resources. However, most of them suffer from some known attacks and they do not efficiently support all required dynamic properties for mobile agent environment. Since, in practical scenarios, from time to time changing of decryption key of a confidential file provides maximum security for the system, it affects significantly the performance of the key management mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic migration access control mechanism for the mobile agents (DMAMA) in a distributed network environment using symmetric-key cryptosystem. Further, we provide an elliptic curve cryptography based signature (El-Gamal type) on the decryption key assigned to the confidential file to avoid unauthorized modifications by an attacker. Moreover, DMAMA provides an efficient solution to the dynamic property such as changing decryption key of a confidential file, whereas other schemes do not provide. In addition, DMAMA is efficient in computation and storage overheads as compared to the other related existing schemes. Through the informal and formal security analysis, we show that DMAMA is secure against possible known attacks including man-in-the-middle attack as well as DMAMA provides backward secrecy to the decryption key of a confidential file when adding a new node or creating a new relationship in the existing hierarchy. As a result, higher security, low computational and storage overheads along with efficient access control properties make DMAMA more suitable for practical applications compared to the other related schemes.

Abstract

Recently, in 2013, Wu et al. proposed an efficient adaptable and scalable group access control scheme (GAC) for managing wireless sensor networks and they claimed that their proposed GAC approach provides the forward secrecy and backward secrecy, and it also prevents the man-in-the-middle attack. However, in this paper, we revisit Wu et al.’s scheme and show that Wu et al.’s scheme fails to provide the forward and backward secrecy to the group access key (GAK), and also their scheme does not prevent the man-inthe-middle attack and it does not provide the mutual authentication between a node and the task manager. Moreover, in Wu et al.’s scheme, all the past GAKs used by a node can be revealed to an adversary when that node is compromised. We then aim to propose a novel group access control mechanism to withstand the security weaknesses found in Wu et al.’s scheme while retaining the original merits of their scheme. Through the rigorous informal security analysis and the formal security analysis using the widely-accepted Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic, we show that our scheme is secure against various known attacks including the attacks found in Wu et al.’s scheme. Moreover, in our scheme, the vulnerability of the GAKs used by a node is limited and bounded to the last GAK update protocol interval when that node is compromised by an adversary. Our scheme provides efficient dynamic properties such as joining and leaving of a node from a group along with high security and the required desirable features as compared to Wu et al.’s scheme, and as a result, our scheme is very suitable for the practical applications.

Abstract

Since the conception of the seminal work proposed by Eschenauer and Gligor in 2002, several key predistribution mechanisms have been proposed in the literature in order to establish symmetric secret keys between any two neighbor sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for secure communication. However, due to lack of prior deployment knowledge, limited resources of sensor nodes and security threats posed in the unattended environment of WSNs, it is always a challenging task to propose a better secure key predistribution scheme apart from existing schemes. In this paper, we aim to propose two new key predistribution schemes based on hashed key chains, which provide secure communication between the sensor nodes with the desired storage and communication overheads. The proposed schemes provide better tradeoff among security, network connectivity, and overheads as compared to those for other existing schemes.

Abstract

Authentication schemes present a user-friendly and scalable mechanism to establish the secure and authorized communication between the remote entities over the insecure public network. Later, several authentication schemes have proposed in the literature. However, most of the existing schemes do not satisfy the desirable attributes, such as resistance against known attacks and user anonymity. In 2012, Chen et al. designed a robust authentication scheme to erase the weaknesses of Sood et al.'s scheme. In 2013, Jiang et al. showed that Chen et al.'s scheme is vulnerable to password guessing attack. Furthermore, Jiang et al. presented an efficient solution to overcome the shortcoming of Chen et al.'s scheme. We demonstrate that Jiang et al.'s scheme does not withstand insider attack, on-line and off-line password guessing attacks, and user impersonation attack. Their scheme also fails to provide user's anonymity. To overcome these drawbacks, we aim to propose an enhanced scheme, which reduces the computation overhead and satisfies all desirable security attributes, while retaining the original merits of Jiang et al.'s scheme. The proposed scheme is also comparable in terms of the communication and computational overheads with Jiang et al.'s scheme and other existing schemes. Furthermore, we simulate the enhanced scheme for the formal security analysis utilizing the widely-accepted AVISPA tool and show that the proposed scheme is resistant against active and passive attacks.

Abstract

For critical applications, real‐time data access is essential from the nodes inside a wireless sensor network (WSN). Only the authorized users with unique access privilege should access the specific, but not all, sensing information gathered by the cluster heads in a hierarchical WSNs. Access rights for the correct information and resources for different services from the cluster heads to the genuine users can be provided with the help of efficient user access control mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a new user access control scheme with attribute‐based encryption using elliptic curve cryptography in hierarchical WSNs. In attribute‐based encryption, the ciphertexts are labeled with sets of attributes and secret keys of the users that are associated with their own access structures. The authorized users with the relevant set of attributes can able to decrypt the encrypted message coming from the cluster heads. Our scheme provides high security. Moreover, our scheme is efficient as compared with those for other existing user access control schemes. Through both the formal and informal security analysis, we show that our scheme has the ability to tolerate different known attacks required for a user access control designed for WSNs. Furthermore, we simulate our scheme for the formal security verification using the widely‐accepted automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications tool. The simulation results demonstrate that our scheme is secure.

Abstract

In communication systems, authentication protocols play an important role in protecting sensitive information against a malicious adversary by means of providing a variety of services such as mutual authentication, user credentials' privacy, and user revocation facility when the smart card of the user is lost/stolen or user's authentication parameters are revealed. Recently, several three‐party authentication with key agreement (3PAKA) schemes are proposed in the literature, but most of them do not provide the basic security requirements such as user anonymity as well as user revocation and re‐registration with the same identity. Thus, we feel that there is a great need to design a secure 3PAKA scheme with these security properties. In this paper, we propose a new secure biometric‐based privacy‐preserving 3PAKA scheme using the elliptic curve cryptography with efficient mechanism for the user revocation and re‐registration with the same identity. The formal security analysis using the widely accepted Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic shows that our scheme provides secure authentication. In addition, we simulate our scheme for the formal security verification using the widely accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool. The simulation results show that our scheme is secure against passive and active attacks. Furthermore, our scheme is efficient as compared with other related schemes. Our scheme provides high security along with low computation and communication costs, and extra features as compared with other related existing schemes in the literature, and as a result, our scheme is suitable for battery‐limited mobile devices.