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.

Abstract

The energy cost of asymmetric cryptography is a vital component of modern secure communications, which inhibits its wide spread adoption within the ultra-low energy regimes such as Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. The ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising cryptographic tool, where an encryptor can decide the access policy that who can decrypt the data. Thus, the data will be protected from the unauthorized users. However, most of the existing CP-ABE schemes require huge storage and computational overheads. Moreover, CP-ABE schemes based on bilinear map loose the high efficiency over the elliptic curve cryptography because of the requirement of the security parameters of larger size. These drawbacks prevent the use of ultra-low energy devices in practice. In this paper, we aim to propose a novel expressive AND-gate access structured CP-ABE scheme with constant-size secret keys (CSSK) with the cost efficient solutions for the encryption and decryption using ECC, called the CP-ABE-CSSK scheme. In the proposed CP-ABE-CSSK, the size of secret key is as small as 320 bits. In addition, ECC is efficient and more suitable for the lightweight devices as compared to the bilinear pairing based cryptosystem. Thus, the proposed CP-ABE-CSSK scheme provides the low computation and storage overheads with an expressive AND-gate access structure as compared to the related existing schemes in the literature. As a result, our scheme is very suitable for CP-ABE key storage and computation cost in the ultra-low energy devices.

Abstract

In this paper, we devise a new and efficient biometric-based password authentication scheme (BIO-PWA) for the client-server environment. Our scheme uses the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) along with the fuzzy extractor. Through the rigorous security analysis, we show that our scheme is secure against various known attacks. We further show that our scheme is secure in the generic group model through the formal security analysis. In addition, the formal security verification of our scheme using the widely-accepted automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) tool is performed against active and passive adversaries and the simulation results clearly demonstrate that our scheme is secure against active and passive attacks, including the replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. Finally, we show that our scheme is also efficient in computation against the existing related ECC-based authentication schemes for the client-server environment.