Abstract

The growth of IoT devices is so rapid that several billions of such devices would be in use in a span of four-year period. Essential security mechanisms need to be put in place to curb several security attacks prevalent in IoT. Access control is an important security mechanism that ensures legitimate and controlled access to critical and limited resources in IoT. The current access control schemes for IoT could not handle burgeoning number of IoT devices, while meeting the necessary level of security. Consequently, in this paper, we propose a new scalable and secure access control scheme for IoT. With blockchain as the root-of-trust, the proposed scheme performs access control for the IoT devices without having the resource-constrained IoT devices to be part of the blockchain network and to possess substantial amount of blockchain data. Blockchain’s tamper-proof property makes it an ideal candidate to be chosen as the root-of-trust. The scheme is secure against various security attacks prevalent in IoT. A proof-of-concept implementation for the scheme is developed and deployed in Ethereum Mainnet. The transaction costs of the different operations in the scheme are fairly below USD 3. Furthermore, scalability of the proposed scheme in different scenarios is investigated.

Abstract

IoT-enabled Smart Grid (IoT-SG) is an emerging paradigm that enables the bi-direction communication of IoT devices and hardware to efficiently collect and transmit the consumer’s information over the Internet. However, the underlying open communication network and resource-constrained capabilities of devices invite manifold challenges and threats in terms of security and privacy. To alleviate such issues, we designed a private blockchain-based access control protocol for IoT-SG using Physically Unclonable Function (PUF). Our protocol allows the Service Provider (SP) and smart meters to transfer the data in an efficient and secure manner. The participating SPs form the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network, and each peer node is responsible for securely creating the blocks from the gathered data. Thereafter, all the peer nodes employ a voting-based consensus mechanism to verify and add the recently created block …

Abstract

With the continuous improvement of the public medical system, the current medical service industry is more intelligent. Among them, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) plays a significant role in intelligent medicine. The emergence of remote wireless monitoring platforms in the IoMT systems has significantly reduced the risk of virus infection among medical staff. However, data is easy to be stolen by criminals in the transmission process. To mitigate these issues, we propose a three-factor enhanced protocol for monitoring patient body information. The proposed protocol can provide the confidentiality of transmitted data and the privacy of doctors and patients. The security of the protocol is demonstrated in the Random Oracle Model (ROM) for formal security. In addition, by comparing the proposed protocol with other related works, our design has efficient performance both in execution time and communication costs.

Abstract

Multiple kinds of ransomware are currently posing a growing threat to the Internet users. Important user data is encrypted by the trendy ransomware, and its recovery requires payment of a ransom in terms of some amount of money. The trend of crypto-currencies may be a contributing factor to the rise of ransomware attacks. From time to time, different mechanisms for detection and mitigation of ransomware attacks have been proposed. However, the performance of the ransomware detection process can be improved through the deployment of Machine Learning/Deep Learning based mechanisms. In this article, we propose a novel Spline Interpolation envisioned Neural Network based Ransomware Detection Scheme (in short, we call it as SINN-RD). Additionally, we introduce the mechanisms for normalizing the data and generating the new features from the log files. The conducted security analysis of the

Abstract

Designing a secure and efficient authentication protocol is crucial and challenging in the mobility network. Due to the seamless roaming of mobile users over multiple foreign agents and the broadcast nature of the communication channel, the mobile networks are often exposed to several network attacks. To achieve perfect authentication and secure communication among mobility entities like MU (Mobile User), FA (Foreign Agent) and HA (Home Agent), the researchers have proposed numerous authentication protocols in the past. However, the existing protocols for the mobility environments are insufficient to address the fundamental security concerns and an adversary can impersonate the mobile user at anytime. Thus, we propose Mobile-Chain, a secure blockchain-based authentication system for mobility environments. The proposed Mobile-Chain is designed to protect user privacy and guarantees provable

Abstract

Precision farming has a positive potential in the agricultural industry regarding water conservation, increased productivity, better development of rural areas, and increased income. Blockchain technology is a better alternative for storing and sharing farm data as it is reliable, transparent, immutable, and decentralized. Remote monitoring of an agricultural field requires security systems to ensure that any sensitive information is exchanged only among authenticated entities in the network. To this end, we design an efficient blockchain-enabled authenticated key agreement scheme for mobile vehicles-assisted precision agricultural Internet of Things (IoT) networks called AgroMobiBlock . The limited existing work on authentication in agricultural networks shows passive usage of blockchains with very high costs. AgroMobiBlock proposes a novel idea using the elliptic curve operations on an active hybrid blockchain over mobile farming vehicles with low computation and communication costs. Formal and informal security analysis along with the formal security verification using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) software tool have shown the robustness of AgroMobiBlock against man-in-the-middle, impersonation, replay, physical capture, and ephemeral secret leakage attacks among other potential attacks. The blockchain-based simulation on large-scale nodes shows the computational time for an increase in the network and block sizes. Moreover, the real-time testbed experiments have been performed to show the practical usefulness of the proposed scheme.

Abstract

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-based authenti-cation schemes for the Radio-frequency identification (RFID) environment have emerged as a very safe, secure, and robust candidate of mutual authentication. However, the limited resource availability in a passive tag makes such schemes difficult to realize in practice. Public/private key pair generation, storage, and the computation using those keys are the major bottlenecks towards the faster and efficient design of such schemes. Therefore, we have designed our scheme without using public/private key pairs. We only utilize the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP) property for the realization of our key-less scheme on the secure elliptic curves. Our scheme is primarily aimed at efficient implementation of authentication schemes in Warehouse Management System (WMS), where the data is stored in local servers. This new idea helps to save the memory space in the tags and the server. Moreover, the computation cost also reduces to a great extent in comparison to other schemes. We have compared our scheme with several other schemes and found it efficient in terms of storage cost as well. The simulation result of our scheme with the popular aut

Abstract

The distributed nature of Internet of Things (IoT) and fog computing mandates that the security provided to the resources of networking and data on these applications is based on a distributed structure. The nodes in a fog computing environment should be working with equal capacities without any necessity of trust among them, in order to allow the layers and infrastructure that constitute the stack of a fog node to be owned and managed by different entities. This idea of security necessitates the need for distributed trust in fog computing that can be realized using the concept of blockchain technology. Blockchain is a distributed and

Abstract

The information system of healthcare operates through various frameworks, like wireless body area network, telecare medical information system, and mobile or electronic healthcare. All these systems need to maintain the personal health records (PHRs) for various users (ie, patients, doctors, and nurses). In such systems, we need to process and store the health related sensitive data (ie, PHRs). In this article, we aim to provide a robust security mechanism to secure exchange and storage of healthcare data, especially PHRs. We present a generic architecture of blockchain‐enabled secure communication mechanism for Internet of Things‐driven personal health records (BIPHRS). We then discuss various threats and security attacks of healthcare system along with different available security mechanisms. The conducted security analysis and detailed comparative study of the state of art blockchain enabled security schemes for PHR systems show that the proposed BIPHRS provides a better security and more functionality features as compared to other similar existing approaches. We propose a blockchain‐enabled secure communication framework for Internet of Things‐driven personal health records (BIPHRS). The proposed BIPHRS provides better security and more functionality features as compared to the other similar schemes. In addition, a practical

Abstract

Industry 5.0 is the automation, digitization, and data communication of the industrial procedure that comprises industrial cyber–physical systems (I-CPSs), industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and artificial intelligence (AI). In the I-CPS-enabled healthcare ecosystem, intelligent wearable devices have been extensively employed to sense body information and measure the health status of the patients. Besides other IIoT applications, the I-CPS-enabled healthcare ecosystem also bears various challenges. For instance, due to the communal communication mediums, the security of a patient’s physiological datum is becoming a significant challenge these days. In order to cope with this challenge, we presented a secure and lightweight key establishment protocol. To the best of our knowledge, this protocol is the first application of physically unclonable function (PUF) in the I-CPS-enabled healthcare. The security of the designed protocol is proved with the help of a widely recognized real-or-random (ROR) model. The practical demonstration of our protocol from the network perspective is also measured through broadly recognized NS3 simulator tool.