Abstract

With the emergence, development, and maturity of various Internet technologies, the healthcare industry is also trying to integrate with these technologies to provide more convenient healthcare services to patients by establishing telemedicine to develop and continuously improve the public healthcare system. Various protocols were proposed in the recent past to provide attack resistance in addition to computational efficiency; however, several such protocols were proved inefficient or prone to one or more attacks. Some of these protocols lack user anonymity and privacy. Keeping in consideration the flaws of existing protocols, in this article, we propose an efficient and secure protocol based on extremely lightweight symmetric key operations. In addition, we provide formal and informal analyses to demonstrate the protocol’s security. Moreover, to measure the efficiency of the proposed protocol, we conducted a real-time experiment, which confirms that the proposed protocol completes an authentication round in 117.1071 ms with an exchange of four messages and 2592 bits among the three participating entities. Finally, by comparing it with other protocols, we show that the proposed protocol has significant security advantages and performance benefits.

Abstract

With the rapid advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing has a significant role in many eHealth applications. However, security and data privacy are major challenges due to the widespread popularity of the digital health domain. The network and data storage should withstand adversarial entities and allow access to only legitimate users. Medical users and servers must be registered with a trusted third-party authority to obtain permissions to authenticate remaining users. Millions of smart medical devices connect online to collect critical patient information, analyze reports, and perform meaningful decisions without human interaction. In this scenario, standard security is essential to safeguard eHealth applications. This research provides a secured, lightweight mobile edge computing framework to address these issues. The empirical results show that our framework mitigates computational overheads. The informal and formal analysis shows that our framework withstands potential attacks.

Abstract

Deepfake refers to synthetic media generated through artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. It involves creating or altering video, audio, or images to make them appear as though they depict something or someone else. Deepfake technology advances just like the mechanisms that are used to detect them. There’s an ongoing cat-and-mouse game between creators of deepfakes and those developing detection methods. As the technology that underpins deepfakes continues to improve, we are obligated to confront the repercussions that it will have on society. The introduction of educational initiatives, regulatory frameworks, technical solutions, and ethical concerns are all potential avenues via which this matter can be addressed. Multiple approaches need to be combined to identify deepfakes effectively. Detecting deepfakes can be challenging due to their increasingly sophisticated nature, but several methods and techniques are being developed to identify them. Mitigating the negative impact of deepfakes involves a combination of technological advancements, awareness, and policy measures. In this paper, we propose a secure deepfake mitigation framework. We have also provided a security analysis of the proposed framework via the Scyhter tool-based formal security verification. It proves that the proposed framework is secure against various cyber attacks. We also discuss the societal impact of deepfake events along with its detection process. Then some AI models, which are used for creating and detecting the deepfake events, are highlighted. Ultimately, we provide the practical implementation of the proposed framework to observe its functioning in a real-world scenario.

Abstract

Critical infrastructure refers to the key systems, assets, and facilities, whether they are physical or virtual, that are necessary for the overall functioning of a country. As our reliance on technology and networked systems continues to expand, so does the significance of taking precautions to protect critical infrastructure from being compromised by cyberattacks. We need some security schemes to secure the communication happening in the critical infrastructure devices. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the design of an authentication and key establishment scheme, which is used in the critical infrastructure to secure its data transmissions. A secure authentication and key management mechanism for fog computing-based IoT-driven critical infrastructures (in short, AKM-FCCI) is proposed in the paper. We then provide the network model and threat model of the proposed AKM-FCCI to explain its deployment and organization of devices and servers. The threat model further explains the various threats of this communication environment. In addition, the security analysis of AKM-FCCI is presented to demonstrate that it is secure against the many different kinds of attacks that could be launched against it. The comparisons demonstrate that the performance of AKM-FCCI is superior to that of the other currently used schemes. In addition to that, it offers a high level of security and utility. Therefore, the proposed AKM-FCCI is appropriate for use in protecting critical infrastructure equipment against a wide variety of threats.

Abstract

In the present era, the increasing number of network devices and ubiquitous computing leads to the flow of enormous amounts of data traffic, including sensitive and confidential information, on the internet and carrying out commercial and banking transactions online. This gives cybercriminals an opportunity to launch an attack like phishing to steal confidential information from the user and gain unauthorized access. This can be mitigated by the help of an intelligent machine learningbased phishing detection system, which can detect potential phishing attacks and take appropriate action. In this paper, we have addressed this major cyber issue and proposed a machine learning-based phishing detection scheme (in short, EM-PAD), which is trained on a benchmark dataset and evaluated on standard metrics: F1-score and Accuracy. The proposed model is compared with different existing schemes based on Accuracy, indicating that it has outperformed them with remarkable results.

Abstract

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Abstract

Maritime communication helps vessels and ports plan their movements, exchange environmental information, and communicate among themselves. The vessels' movement and changing location are critical to keep them secure from data interception and data tampering by unauthorized parties during transmission. To secure maritime communication, we propose a novel lightweight authentication scheme sensitive to the current ship location. We assess the effectiveness of the proposed protocol in defending against a range of security threats while keeping communication and computation costs low, and meeting the desired security and functional requirements of anonymity and untraceability. The detailed security analysis using the widely accepted Scyther tool demonstrates that location-based keys as proposed in our protocol are secure against location inference and spoofing attacks among others.

Abstract

Due to the rapid advancement of quantum computers, there has been a furious race for quantum technologies in academia and industry. Quantum cryptography is an important tool for achieving security services during quantum communication. Designated verifier signature, a variant of quantum cryptography, is very useful in applications like the Internet of Things (IoT) and auctions. An identity-based quantum-designated verifier signature (QDVS) scheme is suggested in this work. Our protocol features security attributes like eavesdropping, non-repudiation, designated verification, and hiding sources attacks. Additionally, it is protected from attacks on forgery, inter-resending, and impersonation. The proposed scheme benefits from the traditional designated verifier signature schemes. In the proposed scheme, the signer encrypts a message with his or her private key, and the designated verifier validates the accompanying QDVS using the signer’s public key, which is the signer’s name or email address, which makes the quantum signature system’s key management simpler. It uses an entangled state while signing and verifying the signature; however, the verifier is not required to compare quantum states. A detailed comparison analysis with other similar schemes provides more security for the proposed scheme. Furthermore, the proposed scheme’s effectiveness and feasibility are validated using quantum simulations.

Abstract

A significant evolution in healthcare recently uses technological advancements to perform different activities, such as patient electronic medical records (EMRs) data gathering, preserving, processing, diagnosis, and handling. The adaptation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud has further facilitated the enhancement of related healthcare systems, which can considerably improve data connectivity, accessibility, and exchange, which leads to a significant improvement in the quality of services to patients. Furthermore, scientific computations over data in transmission can be exposed to adversaries and may reveal private data for financial benefit. This article uses the Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song fully homomorphic encryption scheme and IOTA Tangle using masked authenticated messaging (MAM) protocol to provide secure communication between patient and doctor. CKKS-FHE-based data encryption provides data privacy, and secured EMRs sharing through IOTA Tangle guarantees data confidentiality. The performance of this work is analyzed in terms of encryption and decryption time, and payload sharing using MAM and NON-MAM protocols results in evidence of the effectiveness of the approach and improves overall security. The proposed scheme performs better overall computation time and performance than other relevant schemes. Further, the security analysis shows that the proposed system is resilient to data immutability and integrity, forward secrecy, and passive and active attacks.

Abstract

The burgeoning concept of the metaverse as an interconnected virtual space represents the forefront of the next-generation internet. Quantum teleportation, known for its prowess in ensuring secure and reliable communications, stands poised to revolutionize interactions within this immersive digital realm. In this context, we propose a comprehensive interaction protocol tailored for the metaverse environment. The designed protocol entails two fundamental components: first, the interaction between a user and their avatar, facilitated by a secure seven-qubit entangled state; and second, the interaction between two avatars, enabled through an efficient two-qubit entangled state. To fortify the protocol’s resilience, quantum key distribution (QKD) is employed for secure key sharing, while a trusted certificate authority serves as an essential entity for signature verification. Through rigorous safety and efficiency analysis, we demonstrate the protocol’s robustness and performance, ensuring adherence to fundamental security properties such as unforgeability, undeniability, verifiability and traceability. By seamlessly integrating quantum teleportation principles with the metaverse environment, our protocol not only enhances security but also unlocks novel avenues for interaction and exploration within this digital frontier.