The incorporation of electronics by embedding the relevant sensors in the physical devices in home and office, vehicles of all types, buildings in the smart cities and in all possible spheres of life form a network of devices termed as internet of things (IoT). It is being realized that vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) which are responsible for the reliable and secure communication among vehicles is a primary area of research in IoT and hence ensuring security in this area is essential. Thus, this work introduces a novel approach to improve the existing authentication support to VANETs. In this proposed framework, first an anonymous authentication approach for preserving the privacy is proposed which not only performs the vehicle user’s anonymous authentication but preserves the message integrity of the transmitting messages as well. Although many anonymous authentication schemes have been proposed in VANETs until now, the existing schemes suffer from a high computation cost during the signature and certificate verification process which leads to delayed authentication. Consequently, the vehicles and roadside units (RSUs) cannot authenticate more number of vehicles per second in VANETs. Second, an efficient anonymous group key distribution protocol is proposed in this paper for securely distributing the group key to the group of vehicles in the communication range of an RSU. The RSUs can send location based information to the group of vehicles in a secure manner using this group key. Experimental analysis portrays that the results of this new privacy preserving anonymous authentication and key management schemes are promising and efficient with regard to signature verification cost and computational cost in comparison with the existing schemes.

Computationally efficient privacy preserving authentication and key distribution techniques for vehicular ad hoc networks

Publish/subscribe services have encountered considerable success in the building of modern large-scale mission-critical systems. Such systems are characterized by several non-functional requirements, among which security plays a pivotal role due to the emergence of numerous cyber attacks targeting most mission-critical systems. This requires that the adopted publish/subscribe services have to be equipped with the proper means to protect the exchanged data, to preserve their correct behavior and to face possible attack scenarios. Although significant efforts have been made in this field, many issues are still open. This paper includes an introduction to the principles of securing event notification, and an analysis of the relevant state-of-the-art by both surveying the academic literature over the period 1998–2014 on secure publish/subscribe services and overviewing the current standards for the marketed products. Next, it presents the main challenges that are still unresolved and are worthy of further attention in future research efforts.

On Security in Publish/Subscribe Services: A Survey

Security Algorithms for Cloud Computing

Since most Internet of things (IoT) devices are energy-limited, increasingly more manufacturers have chosen to develop IoT applications based on group communication. For these applications, a secure and effective authenticated group secret key
 is fundamental to whole group communication. A large number of related protocols have been proposed to address this security problem. However, most of them have a centralized architecture, which is vulnerable to a single point of failure. Blockchain technology has the potential to address the challenges mentioned above because of its distributed, secure, and private property. Thus, this paper proposes a blockchain-based authenticated group key agreement protocol for IoT. The proposed protocol introduces a new entity called the device manager, who acts as an intermediary to connect IoT devices with blockchain networks. Security analysis demonstrates the robustness of the proposed protocol to various kinds of attacks. Besides, the simulation results further show that the time costs of protocol operations are reasonable and suitable for IoT environments.

A secure blockchain-based group key agreement protocol for IoT

There is an increasing involvement of the Internet of Things (IoT) in many of our daily activities, with the aim of improving their efficiency and effectiveness. We are witnessing the advent of smart cities, in which IoT is exploited to improve the management of a city's assets, as well as smart factories, where IoT is paving the way for the forth industrial revolution. These applications and many other ones imply several non-functional requirements to be satisfied by the adopted IoT solution, where security assumes paramount importance. Secure communications among the IoT nodes are strongly needed due to the use of wireless technologies that are easy to eavesdrop, in order to steal valuable information. Accordingly, confidentiality is a fundamental prerequisite, but the existing solutions based on transport-level encryption are ineffective, while the ones with application-level encryption may be too expensive in terms of energy consumption. In this work, we propose a series of solutions and methods to achieve confidentiality with end-to-end guarantees, by using group-based keys within the context of a clustered and distributed key management framework. We have implemented such solutions on top of TinyOS, and assessed their achievable quality by means of the TOSSIM simulator.

Distributed Group Key Management for Event Notification Confidentiality Among Sensors

A hierarchical group key management scheme for secure multicast increasing efficiency of key distribution in leave operation

This paper proposes an efficient many-to-many group key management protocol in distributed group communication. In this protocol, group members are managed in the hierarchical manner logically. Two kinds of keys are used, asymmetric and symmetric keys. The leaf nodes in the key tree are the asymmetric keys of the corresponding group members and all the intermediate node keys are symmetric keys assigned to each intermediate node. For asymmetric key, Diffie-Hellman key agreement is introduced. To calculate intermediate node keys, members use codes assigned to each intermediate node key tree. Group members calculate intermediate node keys rather than distributed by a sponsor member. The features of this approach are that, no keys are exchanged between existing members at join, and only one key, the group key, is delivered to remaining members at leave.

An efficient distributed group key management using hierarchical approach with Diffie-Hellman and Symmetric Algorithm: DHSA

This paper presents a new group key management protocol, CKC (Code for Key Calculation) for secure IP multicast. In this protocol which is based on logical key hierarchy, only the group key needs to be sent to new member at join. Then, using the group key current members and the new member calculate the necessary keys by node codes and one-way hash function. A node code is a random number assigned to each node to help users calculate necessary keys. Again, at leave server just sends the new group key to the remaining members. By this key, members calculate necessary keys using node codes and one-way hash function. The security of the keys is based on one-wayness of hash function. The results show that CKC reduces computational and communication overhead, and message size largely at join without increasing them at leave.

Alireza Nemaney Pour

Papers

A hierarchical group key management scheme for secure multicast increasing efficiency of key distribution in leave operation

An efficient distributed group key management using hierarchical approach with Diffie-Hellman and Symmetric Algorithm: DHSA

An efficient group key management protocol using code for key calculation: CKC