By broadcasting messages about traffic status to vehicles wirelessly, a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) can improve traffic safety and efficiency. To guarantee secure communication in VANETs, security and privacy issues must be addressed before their deployment. The conditional privacy-preserving authentication (CPPA) scheme is suitable for solving security and privacy-preserving problems in VANETs, because it supports both mutual authentication and privacy protection simultaneously. Many identity-based CPPA schemes for VANETs using bilinear pairings have been proposed over the last few years to enhance security or to improve performance. However, it is well known that the bilinear pairing operation is one of the most complex operations in modern cryptography. To achieve better performance and reduce computational complexity of information processing in VANET, the design of a CPPA scheme for the VANET environment that does not use bilinear paring becomes a challenge. To address this challenge, we propose a CPPA scheme for VANETs that does not use bilinear paring and we demonstrate that it could supports both the mutual authentication and the privacy protection simultaneously. Our proposed CPPA scheme retains most of the benefits obtained with the previously proposed CPPA schemes. Moreover, the proposed CPPA scheme yields a better performance in terms of computation cost and communication cost making it be suitable for use by the VANET safety-related applications.

An Efficient Identity-Based Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Computer communications

Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of all devices that can be accessed through the Internet. These devices can be remotely accessed and controlled using existing network infrastructure, thus allowing a direct integration of computing systems with the physical world. This also reduces human involvement along with improving accuracy and efficiency, resulting in economic benefit. The devices in IoT facilitate the day-to-day life of people. However, the IoT has an enormous threat to security and privacy due to its heterogeneous and dynamic nature. Authentication is one of the most challenging security requirements in the IoT environment, where a user (external party) can directly access information from the devices, provided the mutual authentication between user and devices happens. In this paper, we present a new signature-based authenticated key establishment scheme for the IoT environment. The proposed scheme is tested for security with the help of the widely used Burrows-Abadi–Needham logic, informal security analysis, and also the formal security verification using the broadly accepted automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications tool. The proposed scheme is also implemented using the widely accepted NS2 simulator, and the simulation results demonstrate the practicability of the scheme. Finally, the proposed scheme provides more functionality features, and its computational and communication costs are also comparable with other existing approaches.

Secure Signature-Based Authenticated Key Establishment Scheme for Future IoT Applications

Wireless body area network (WBAN) has been recognized as one of the promising wireless sensor technologies for improving healthcare service, thanks to its capability of seamlessly and continuously exchanging medical information in real time. However, the lack of a clear in-depth defense line in such a new networking paradigm would make its potential users worry about the leakage of their private information, especially to those unauthenticated or even malicious adversaries. In this paper, we present a pair of efficient and light-weight authentication protocols to enable remote WBAN users to anonymously enjoy healthcare service. In particular, our authentication protocols are rooted with a novel certificateless signature (CLS) scheme, which is computational, efficient, and provably secure against existential forgery on adaptively chosen message attack in the random oracle model. Also, our designs ensure that application or service providers have no privilege to disclose the real identities of users. Even the network manager, which serves as private key generator in the authentication protocols, is prevented from impersonating legitimate users. The performance of our designs is evaluated through both theoretic analysis and experimental simulations, and the comparative studies demonstrate that they outperform the existing schemes in terms of better trade-off between desirable security properties and computational overhead, nicely meeting the needs of WBANs.

Certificateless Remote Anonymous Authentication Schemes for WirelessBody Area Networks

In this paper we revisit the security models of certificateless signatures and propose two new constructions which are provably secure in the random oracle model. We divide the potential adversaries according to their attack power, and for the first time, three new kinds of adversaries are introduced into certificateless signatures. They are Normal Adversary, Strong Adversary and Super Adversary (ordered by their attack power). Combined with the known Type I Adversary and Type II Adversary in certificateless system, we then define the security of certificateless signatures in different attack scenarios. Our new models, together with the others in the literature, will enable us to better understand the security of certificateless signatures. Two concrete schemes with different security levels are also proposed in this paper. The first scheme, which is proved secure against Normal Type I and Super Type II Adversary, enjoys the shortest signature length among all the known certificateless signature schemes. The second scheme is secure against Super Type I and Type II adversary. Compared with the scheme in ACNS 2006 which has a similar security level, our second scheme requires lower operation cost but a little longer signature length.

Certificateless signature revisited

A pairing-free identity-based authenticated key agreement protocol with minimal message exchanges

IMBAS: Identity-based multi-user broadcast authentication in wireless sensor networks

Based on identity-based cryptography, this paper proposes a remote authentication protocol featured with client anonymity, nonrepudiation, and improved efficiency for value-added services in a mobile environment. First, an identity-based signature scheme is proposed, and the verification result of the signature is a constant with respect to the signer's identifier. Then, a remote authentication protocol is constructed by combining the proposed signature scheme with a new concept called the client account index, which helps to realize client anonymity with no encryption operations. A formal proof and a theoretical analysis are provided to show the security strength of the proposals. Performance evaluation shows that compared with previous identity-based remote authentication schemes, the new protocol reduces at least 21.7% of the overall running time with stronger security; the reductions in the overall running time and signaling traffic reach 31.9% and 82.0%, respectively, compared with previous Rivest-Shamir-Adleman-based schemes.

Identity-Based Anonymous Remote Authentication for Value-Added Services in Mobile Networks

This paper demonstrates that a certificateless signature scheme recently proposed by Gorantla and Saxena is insecure. It is shown that an adversary who replaces the public key of a signer can then forge valid signatures for that signer without knowledge of the signer’s private key.

/pdf/an-attack-on-a-certificateless-signature-scheme-53mny9beq4.pdf

An Attack on a Certificateless Signature Scheme.

This letter proposes an identity-based authenticated key agreement protocol. Different from available comparable ones, the new protocol realizes implicit authentication without bilinear pairings which makes it more efficient. The security of proposed protocol can be reduced to the standard Computational Diffie-Hellman problem. Two variants of the protocol are also given, with one achieving the security-efficiency trade-off and the other providing authenticated key agreement between users of different domains.

Xuefei Cao

Papers

A pairing-free identity-based authenticated key agreement protocol with minimal message exchanges

IMBAS: Identity-based multi-user broadcast authentication in wireless sensor networks

Identity-Based Anonymous Remote Authentication for Value-Added Services in Mobile Networks

An Attack on a Certificateless Signature Scheme.

Identity-Based Authenticated Key Agreement Protocols without Bilinear Pairings