SEAI: Secrecy and Efficiency Aware Inter-gNB Handover Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol in 5G Communication Network

Recently, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has initiated the research in the Fifth Generation (5G) network to fulfill the security characteristics of IoT-based services. 3GPP has proposed the 5G handover key structure and framework in a recently published technical report. In this paper, we evaluate the handover authentication mechanisms reported in the literature and identify the security vulnerabilities such as violation of global base-station attack, failure of key forward/backward secrecy, de-synchronization attack, and huge network congestion. Also, these protocols suffer from high bandwidth consumption that doesn’t suitable for energy-efficient mobile devices in the 5G communication network. To overcome these issues, we introduce Secrecy and Efficiency Aware Inter-gNB (SEAI) handover Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol. The formal security proof of the protocol is carried out by Random Oracle Model (ROM) to achieve the session key secrecy, confidentiality, and integrity. For the protocol correctness and achieve the mutual authentication, simulation is performed using the AVISPA tool. Also, the informal security evaluation represents that the protocol defeats all the possible attacks and achieves the necessary security properties.Moreover, the performance evaluation of the earlier 5G handover schemes and proposed SEAI handover AKA protocol is carried out in terms of communication, transmission, computation overhead, handover delay, and energy consumption. From the evaluations, it is observed that the SEAI handover AKA protocol obtains significant results and strengthens the security of the 5G network during handover scenarios.

     

Strongly secure ID‐based authenticated key agreement protocol for mobile multi‐server environments

To provide mutual authentication and communication confidentiality between mobile clients and servers, numerous identity‐based authenticated key agreement (ID‐AKA) protocols were proposed to authenticate each other while constructing a common session key. In most of the existing ID‐AKA protocols, ephemeral secrets (random values) are involved in the computations of the common session key between mobile client and server. Thus, these ID‐AKA protocols might become vulnerable because of the ephemeral‐secret‐leakage (ESL) attacks in the sense that if the involved ephemeral secrets are compromised, an adversary could compute session keys and reveal the private keys of participants in an AKA protocol. Very recently, 2 ID‐AKA protocols were proposed to withstand the ESL attacks. One of them is suitable for single server environment and requires no pairing operations on the mobile client side. The other one fits multi‐server environments, but requires 2 expensive pairing operations. In this article, we present a strongly secure ID‐AKA protocol resisting ESL attacks under mobile multi‐server environments. By performance analysis and comparisons, we demonstrate that our protocol requires the lowest communication overhead, does not require any pairing operations, and is well suitable for mobile devices with limited computing capability. For security analysis, our protocol is provably secure under the computational Diffie‐Hellman assumption in the random oracle model.     

An effective approach to solving large communication overhead issue and strengthening the securities of AKA protocols

Authentication and key agreement (AKA) is a challenge‐response‐like security protocol that uses symmetric‐key cryptography to establish authenticated keys between 2 parties. Its application in the third‐generation mobile system universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) is called UMTS‐AKA, and the version applied in the fourth‐generation mobile communication system long‐term evolution (LTE) is called LTE‐AKA. Both UMTS‐AKA and LTE‐AKA share the same weakness: the network operators need to maintain a large space of authentication vectors for visiting stations, and the transmission of the vectors causes lots of overhead. This weakness will be amplified when there are billions of devices accessing the network in the Internet‐of‐things scenarios. In addition, these schemes provide only key distribution (not key agreement) and cannot provide session key forward secrecy. In this paper, we propose a range‐bound key assignment technique to tackle the challenges. The proposed scheme drastically reduces the communication overhead and greatly strengthens the security robustness. The securities are analyzed and are verified using the AVISPA toolset.     

An efficient pairing‐free identity‐based authenticated group key agreement protocol

An authenticated group key agreement protocol allows participants to agree on a group key that will be subsequently used to provide secure group communication over an insecure network. In this paper, we give a security analysis on a pairing‐free identity‐based authenticated group key agreement because of Islam et al. We show that the protocol of Islam et al. cannot satisfy the minimal security requirements of the key agreement protocols. We propose an efficient pairing‐free identity‐based authenticated group key agreement for imbalanced mobile network. The proposed protocol can be implemented easily for practical application in mobile networks as it is free from bilinear. Under the difficulty of the InvCDH and CDH we demonstrate that the proposed protocol provides perfect forward secrecy, implicit key authentication and the dynamic functionality. As compared with the group key agreement protocols for imbalanced mobile network, the proposed protocol provides stronger security properties and high efficiency. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

SecCloudSharing: Secure data sharing in public cloud using ciphertext‐policy attribute‐based proxy re‐encryption with revocation

An efficient cryptography mechanism should enforce an access control policy over the encrypted data to provide flexible, fine‐grained, and secure data access control for secure sharing of data in cloud storage. To make a secure cloud data sharing solution, we propose a ciphertext‐policy attribute‐based proxy re‐encryption scheme. In the proposed scheme, we design an efficient fine‐grained revocation mechanism, which enables not only efficient attribute‐level revocation but also efficient policy‐level revocation to achieve backward secrecy and forward secrecy. Moreover, we use a multiauthority key attribute center in the key generation phase to overcome the single‐point performance bottleneck problem and the key escrow problem. By formal security analysis, we illustrate that our proposed scheme achieves confidentiality, secure key distribution, multiple collusions resistance, and policy‐ or attribute‐revocation security. By comprehensive performance and implementation analysis, we illustrate that our proposed scheme improves the practical efficiency of storage, computation cost, and communication cost compared to the other related schemes.     

Handover authentication between different types of eNBs in LTE networks

There are two types of base stations in the long term evolution (LTE) wireless networks, home eNodeB (HeNB) and eNodeB (eNB). It is critical to achieve seamless handovers between the HeNB and the eNB in order to support mobility in the LTE networks. A handover from an eNB/HeNB to a new eNB/HeNB, suggested by the third generation partnership project (3GPP), requires distinct procedures for different mobility scenarios, which will increase the system complexity. Besides, the existing handover schemes for other wireless networks are not suitable for the mobility scenarios in the LTE networks due to their inherent vulnerabilities. In this paper, we propose a fast and secure handover authentication scheme, which is to fit in with most of the mobility scenarios in the LTE networks. Compared with other handover schemes, our scheme cannot only achieve a simple authentication process with desirable efficiency, but also provide several security features including perfect forward/backward secrecy (PFS/PBS), which have never been achieved by the previous works. The experiment results and formal verification by using the automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) tool show that the proposed scheme is efficient and secure against various malicious attacks.     

A pairing‐free identity‐based handover AKE protocol with anonymity in the heterogeneous wireless networks

Nowadays, seamless roaming service in heterogeneous wireless networks attracts more and more attention. When a mobile user roams into a foreign domain, the process of secure handover authentication and key exchange (AKE) plays an important role to verify the authenticity and establish a secure communication between the user and the access point. Meanwhile, to prevent the user's current location and moving history information from being tracked, privacy preservation should be also considered. However, existing handover AKE schemes have more or less defects in security aspects or efficiency. In this paper, a secure pairing‐free identity‐based handover AKE protocol with privacy preservation is proposed. In our scheme, users' temporary identities will be used to conceal their real identities during the handover process, and the foreign server can verify the legitimacy of the user with the home server's assistance. Besides, to resist ephemeral private key leakage attack, the session key is generated from the static private keys and the ephemeral private keys together. Security analysis shows that our protocol is provably secure in extended Canetti‐Krawczyk (eCK) model under the computational Diffie‐Hellman (CDH) assumption and can capture desirable security properties including key‐compromise impersonation resistance, ephemeral secrets reveal resistance, strong anonymity, etc. Furthermore, the efficiency of our identity‐based protocol is improved by removing pairings, which not only simplifies the complex management of public key infrastructure (PKI) but also reduces the computation overhead of ID‐based cryptosystem with pairings. It is shown that our proposed handover AKE protocol provides better security assurance and higher computational efficiency for roaming authentication in heterogeneous wireless networks.     

A fault‐tolerant group key agreement protocol exploiting dynamic setting

A fault‐tolerant group key agreement is an essential infrastructure for Internet communication among all involved participants; it can establish a secure session key no matter how many malicious participants exit simultaneously in an effort to disrupt the key agreement process. Recently, Zhao et al. proposed an efficient fault‐tolerant group key agreement protocol named efficient group key agreement that can resist denial‐of‐service attacks, reply attacks, man‐in‐middle attacks, and common modulus attacks; it can also preserve forward secrecy with lower computational cost than previous protocols. We show that it is still vulnerable to active attacks by malicious participants and modify the corresponding security weakness adaptively. Furthermore, we propose an efficient fault‐tolerant group key agreement based on a binary tree structure and enhance it to a dynamic setting where participants can leave or join the group arbitrarily according to their preferences with instant session key refreshment. Additionally, our session key refreshment is based on secure key updating to protect forward/backward confidentiality and is resistant to active/passive attacks. The performance analysis shows that our proposed protocol has lower computational cost and little additional communication cost exploiting dynamic setting. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cryptanalysis of an identity‐based authenticated key exchange protocol

Authenticated key exchange protocols represent an important cryptographic mechanism that enables several parties to communicate securely over an open network. Elashry, Mu, and Susilo proposed an identity‐based authenticated key exchange (IBAKE) protocol where different parties establish secure communication by means of their public identities.The authors also introduced a new security notion for IBAKE protocols called resiliency, that is, if the secret shared key is compromised, the entities can generate another shared secret key without establishing a new session between them. They then claimed that their IBAKE protocol satisfies this security notion. We analyze the security of their protocol and prove that it has a major security flaw, which renders it insecure against an impersonation attack. We also disprove the resiliency property of their scheme by proposing an attack where an adversary can compute any shared secret key if just one secret bit is leaked.     

Security enhancement to a password-authenticated group key exchange protocol for mobile Ad-hoc networks

Group key exchange protocols allow a group of parties communicating over a public network to come up with a common secret key called a session key. Due to their critical role in building secure multicast channels, a number of group key exchange protocols have been suggested over the years for a variety of settings. Among these is the so-called NEKED protocol proposed by Byun et al. for password-authenticated group key exchange in mobile ad-hoc networks overseen by unmanned aerial vehicles. In the current work, we are concerned with improving the security of the NEKED protocol. We first show that the NEKED protocol is vulnerable not only to an attack against backward secrecy but also to an attack against password security. We then figure out how to eliminate the security vulnerabilities of NEKED.     

Secure communication in CloudIoT through design of a lightweight authentication and session key agreement scheme

Internet of Things (IoT) is a newly emerged paradigm where multiple embedded devices, known as things, are connected via the Internet to collect, share, and analyze data from the environment. In order to overcome the limited storage and processing capacity constraint of IoT devices, it is now possible to integrate them with cloud servers as large resource pools. Such integration, though bringing applicability of IoT in many domains, raises concerns regarding the authentication of these devices while establishing secure communications to cloud servers. Recently, Kumari et al proposed an authentication scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for IoT and cloud servers and claimed that it satisfies all security requirements and is secure against various attacks. In this paper, we first prove that the scheme of Kumari et al is susceptible to various attacks, including the replay attack and stolen-verifier attack. We then propose a lightweight authentication protocol for secure communication of IoT embedded devices and cloud servers. The proposed scheme is proved to provide essential security requirements such as mutual authentication, device anonymity, and perfect forward secrecy and is robust against security attacks. We also formally verify the security of the proposed protocol using BAN logic and also the Scyther tool. We also evaluate the computation and communication costs of the proposed scheme and demonstrate that the proposed scheme incurs minimum computation and communication overhead, compared to related schemes, making it suitable for IoT environments with low processing and storage capacity.     

A provably secure biometrics and ECC‐based authentication and key agreement scheme for WSNs

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) underpin many applications of the Internet of Things (IoT), ranging from smart cities to unmanned surveillance and others. Efficient user authentication in WSNs, particularly in settings with diverse IoT device configurations and specifications (eg, resource‐constrained IoT devices) and difficult physical conditions (eg, physical disaster area and adversarial environment such as battlefields), remains challenging, both in research and in practice. Here, we put forth a user anonymous authentication scheme, relying on both biometrics and elliptic curve cryptography, to establish desired security features like forward and backward secrecy. We then make use of the Random‐or‐Real (RoR) model to prove the security of our scheme. We have implemented the proposed scheme in an environment compatible with WSNs. We show after conducting the comparison of the proposed scheme with some recent and related existent schemes that it satisfies various essential and desirable security attributes of a WSN environment. We conclude that the proposed scheme is suitable for the WSN scenario demanding high security.     

MaTRU‐KE revisited: CCA2‐secure key establishment protocol based on MaTRU

Quantum attack–resistant cryptosystems are required for secure communication since there is a big demand to have quantum computers. Lattice‐based cryptography is one of the quantum‐secure families due to its key/ciphertext sizes and performance. NTRU‐based cryptosystems, a member of lattice‐based cryptosystems, have received much more attention. MaTRU, a noncommutative version of NTRU with some matrix properties, is used to obtain a key exchange protocol in 2018. In this paper, we focus on MaTRU‐based key exchange protocols having CCA2 properties. We propose CCA2‐secure versions of MaTRU‐KE and then provide a security analysis of CCA2‐secure key establishment protocols. We also provide a comparison with the previous ones.     

Secure multi‐factor remote user authentication scheme for Internet of Things environments

Because of the exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT), several services are being developed. These services can be accessed through smart gadgets by the user at any place, every time and anywhere. This makes security and privacy central to IoT environments. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, robust, and multi‐factor remote user authentication and key agreement scheme for IoT environments. Using this protocol, any authorized user can access and gather real‐time sensor data from the IoT nodes. Before gaining access to any IoT node, the user must first get authenticated by the gateway node as well as the IoT node. The proposed protocol is based on XOR and hash operations, and includes: (i) a 3‐factor authentication (ie, password, biometrics, and smart device); (ii) mutual authentication ; (iii) shared session key ; and (iv) key freshness . It satisfies desirable security attributes and maintains acceptable efficiency in terms of the computational overheads for resource constrained IoT environment. Further, the informal and formal security analysis using AVISPA proves security strength of the protocol and its robustness against all possible security threats. Simulation results also prove that the scheme is secure against attacks.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Nframe</Emphasis>: A privacy-preserving with non-frameability handover authentication protocol based on (<Emphasis Type="Italic">t</Emphasis>, <Emphasis Type="Italic">n</Emphasis>) secret sharing for LTE/LTE-A networks

Seamless handover between the evolved universal terrestrial radio access network and other access networks is highly desirable to mobile equipments in the long term evolution (LTE) or LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) networks, but ensuring security and efficiency of this process is challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy-preserving with non-frameability handover authentication protocol based on (t, n) secret sharing to fit in with all of the mobility scenarios in the LTE/LTE-A networks, which is called Nframe. To the best of our knowledge, Nframe is the first to support protecting users’ privacy with non-frameability in the handover process. Moreover, Nframe uses pairing-free identity based cryptographic method to secure handover process and to achieve high efficiency. The formal verification by the AVISPA tool shows that Nframe is secure against various malicious attacks and the simulation result indicates that it outperforms the existing schemes in terms of computation and communication cost.     

An efficient chaos‐based 2‐party key agreement protocol with provable security

Key agreement protocol is an important cryptographic primitive, which allows 2 parties to establish a secure session in an open network environment. A various of key agreement protocols were proposed. Nowadays, there still exists some other security flaws waiting to be solved. Owing to reduce the computational and communication costs and improve the security, chaotic map has been studied in‐depth and treated as a good solution. Recently, Liu et al proposed a chaos‐based 2‐party key agreement protocol and demonstrated that it can defend denial‐of‐service attack and replay attack. We found, however, it cannot resist off‐line password‐guessing attack, and it also has some other security flaws. In this paper, we propose an improved chaos‐based 2‐party key agreement protocol. The results prove that the protocol can solve the threats of off‐line password‐guessing attack and other security flaws in the security proof section. What is more, performance analysis shows that the computational cost of the improved protocol is lower than Liu et al protocol.     

A novel self‐healing key distribution scheme based on vector space access structure and MDS codes

Self‐healing group key distribution protocols are useful in applications that have a dynamic group structure. These include broadcast transmission systems and multicast networks such as pay‐per‐view television, embedded and sensor networks, and cellular and wireless networks. To cater to the requirements of these applications, several self‐healing group key distribution protocols are proposed in the literature. Many of these schemes are vulnerable to polynomial factorization or insider replay attacks. Some other schemes impose constraints on the users joining the group or revoked from the group. Motivated by these and other shortcomings of the existing schemes, we hereby propose a novel self‐healing group key distribution protocol. Some of the features of this scheme include that (a) the number and the set of revoked users is not constrained, (b) the communication group can consist of any set of users, and (c) a revoked user is allowed to rejoin the group in any of the later sessions. The scheme is analyzed for its security, and it is found to provide anywise forward and backward secrecy. It is also found to resist anywise collusion attack. Communication and computation complexity of the scheme is analyzed; while doing so, various possible realizations of the scheme is discussed. In addition to the theoretical analysis, the proposed scheme is experimentally verified for its correctness using OMNET++ network simulator.     

Time‐assisted authentication protocol

Authentication is the first step toward establishing a service provider and customer association. In a mobile network environment, a lightweight and secure authentication protocol is one of the most significant factors to enhance the degree of service persistence. This work presents a secure and lightweight keying and authentication protocol suite termed time‐assisted authentication protocol (TAP). The TAP improves the security of protocols with the assistance of time‐based encryption keys and scales down the authentication complexity by issuing a reauthentication ticket. While moving across the network, a mobile customer node sends a reauthentication ticket to establish new sessions with service‐providing nodes. Consequently, this reduces the communication and computational complexity of the authentication process. In the keying protocol suite, a key distributor controls the key generation arguments and time factors, while other participants independently generate a keychain based on key generation arguments. We undertake a rigorous security analysis and prove the security strength of TAP using communicating sequential processes and rank function analysis.     

A simple three‐party password‐based key exchange protocol

In three‐party password‐based key exchange (3PAKE) protocol, a client is allowed to share a human‐memorable password with a trusted server such that two clients can agree on a secret session key for secure connectivity. Recently, many 3PAKE protocols have been developed. However, not all of them can simultaneously achieve security and efficiency. Without any server's public key, this article will propose a simple three‐party password‐based authenticated key exchange scheme. Compared with the existing schemes, the proposed scheme is not only more efficient, but also is secure. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.