The incorporation of cloud to Internet of Health Things (IoHT) referred to as Cloud-assisted IoHT (CIoHT) assures efficient storage of the sensitive health data with better flexibility and scalability. However, owing to the openness nature of the CIoHT infrastructure, it is often susceptible to several security threats. On the contrary, security is an essential aspect of the CIoHT infrastructure. Thus, to address these security concerns, it is a common practice to establish a mutual authentication scheme among the communicating cloud entities that ensures to satisfy all the essential security requirements. In line with this, establishing trust among these entities is also a significant prerequisite. However, after a rigorous literature survey, it is found that all the existing authentication schemes are either vulnerable to various security threats or bear higher computation and/or communication overheads. Above all, these schemes have either taken the security or the trust aspect into consideration, but not both. Thus, we have proposed a Zero Trust Security (ZTS) based mutual authentication scheme for the CIoHT infrastructure using a Puncturable Pseudorandom Function (PPRF) in this paper. The detailed security analysis using informal and formal security analysis, and formal security verification using AVISPA tool ensures that the proposed scheme is highly robust against various known attacks needed in a CIoHT infrastructure. Moreover, the comprehensive comparative analysis exhibit that in comparison to the related literature our scheme provides higher computation and communication efficiency. Thus, unlike the existing schemes, the proposed scheme satisfies the vital security-trust-efficiency traid; ensuring its feasibility for implementation in real-world CIoHT infrastructure.

Fraud detection in Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications remains a pressing challenge. Adversaries exploit injection, eavesdropping, and man-in-the-middle attacks that often evade conventional detection pipelines. Existing blockchain and Machine Learning (ML) based solutions improve accuracy but lack verifiability, auditability, and resilience against quantum-era threats. We proposeQuanFraud, a protocol that integrates Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ)–$\theta$quantum state verification, Decentralized Identifiers (DID), and a Quantum Support Vector Classifier (QSVC) within an auditable blockchain framework. The scheme ensures that fraud detection outcomes are not only data-driven but also cryptographically verifiable and resistant to identity-correlation and replay attacks. We evaluateQuanFraudon a financial dataset of 20,000 records (117 features), using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) under 10- fold cross-validation. Results show that classical baselines such as Random Forest and XGBoost achieve balanced accuracy above 77%, while QSVC alone yields 42.1$\pm$2.8%. This gap indicates that the contribution ofQuanFraudis not accuracy leadership but a verifiable, auditable fraud-detection protocol under Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) constraints, where QSVC provides kernel-level privacy, quantum state verification, and on-chain checks that classical models do not offer. We further discuss complexity and scalability, highlighting the scheme's suitability for deployment in resource-constrained IoT environments.

Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) refers to an arbitrarily distributed network that is an integral subset of an Intelligent Transport System (ITS) and plays a vital role in providing convenient transportation, improving traffic safety, etc.VANETrealizes interactive communication through wireless medium among Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I). But, owing to the open/public communication nature of the wireless medium, it is often prone to different security threats. On the other hand, security is a significant aspect of theVANETframework. Thus, to address the security concerns, it is a common practice to establish an authentication and key agreement protocol among the communicating entities that ensures to provide the essential security requirements. However, after extensive literature survey, it is identified that all the existing authentication protocols are prone to different security threats. Moreover, the implementation of these protocols in real-world scenarios becomes impractical as it bears higher computation and/or communication overheads. Therefore, in this paper, we have proposed a trust-extended mutual authentication protocol for theVANETframework using a Puncturable Pseudorandom Function (PPRF). The informal and formal security verification of our protocol proves that it provides comparably higher security than the existing schemes. Further, our protocol is simulated using a well-known AVISPA simulation tool and the results show that our protocol is SAFE against replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. Additionally, in comparison to the existing literature our protocol provides higher computation and communication efficiency. Therefore, our protocol is reliable and secure for real-world implementation in theVANETframework.

Abstract In recent era, the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) commonly known as drones has emerged as a one of the most significant and promising tools which has demonstrated its wide range of implementations variating from commercial domain to the field of defense due to its distinct capabilities such as inspection, surveillance, precision and so forth. Internet connected drones provides a propitious trend that boosts the flying safety, and service qualities of the UAVs where numerous low‐altitude drones winged in different flying regions for executing a precise task such as gathering the real‐time information from the unuttered environment to be interpretated by users. Nevertheless, the open‐access insecure communications in hostile environment, the issues like safety and confidentiality threats, various security concerns such as the leakage of flying courses, identities, position, and gathered data by the drones are upstretched. To address these security concerns, access control mechanism provides a potential service in terms of authentication and key agreement for securing the communication between the individual drones within their respective flying regions. This article introduces a robust, efficient, lightweight, and privacy preserving ECC integrated access control approach by employing digital certificate with considering the high dynamicity and mobility of the drones. The designing of this proposed approach, that is, CLAASC‐IoD is influenced by the aim of inter‐drone and drone‐to‐ground station communication in the IoD paradigm. The detailed analysis of security using probabilistic random oracle model as well as simulation using well‐accepted security verification tool AVISPA and comparative performance evaluation supports the claim of robustness, effectiveness, and proficiency.

Scalability, heterogeneity, energy efficiency, cost-effectiveness, robustness, interoperability, and low latency data transfer are some of the critical challenges posed by the Internet of Things in the modern era of the Internet. Content Centric Networks (CCN) and Named Data Networks (NDN) are some proposed solutions that can meet the abovementioned challenges. In-network caching, multicasting, content security, and decoupling of data from location are the significant advantages offered by the CCN. Despite the diverse benefits of CCN, it has to face some significant problems, such as how the key management and distribution are performed among the consumers and key managers efficiently, how the node-to-node communication occurs, and how to provide services to the neighboring nodes while saving resources, etc. This paper proposes an Elliptic Curve Cryptography-based secure communication protocol supporting broadcast/multicast IoT data. Push-based data generation and transfer, typical requirements of IoT devices, have been integrated with the proposed protocol. The proposed communication protocol has been compared with existing protocols regarding computation and communication overheads as well as functional and security features. The proposed protocol has been evaluated in AVISPA and NS3 simulators for security and efficiency, and it is found that the proposed protocol outperforms the existing protocols in all aspects.