A smart traffic monitoring system in smart city surveillance requires publisher and subscriber MQTT-enabled vehicles to share sensitive vehicle and route data with semi-trusted RSU nodes as brokers. To ensure end-to-end confidentiality, we propose the use of an RSU broker as a proxy to perform re-encryption of the exchanged messages between publisher and subscriber vehicles. The RSU brokers are implemented as serverless edge devices with the proxy re-encryption functions designed as function-as-a-service. In peak traffic scenarios, the RSU proxy brokers can become overloaded and drop the re-encryption operations. Additionally, a malicious actor can send counterfeit re-encryption requests to overload the brokers leading to Denial-of-Service attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to mitigate DoS attacks by balancing the re-encryption functions from overloaded brokers. This problem is modeled as an online optimization problem , solved using a greedy heuristic approach, and compared with a baseline approach. The objective function is to reallocate the minimum number of clients when brokers are overloaded since this operation brings additional overhead for clients. Our experimental analysis shows that the greedy approach manages to move up to 5 times fewer clients than the baseline approach, depending on the scenario considered.

Maritime communication, critical for global oceanic trade, faces challenges and opportunities with advancements in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Traditional methods are susceptible to interception due to open channels, limited authentication, jamming, and other security risks. Securing vessel movements and locations in Internet of Vessels (IoV) is essential to prevent unauthorized data interception and tampering during transmission. We propose a ship authentication method using location-based secure keys to ensure the confidentiality of a vessel’s whereabouts. The proposed scheme’s robustness is validated through formal and informal security analyses, and formal verification using the Scyther automated verification tool, demonstrating its effectiveness against potential attacks in maritime networks. Comparative studies indicate that utilizing location-based keys maintains anonymity and untraceability without imposing significant computational or communication burdens. Experimental findings from comprehensive big data analytics and simulations using NS3 validate the scheme’s feasibility and performance.

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 User authentication is a promising security solution in which an external user having his/her mobile device can securely access the real‐time information directly from the deployed smart devices in an Internet of Things‐enabled intelligent precision agricultural environment. To achieve this goal, we present a new signature‐based three factor user authentication scheme. The established session key between a user and the accessed smart device is then used to make secure communication among them to fetch the real‐time data of the device. A detailed security analysis including the random‐oracle based formal security, formal security verification using the broadly recognized automated validation of internet security protocols and applications tool and nonmathematical informal security analysis show the robustness of the proposed scheme against a number of potential attacks. In addition, testbed experiments are performed for measuring computational time of various cryptographic primitives that are used for comparative study among the proposed scheme and other related existing competing schemes. The detailed comparative analysis shows that the proposed scheme has a better trade‐off among its offered security and functionality features, and communication and computational overheads as compared with those for other competing schemes.

Precision farming has a positive potential in the agricultural industry regarding water conservation, increased productivity, better development of rural areas, and increased income. Blockchain technology is a better alternative for storing and sharing farm data as it is reliable, transparent, immutable, and decentralized. Remote monitoring of an agricultural field requires security systems to ensure that any sensitive information is exchanged only among authenticated entities in the network. To this end, we design an efficient blockchain-enabled authenticated key agreement scheme for mobile vehicles-assisted precision agricultural Internet of Things (IoT) networks called$AgroMobiBlock$. The limited existing work on authentication in agricultural networks shows passive usage of blockchains with very high costs.$AgroMobiBlock$proposes a novel idea using the elliptic curve operations on an active hybrid blockchain over mobile farming vehicles with low computation and communication costs. Formal and informal security analysis along with the formal security verification using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) software tool have shown the robustness of$AgroMobiBlock$against man-in-the-middle, impersonation, replay, physical capture, and ephemeral secret leakage attacks among other potential attacks. The blockchain-based simulation on large-scale nodes shows the computational time for an increase in the network and block sizes. Moreover, the real-time testbed experiments have been performed to show the practical usefulness of the proposed scheme.

Smart Energy Systems (SES) are the need of the hour, given the looming dangers of power crises amid changing climatic conditions. However, sensitive data play a critical role in such systems deserving high privacy and security protection. This paper proposes a novel blockchain-based authentication scheme that preserves privacy using the zero-knowledge protocol. During informal analysis, the proposed scheme shows resistance to various attacks such as man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks, impersonation attacks, privileged insider attacks, and ephemeral secret leakage attacks. The formal security verification using AVISPA regards the scheme as safe. In addition, the scheme supports critical features such as anonymity and untraceability within limited computational and communicational costs. A simulation of blockchain using Node.js shows only a linear increase in computation time with an increase in the number of blocks, and transactions, and an exponential increase with the number of nodes.

A blockchain-based smart farming technology provides the agricultural data to the farmers and other users associated with smart farming on a single integrated platform. Moreover, persistence and auditability of stored data in blocks into the blockchain provide the confidence of using the correct data when needed later and adds transparency, anonymity, and traceability at the same time. To fulfill such a goal, in this article, we design a new smart contract-based blockchain-envisioned authenticated key agreement mechanism in a smart farming environment. The device-to-device (D2D) authentication phase and device-to-gateway (D2G) authentication phase support mutual authentication and key agreement between two Internet-of-Things (IoT)-enabled devices and between an IoT device and the gateway node (GWN) in the network, respectively. The blocks are created by the edge servers on the authenticated data of IoT devices received from the GWNs and then sent to the cloud server (CS). The smart contract-based consensus mechanism allows verification and addition of the formed blocks by a peer-to-peer (P2P) CSs network. The security of the proposed scheme is done through formal and informal security analysis, and also using the formal security verification tool. A detailed comparative study reveals that the proposed scheme offers superior security and more functionality features as compared to existing competing authentication protocols. Finally, the blockchain-based simulation has been conducted to measure computational time for a varied number of mined blocks and also a varied number of transactions per block.