Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) has become a key enabler for data-intensive vehicular services, yet its open wireless medium and dynamic mobility patterns introduce significant security and privacy challenges. Existing authentication mechanisms for VCC often rely on computation-heavy cryptographic primitives, rendering them unsuitable for resource-constrained Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)-based vehicular devices. This study proposes a lightweight RFID authentication protocol that leverages XOR operations, hash functions, and a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) to provide secure mutual authentication, resistance to physical tampering, and robustness against de-synchronization attacks. The security of the proposed scheme is rigorously validated through informal analysis and formal verification using the ProVerif and the Scyther tools. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed protocol reduces computation overhead by an average of 66.8% compared with existing schemes. Although the communication overhead increases by an average of 436.01% due to the inclusion of essential security parameters, this impact is marginal in practical VCC environments where high-bandwidth V2I links dominate overall latency. Thus, the proposed protocol delivers strong security guarantees while maintaining lightweight performance suitable for real-time VCC applications.

Fifth-generation (5G) networks are widely applied in diverse fields, and numerous devices are densely interconnected in these networks. As the number of devices increases, security and authentication concerns become more important for this technology. Furthermore, the concurrent connections of many devices result in severe signaling congestion, and the 5G-AKA protocol has certain vulnerabilities. In 2020, Cao et al. proposed a novel scheme referred to as LSAA that employs the Chebyshev chaotic map, which significantly alleviated the aforementioned problems and fulfilled security requirements. However, their scheme overlooked critical security aspects like untraceability. In this study, we proposed Chebyshev-polynomials-based efficient and secure access authentication (CESA), an efficient and secure access authentication scheme inspired by the lightweight and secure access authentication scheme for both user equipment (UE) and massive machine-type communication devices in 5G networks. We achieve improved security properties, efficiency, and lightweight characteristics compared to existing protocols. CESA includes a lightweight authentication method using an extended Chebyshev chaotic map, ensuring resistance to various attacks for common UE and massive machine-type communication devices. CESA offers robust security features, including mutual authentication, identity anonymity, secure session key agreement, and a perfect forward secrecy/public key-based scheme, all achieved with high efficiency and low computational cost. We conducted a rigorous evaluation of CESA using the formal security analysis tools ProVerif and Scyther. This system reduces bandwidth consumption, signaling and transmission cost, computational cost, and storage cost by 75.98% on average.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is progressively being integrated into everyday life, with cloud computing systems being widely employed to monitor and manage IoT devices. Cloud servers offer centralized high-performance processing of large-scale data utilizing millions of connected sensors and geographically distributed devices. Distributed data processing with low latency is important for autonomous driving, healthcare, virtual reality, and augmented reality in cloud services based on 5G technology. mobile edge computing (MEC) infrastructure enables cloud services at the edge of the network in a 5G ecosystem, allowing for real-time processing of large amounts of data. MEC involves an open infrastructure that allows for access by heterogeneous devices, increasing the complexity of security challenge. This, in turn, brings the potential risk of attacks that could result in information leakage and compromise the privacy of users. In extreme cases, attacks may even pose a risk to human life. Thus, an effective authentication mechanism is required to prevent attacks and protect privacy in MEC environments. To address this issue, we propose a secure and anonymous authentication scheme that enhances security in MEC environments. In the proposed scheme, the user and MEC server establish a secure session key without the need of a trusted third party. The proposed scheme is designed to be secure from various known attacks attempted by internal and external adversaries. We have conducted both formal and informal analyses to prove the security of the proposed scheme and compared its performance with related schemes to validate its effectiveness and practical application.

To accelerate the deployment of fifth-generation (5G) cellular networks, millions of devices are being connected to massive Internet of Things (IoT) networks. However, advances in the scale of connectivity on 5G networks may increase the attack surface of these devices, thereby increasing the number of attack opportunities. To address the potential security risks in IoT systems, one feasible security practice involves the development of secure and efficient user authentication schemes. In 2017, Dhillon and Kalra proposed a three-factor user authentication scheme for IoT. We noted that their scheme suffers from several security weaknesses. In this study, we specifically demonstrate that the scheme proposed by Dhillon and Kalra (1) is not secured from a stolen mobile device attack; (2) does not prevent a user impersonation attack; (3) does not provide a session key agreement; (4) does not have a contingency plan (e.g., a revocation phase) for situations where a user’s private key is compromised, or a mobile device is stolen or lost. We propose an improved three-factor user authentication scheme to resolve these security issues. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme provides desirable attributes for IoT environments and that its computation and communication costs are suitable for extremely low-cost IoT devices.