The recent rise in Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart homes has introduced new security risks, particularly due to resource constraints in IoT devices, which make it challenging to design efficient security solutions. Current authentication schemes are vulnerable to various security attacks, including replay, man-in-the-middle, and impersonation attacks; lack forward secrecy; and exhibit high computational and communication complexity. To address these issues, this paper presents a secure and efficient authentication scheme tailored to IoT-based smart home surveillance networks. The proposed scheme employs Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), SHA-256 hashing, and XOR operations to achieve mutual authentication and establish session keys between mobile devices, gateway nodes, and sensor nodes. The security analysis, conducted using the Random Oracle Model and ProVerif, confirms that the proposed scheme is secure against various attacks. The performance analysis carried out on a heterogeneous testbed reveals that the proposed protocol has low computation cost (1.15 ms), small communication overhead (6784 bits), optimal storage requirement (576 bytes), and low energy consumption (1.67 mJ per session), which makes it highly appropriate for resource-limited IoT networks. The proposed scheme achieves a good trade-off between security and efficiency, offering a viable solution for secure smart-home surveillance.

The Internet of Drones (IoD) extends the capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles, enabling them to participate in a connected network. In IoD infrastructure, drones communicate not only among themselves but also with users and a control center. This interconnected communication framework holds promise for various applications, from collaborative decision-making to real-time data exchange. However, the expansion of communication in IoD also introduces new challenges, particularly in terms of security, privacy and authentication. Unfortunately, the current authentication protocols are inadequate in offering robust security features against various attacks in the IoD environment. To address these security issues and limitations, we proposed a secure protocol for the IoD environment using chaotic maps and hash functions. In addition, we also employed a physically unclonable function in the development of the proposed protocol. We assess the security of the protocol through both informal and formal security analysis. The formal security analysis is conducted through a widely used random or real (RoR) model. The informal analysis shows the rigorous security features against various attacks, such as masquerading, anonymity violation, and physical cloning attacks. Moreover, we compare the performance of the devised protocol with similar existing protocols across important performance parameters such as communication overhead, computation overhead, and security features. The devised protocol provides a 67.86% and 17.80% reduction in computation and communication overheads, respectively, as compared to related protocols. The analysis demonstrates the proposed protocol’s capacity to support secure communication in the IoD environment and satisfy desirable security attributes.

The communication among smart meters (SMs) and neighborhood area network (NAN) gateways is a fundamental requisite for managing the energy consumption at the consumer site. The bidirectional communication among SMs and NANs over the insecure public channel is vulnerable to impersonation, SM traceability, and SM physical capturing attacks. Many existing schemes’ insecurities and/or inefficiencies call for an efficient and secure authentication scheme for smart grid infrastructure. In this article, we present a privacy preserving and lightweight authentication scheme for smart grid (LAS-SG) using elliptic curve cryptography. The proposedLAS-SGis proved as secure under the standard model. Moreover, the efficiency of the LAS-SG is extracted through a real-time experiment, which attests that proposedLAS-SGcompletes a round of authentication in 20.331 ms by exchanging only two messages and 192 B. Due to the adequate efficiency and ample security, the proposedLAS-SGis more appropriate for SG environments.

The rapid advancements in smart grid (SG) technology extend a large number of applications including vehicle charging, smart buildings, and smart cities through the efficient use of advanced communication architecture. However, the underlying public channel leads these services to be vulnerable to many threats. Recently, some security schemes were proposed to counter these threats. However, the insecurities of some of these schemes against key compromise impersonation (KCI) and related attacks or compromise on efficiency calls for a secure and efficient authentication scheme for SG infrastructure. A new scheme to secure SG communication is presented in this article to provide a direct device-to-device authentication among smart meter and neighborhood area network gateway. Designed specifically to resists KCI and related attacks, the proposed scheme is more secure and completes the authentication procedure by using the least communication cost as compared with related schemes, which is evident through security and efficiency comparisons.

The advancements in the internet of things (IoT) require specialized security protocols to provide unbreakable security along with computation and communication efficiencies. Moreover, user privacy and anonymity has emerged as an integral part, along with other security requirements. Unfortunately, many recent authentication schemes to secure IoT-based systems were either proved as vulnerable to different attacks or prey of inefficiencies. Some of these schemes suffer from a faulty design that happened mainly owing to undue emphasis on privacy and anonymity alongside performance efficiency. This article aims to show the design faults by analyzing a very recent hash functions-based authentication scheme for cloud-based IoT systems with misunderstood privacy cum efficiency tradeoff owing to an unadorned design flaw, which is also present in many other such schemes. Precisely, it is proved in this article that the scheme of Wazid et al. cannot provide mutual authentication and key agreement between a user and a sensor node when there exists more than one registered user. We then proposed an improved scheme and proved its security through formal and informal methods. The proposed scheme completes the authentication cycle with a minor increase in computation cost but provides all security goals along with privacy.