Integrating advanced communication technologies has significantly enhanced power distribution efficiency, reliability, and sustainability in the evolving landscape of smart microgrids. However, this integration introduces substantial security challenges, particularly concerning authentication and critical agreement processes, which are essential for maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of smart grid communications. This paper presents a novel authentication and key agreement protocol specifically designed for the smart grid environment by incorporating advanced cryptographic techniques such as ECC, physical unclonable functions, and blockchain. Our protocol ensures mutual authentication between devices, robust key management, and resistance to prevalent security threats. We conduct a comprehensive security analysis and performance evaluation, demonstrating that our protocol enhances security and maintains the efficiency necessary for practical deployment in smart grids. The results indicate significant improvements in security and performance metrics compared to existing solutions, establishing our protocol as a viable and effective option for securing smart grid communications. • Blockchain-based key management ensures scalable, resilient data exchange. • Novel ECC- and PUF-driven protocol enables secure smart microgrid authentication. • Protocol achieves mutual authentication, session secrecy, and forward secrecy. • Resistant to replay, man-in-the-middle, cloning, and physical attacks. • Supports lightweight operations suitable for real-time smart energy systems.

The Space Information Network (SIN) plays a crucial role in terrestrial communication, delivering time-bound services from ground stations to users. It relies on moving low-orbit earth (LEO) satellites for uninterrupted coverage. However, untrustworthy connectivity poses several security challenges during handover services for users maintained by the satellites. While traditional cryptographic techniques provide a degree of security, the advent of quantum computing exposes significant vulnerabilities. This work proposes a quantum-safe and continuous authentication mechanism with handover provision. The proposed authentication protocol uses post-quantum primitives of the Frodo key encapsulation mechanism, currently an approved mechanism under ISO/IEC 18033-2. It ensures privacy and ensures users’ anonymity. The security of the proposed protocol is analyzed using the quantum random oracle (QROM) model. Formal verification confirms its safety for practical adoption as a post-quantum candidate. Further, the performance evaluation shows an authentication delay and energy consumption of the proposed protocol within practical limits, making it a suitable candidate for privacy-preserved post-quantum adoption for SIN.

The SAE J1939, a higher-layer broadcast communication protocol with ISO 11898-1 specification at its lower layer, has significantly impacted the automobile industry. However, the SAE J1939 frames lack authenticity and secrecy, rendering it vulnerable to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. While current authentications establish keys among electronic control units (ECUs), they abort ongoing sessions to re-initiate fresh sessions. We present DSR-CAAP, a robust authenticated key exchange protocol that establishes session keys among ECUs without aborting ongoing sessions during DoS and adaptive DoS. DSR-CAAP offers channel-aware key establishment using a hierarchical-challenge response mechanism. It is provably secure under the random oracle model and verified using the Tamarin. The empirical analysis reveals that DSR-CAAP supports comprehensive security attributes with enhanced 3R (robustness, reliability, and resilience) and reduces bus load, communication, computation, and energy costs. Besides, simulation in MATLAB 2023a reveals that DSR-CAAP outperforms existing protocols in communication response time. Thus, DSR-CAAP provides lightweight, secure solutions for in-vehicle heavy-duty vehicles.

For Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), the security of sensitive data of patients is of the utmost importance, particularly in healthcare environments. This study presents a novel methodology for improving the efficacy of signature aggregation in a scenario involving doctors and patients while mitigating concerns about location privacy. Though there have been prior proposals for signature aggregation schemes, the proposed approach seeks to optimize the aggregation process within the considered scenario, thereby improving performance and reducing computational and communication burden. In addition, the proposed scheme integrates a resilient mechanism that safeguards the doctor’s location privacy by utilizing the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT). Advanced cryptographic algorithms and location-anonymization techniques are employed in the proposed method to safeguard the confidentiality of the doctors’ location. The security of the proposed scheme is formally analyzed using the Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and formally verified using the automated software validation tool, known as the Scyther tool, and an informal analysis of various security attributes confirms the security robustness of the proposed scheme. The efficacy is evaluated in comparison to analogous works utilizing the Cygwin software. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme has lower communication costs as compared to existing competing schemes. Moreover, the serving ratio in the proposed scheme is high even if the number of patients is low for doctors.

Broadcast encryption schemes for the standard Controller Area Network (CAN 2.0B) reduce bandwidth for data transmission from one electronic control unit (ECU) to others while assuring confidentiality. If received data is damaged, CAN 2.0B enables remote transmission request (RTR), allowing recipient ECUs to request retransmissions. However, retransmission for n ECUs increases the communication cost of current broadcast encryption techniques to a complexity O(n) for intra-vehicular networks (IVNs). This paper designs a novel broadcast encryption called SMEBE-CAN that retains its sublinear complexity of $O(\sqrt {\text{n}} )$ throughout IVN retransmissions. Besides, we devise a robust authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol using SMEBE-CAN to address IVN data corruption during regular communication. Our protocol is provably secure in the standard model under the harness of the bilinear Diffie-Hellman exponent (BDHE) assumption. Besides, it is formally verified using the Scyther tool. As proof of concept, a performance comparison for 100 ECUs, with 10 ECUs per group, shows that the SMEBE-CAN has a lower authentication delay when ECUs are run at higher frequencies. Nonetheless, it ensures a lower bus load than related schemes, making it fit for practical usage.

Communication in modern cars is managed by a controller area network (CAN) bus protocol and its extensions for electronic control units (ECUs). The CAN bus is a preferred method for reliable real-time broadcast communication. However, unprotected CAN communications make the vehicles vulnerable to a variety of practical malicious wired/wireless attacks. In this work, we analyze the existing frame-level authentication protocol and identify weaknesses and limitations. To address this, we provide a protocol suite for entity authentication, key management, a secure message flow for remote transmission request frames and session key update to be applied for vehicle connection with external devices. We prove the security of our protocol in the random oracle model and assess its resistance against known attacks. We formally verify the security of our protocol using the Tamarin tool. Our simulation results indicate that our protocol improves efficiency.