The Internet of Things (IoT) is an evolving paradigm expected to permeate every aspect of human existence. IoT is a growing trend in which numerous devices interconnect with each other to transmit sensitive data. One of its significant application areas is the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), which promises a contemporary healthcare environment via linked sensors, clinical systems, and wearable medical devices. However, public communication among these devices faces challenges like security, privacy, authentication, and machine learning/modeling attacks. Additionally, most existing schemes are vulnerable to impersonation, denial-of-service, and machine-learning/modeling attacks. Therefore, this article addresses these challenges by designing a lightweight authentication scheme that utilizes a one-time physical unclonable function (OPUF) and elliptic curve cryptography to reduce the likelihood of machine learning/modeling attacks on wearable medical devices. We utilizeOPUFto resist machine learning/modeling attacks. We also employ a rate-limiting mechanism that restricts the number of authentication requests within a specific time window to enhance resistance against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Moreover, the devised scheme also offers resistance to impersonation, session key leakage, ephemeral secret leakage, desynchronization, and ML-based modeling attacks. We analyze the security and reliability of the devised scheme using informal and formal analysis. Informal analysis indicates that the scheme offers essential security features, while formal analysis substantiates these findings. In the end, we present the results of the performance analysis, which show that the devised scheme achieves an average reduction of 26.92% and 21.53% in computational and communication costs, respectively.

The convergence of Digital Twin (DT) technology with Internet of Things (IoT)-based healthcare systems offers promising capabilities for real-time monitoring, personalized treatment, and predictive diagnostics. However, the integration of context-aware data flows and dynamic device interactions introduces critical security and privacy challenges such as impersonation, desynchronization, and physical tampering attacks. To address these concerns, this paper proposes a lightweight, context-aware authentication protocol using Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD), Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), and cryptographic hash functions within a DT-enabled framework. The protocol supports mutual authentication and secure key establishment among sensing devices, gateways, and medical servers, while protecting device identities and ensuring data confidentiality and integrity without relying on stored credentials. A key innovation of this work is context enforcement through data-type authorization, where each sensing device is restricted to transmit only predefined categories of physiological data (e.g., temperature, oxygen saturation), thereby achieving fine-grained, semantics-driven access control. Security analysis under the Real-Or-Random (ROR) model confirms the protocol’s resistance to impersonation, desynchronization, replay, and leakage of ephemeral secrets. Performance evaluation demonstrates a 25.85% reduction in computational overhead and a 31.59% reduction in communication cost compared to relevant baseline protocols. These results validate the protocol’s effectiveness for securing resource-constrained, real-time healthcare systems in DT-enabled IoT environments.

The convergence of autonomous aerial systems and networking technologies has given rise to the Internet of Drones (IoD) as a compelling paradigm, gaining significant attention from academia and industry stakeholders. Drones often operate in swarm formations to collaboratively achieve autonomous coordination and aerial intelligence, thereby forming a Flying Ad Hoc Network (FANET). However, the persistent vulnerability remains in the insecure communication link, exposing the network to eavesdropping and unauthorized access. Addressing such shortcomings necessitates a robust Authentication and Key Exchange (AKE) protocol. Therefore, we have designed a quantum secure AKE protocol integrating NIST-proven quantum secure primitives, including ML-DSA, symmetric AES, and hash functions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first AKE protocol that leverages a quantum secure signature scheme for securing IoD-enabled FANET applications. The designed protocol incorporates hardware-specific fingerprinting integrated with a noise tolerance mechanism to eliminate the risk of unauthorized device tampering. The use of re-synchronization and robust security measures for credential management further enhances its resilience against desynchronization and stolen attacks. The findings of performance evaluation exhibit the superiority of the designed protocol over the prevalent AKE protocols, with a remarkable reduction of 67.62% in computation cost while achieving a 50% improvement in overall security. Finally, implementing a complete authentication cycle using PIX32 and Pixhawk 6C drones sets a new benchmark as a practical validation of the designed AKE protocol within a real-world IoD testbed.

The Internet of Drones (IoD) represents an emerging paradigm of the Internet of Things (IoT), enabling seamless, coordinated communication among drones and integration with other connected systems. This interconnected network enables autonomous decision-making among drones. As this IoD paradigm continues to expand it faces significant challenges due to its reliance on public channel. Therefore, existing methods often suffer from impersonation, cloning, anonymity violation, and fails to offer end-to-end key secrecy. Moreover, they require high computation resources which present challenges of deployment in resource-constrained IoD environment. To address these challenges, we propose a secure and efficient protocol that provides mutual authentication among participating entities. The protocol resists impersonation, cloning, anonymity violation and offers end-to-end key secrecy. The protocol employs Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), along with a fuzzy extractor, to ensure secure communication. The resilience of the proposed protocol was evaluated through an informal analysis. Its security properties were rigorously verified using formal analysis based on the Real-Or-Random (ROR) model. Evaluation of its performance shows that the proposed protocol outperforms existing solutions, achieving reductions of 20.9% in computation cost and 32.6% in communication overhead. The results demonstrate that the protocol improves security and provides reliability under the evaluated scenarios of IoD systems.

The authentication and key establishment (AKE) mechanism is considered one of the promising solutions for securing communication in Internet of Drones (IoD) applications. Nevertheless, existing AKE mechanisms based on traditional cryptographic techniques rely on integer factorization and discrete logarithms, which are no longer safe with the advent of quantum computers. These shortcomings motivate us to design a cutting-edge Quantum Secure Authentication and Key-Establishment mechanism (QSAKE) for the IoD environment. To the best of our knowledge, QSAKE is the pioneered work that uses advanced quantum-safe cryptography, providing a strong defence beyond traditional methods. To further enhance security, it eliminates storing long-term secrets directly in drone memory, reducing the risk of unauthorized access. A Holybro Pixhawk-based microcontroller is used with a Raspberry Pi connected to a Xilinx Arty A7-100T FPGA board to develop a realistic testbed. Finally, this work stands out as a groundbreaking application of a complete authentication process within a practical IoD testbed, demonstrating its high efficacy and practicality.

Smart grids (SGs) rely on home area networks (HANs) and neighborhood area networks (NANs) to ensure efficient power distribution, real-time monitoring, and seamless communication between smart devices. Despite these advantages, the use of public communication channels in HAN and NAN networks introduces critical challenges, such as vulnerability to impersonation, physical tampering, and scalability issues in resource-constrained environments. These issues compromise the stability, reliability, and security of SG environments. Existing protocols often fail to adequately address these challenges, particularly in ensuring resistance to physical tampering of supply lines and impersonation attacks. Additionally, they struggle to minimize the computation, communication, and energy costs associated with securing a resource-constrained SG environment. Therefore, we propose a robust key exchange and tamper-resistant protocol for HAN and NAN networks to address these limitations. The proposed protocol leverages the physical unclonable function (PUF) mechanism to offer physical tampering resistance to smart meters. We validate our protocol formally using the Random or Real (RoR) model, which confirms its security robustness. Additionally, our informal security analysis highlights the protocol’s resilience against impersonation, physical tampering attacks, etc. We analyze and compare the performance of the proposed protocol, which further demonstrates our protocol’s effectiveness and security compared to competing protocols. Moreover, the proposed protocol achieves resource efficiency with 45.99% and 58.85% substantial reductions in computation overhead and energy overhead, respectively, compared to competing protocols. These results showcase the protocol’s enhanced security and practicality for resource-constrained SG environments.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), pivotal in the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), encompass resource-limited sensor nodes, users, and gateways. Advancements in Internet technologies have substantially facilitated remote data access, rendering WSNs indispensable across various sectors, such as defense, agriculture, disaster management, and healthcare, where they serve as pivotal components for remote monitoring and control mechanisms. Within the IIoT framework, the transmission of critical and sensitive information over public channels presents significant security challenges. Such challenges disrupt operations and compromise the integrity and reliability of industrial processes. The system must include an authentication mechanism to tackle this critical issue that resists potential security threats. Consequently, this article introduced a reliable and secure the three-factor authentication protocol tailored for IIoT environments. The proposed protocol aims to mitigate unauthorized access and safeguard the integrity of industrial operations. We comprehensively evaluated the protocol’s robustness and security efficiency by employing informal and formal security analysis techniques, highlighting its effectiveness in resisting potential threats. This proposed protocol fortifies the network against potential security threats, ensuring security and system reliability in industrial applications. This protocol assists only legitimate users in accessing the sensing devices remotely. Moreover, the statistical results endorse the resource efficiency of the devised protocol as it achieves 43.2% and 35.8% efficiency in terms of communication and computational costs, respectively.

With the growing presence of drones in our skies, securing their operations and ensuring reliable communication has become more crucial than ever. These drones form interconnected networks known as the Internet of Drones (IoD) to facilitate real-time coordination, autonomous aerial surveillance, and special aerial tasks. However, the interaction between drones and ground stations occurs over unregulated and dynamic communication channels, introducing security vulnerabilities such as impersonation, Man-in-the-Middle (MitM), and forgery attacks. Implementing robust authentication protocols can serve as a promising solution to protect drone operations and communication, thereby ensuring the safety and security of our skies. In this article, we introduce a novel authentication and key establishment protocol that uniquely integrates level-triggered Physically Unclonable Function (PUF), BCH error-correcting code, and AES-GCM symmetric encryption, setting a new standard for secure and reliable communication between drones and ground stations. We demonstrate the robustness of our protocol through comprehensive security verification using the Scyther tool, coupled with formal validation within the Random Oracle Model (ROM). Through rigorous performance analysis, we demonstrate the superiority of our protocol over baseline protocols, achieving 64.37% greater efficiency in computation and 26.03% reduction in communication overheads. We also present a realistic implementation of our protocol using Pix32 v6 companion with Raspberry Pi as drone and laptop device as ground station server. The PUF has been implemented in Xilinx Arty A7-100T FPGA board. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work demonstrating the implementation of a complete authentication cycle in real-world IoD settings.

In the evolving landscape of supply chain management, the integration of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology has marked a significant milestone. This development has led to the emergence of a new system in RFID-based supply chain management, which is intricately linked with the advances in the Internet of Things (IoT). RFID technology employs electromagnetic fields to identify and track tags on objects and revolutionizes the management and tracking of items in the supply chain. However, the public communication among RFID tags, RFID readers, and supply chain infrastructure predominantly escalates security and privacy challenges. Several authentication protocols have been proposed to overcome these challenges. However, the vulnerability of most proposed protocols to numerous security attacks renders them inefficient. Therefore, to address these crucial challenges, we devised an RFID-based authentication protocol for supply chain management systems. The incorporation of a physically unclonable function (PUF) into the protocol fortifies the system against physical tampering attacks. To validate the security and effectiveness of the devised protocol, both informal and formal security analysis are conducted. The formal security analysis is conducted using the widely used random oracle model. The informal security analysis reveals that the devised protocol provides enhanced and efficient security features. Furthermore, we perform a comparative analysis with related protocols, focusing on critical performance metrics like communication cost, computation cost, and overall security features. The results of the comparative analysis are promising, indicating a substantial 30.92% reduction in computational cost and a 23.98% reduction in communication cost in comparison to related protocols, thus highlighting the protocol’s superior performance and resource efficiency.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are crucial components in e-healthcare networks. It enables remote patient health monitoring and facilitates seamless communication among medical sensors, wearable devices, and healthcare providers through public communication channels. Despite these advantages, the use of public communication among medical sensors in e-healthcare networks introduces critical challenges, such as vulnerability to impersonation, physical capture, and ephemeral secret leakage, particularly in resource-constrained environments. In recent years, various access control protocols have been developed to mitigate these risks. However, these protocols often fail to ensure robust security while incurring significant communication and computation overhead. To overcome these limitations, we propose a lightweight and robust access control protocol for IoT-based e-healthcare networks using chaotic maps. We propose a novel protocol that integrates a PUF-based mechanism to mitigate the challenges of physical tampering and cloning attacks in e-healthcare networks. It leverages the inherent uniqueness of PUF and enhances security through the high-entropy properties of chaotic maps. We analyze the proposed protocol informally, which confirms that it significantly bolsters efficiency and security. We also validate the security using the Random or Real (RoR) model. Moreover, we verify the security of the proposed protocol using Scyther. These analyses highlight that the proposed protocol offers robust resistance to numerous attacks, such as impersonation, physical capture, and ephemeral secret leakage. Moreover, we also compare it with existing and relevant protocols. The comparative analysis showcases its superior performance. Notably, the proposed authentication protocol significantly reduces 46.84% computational overhead and decreases 31.30% communication overhead, underscoring its enhanced performance and resource efficiency.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of interconnected objects, which congregate and exchange gigantic amounts of data. Usually, pre-deployed embedded sensors sense this massive data. Soon, several applications of IoT are anticipated to exploit emerging 6G technology. Healthcare is one of them, where the 6G-inspired paradigm may facilitate the users to exchange information through hundreds of sensors under the assumption of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT). Integration of medical sensors with AIoT is known as Artificial Intelligence of Medical Things (AIoMT). The secure and seamless interactions among 6G-enabled AIoMT users should be the primary challenge. Furthermore, resource-constrained wearable sensing devices, with their inability to execute complex security solutions, provide an ideal attraction for malicious entities to launch diverse attacks. These challenges have motivated us to design a cost-effective authenticated solution (CAS) for 6G-enabled AIoMT healthcare applications. Our CAS protocol not only prevents cyber threats like impersonation session key secrecy, but it can also prevent physical threats like hardware tampering. We observe formal and informal security validations to endorse its robustness and effectiveness. Performance comparison reveals that CAS protocol offers maximum security enrichment. Moreover, CAS is cost-effective as it has achieved 33% and 60% reduction in computation and communication overheads, respectively, compared to contemporary competing related protocols.

The rise of smart cities is directly connected to the increasing use of vehicles. The growing vehicle utilization has driven the emergence of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), facilitating instant information exchange among vehicles. The system provides essential information regarding road conditions, traffic patterns, and more relevant data. VANETs encompass two fundamental categories of communication exchanges, namely Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I). V2I technology facilitates the integration of cars and transportation infrastructure, enabling effective communication between vehicles and infrastructure. Nevertheless, the potential of V2I communication has various security concerns arising from prevalent security threats. Current authentication techniques encounter challenges regarding complexity, security, and privacy considerations. We designed a hash-based lightweight and anonymous authentication scheme to address the aforementioned restrictions and enhance the effectiveness of authentication in V2I architecture. This scheme effectively combines identity, password, and bio-metric to enhance resistance against impersonation, denial of service, and privileged insider attacks. The devised scheme distinguishes itself by a comparative analysis and security proofs, highlighting its superior capability in guaranteeing secure authentication in V2I communication. The comprehensive security analysis conducted formally and informally showcases the robustness of the proposed solution against several threats. The performance evaluation results show that our scheme demonstrates a decrease in the computational cost of 51.40% approximately and a reduction in communication overhead of around 22.57%. These results establish the efficiency and scalability of the proposed scheme as a viable solution for V2I architecture.

The energy Internet (EI) presents a novel paradigm for renewable energy distribution that utilizes communication and computing technologies to revolutionize the conventional intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) and power grid into a structure that provides assistance to open innovation. The EI offers sustainable and bidirectional transmission for the improvement and analysis of energy convention among electric vehicles (EVs) and service providers. To ensure efficient, reliable, and secure operation, EI must be safe from security attacks. Therefore, efficient and secure key negotiation is a significant issue for the EI-based Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) architecture. Thus, to ensure the system’s security, we have devised a robust scheme to facilitate a secure key agreement between the entities involved for the secure and efficient renewable energy distribution for the EI-based energy vehicles in V2G. The devised scheme’s robustness is solicited through the widely accepted formal random or real (RoR) model. In addition, the informal security analysis is conducted on the devised scheme, which is evident that the designed scheme achieves all the required security features of EI-based ITS. Moreover, the performance evaluation results endorse that the designed scheme achieves the desired security and minimizes the communication, computation, and energy overhead by 29.33%, 27.94%, and 28.08% in comparison to the existing competitive schemes.

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a vital application of the Internet of Things (IoT) that plays a significant role in gathering a patient's healthcare information. This collected data helps special professionals like doctors or physicians analyze patients' health status to cure different diseases. However, collecting such information from an insecure channel can be threatening due to the potential security threats. Therefore, it is crucial to secure this sensitive information. This article proposes a secure and lightweight authentication protocol for WBAN. The devised protocol is scalable, secure, and lightweight compared to various relevant competing protocols. The informal security analysis shows that the designed protocol is lightweight, secure, and efficient in resisting various major attacks. The performance analysis demonstrates our protocol's supremacy over various competing protocols in terms of computation and communication costs, inducing efficiency of 20.3% and 12.3%, respectively. Moreover, the practical performance of the designed protocol from the network point of view is measured using the widely recognized NS3 simulation tool.

The emergence of contemporary technologies like cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the trends in the cyber world to serve humanity. There are plenty of applications in which they are being used, especially in smart cities and their constituents, Maritime Transportation System (MTS) is one of them. The IoT-enabled MTS has the potential to entertain the growing challenges of modern-day ship transportation. Secure real-time data access from numerous smart IoT devices is the most critical and crucial exercise for Big Data acquisition in IoT-enabled MTS. Therefore, we have developed a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) based authenticated key agreement solution to deal with this challenge. This solution enables the mobile user and IoT node to mutually authenticate each other via Cloud-Gateway before real-time data exchange and transmission in IoT-enabled MTS. The use of PUF in our solution brings invincibility against physical security threats. An inclusive security analysis under the assumption of the specified threat model is carried out to substantiate the security resilience of our solution. The conduct of our solution is realized through security features, communication, and computation cost and It has been observed that our solution achieves efficiency of 37.3% and 9.7% in communication and computation overhead, respectively. Moreover, the network performance effectiveness of our solution is demonstrated in NS3 implementation.

The epidemic growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) objects have revolutionized Maritime Transportation Systems (MTS). Though, it becomes challenging for the centralized cloud-centric framework to fulfil the application requirements such as low latency and power utilization. The introduction of the distributed edge-centric framework has recently helped the IoT-enabled MTS to meet these requirements by manipulating the tasks at the edge of the networks. Despite the fact that MTS leverages mobile subscribers by overcoming inherent cloud computing limitations, data security and user privacy requirements in establishing the MTS setup are still non-trivial challenges. In this article, we develop a key agreement solution for mobile users to realize mutual authentication in a single round. Our protocol offers user anonymity to maintain user privacy, and it can prevent physical attacks by physically unclonable functions. Initially, the security analysis is conferred to substantiate our protocol’s security persistence or strength. Later, its performance correlation is observed under the assumption of diverse metrics in a predefined empirical setup. The meticulous performance correlation endorses the precedence of our protocol over specified related protocols.

The popularity of vehicles promotes the evolution of smart cities. This development makes vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) a widely used inter-vehicular communication to obtain information about road conditions, speed, vehicle location and traffic congestion. Such a public network is vulnerable to different security threats. Overall, the security of private data in VANET is a critical task. It has been observed that various authentication protocols have been devised for VANETs. However, most of the proposed protocols are not secure and reliable because of different security threats, including denial of service, replay, forgery and impersonation attacks, etc. Furthermore, the existing protocols used extra communication overhead and computational cost, so they become infeasible for resource-constrained environments. In this article, we design a lightweight and secure privacy-preserving key agreement protocol for VANETs using the hashing technique, which provides an efficient and secure data transmission mechanism over a public communication channel. Detailed security analysis shows that the proposed protocol is secure against various attacks. To evaluate the performance of the protocol, we simulate key cryptographic operations of vehicles, a roadside unit, and a trusted party agent on Arduino, low-end and high-end devices, respectively. The experimental results show that compared with the other related protocols, the computational cost and communication overhead of our protocol are reduced on average by 8.797% and 22.06 %, respectively. Additionally, simulation results on NS3 show that our protocol consistently achieves a packet delivery ratio higher than 99.91 %. Therefore, our protocol is secure and reliable for VANET environment.

Industry 5.0 is the automation, digitization, and data communication of the industrial procedure that comprises industrial cyber–physical systems (I-CPSs), industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and artificial intelligence (AI). In the I-CPS-enabled healthcare ecosystem, intelligent wearable devices have been extensively employed to sense body information and measure the health status of the patients. Besides other IIoT applications, the I-CPS-enabled healthcare ecosystem also bears various challenges. For instance, due to the communal communication mediums, the security of a patient’s physiological datum is becoming a significant challenge these days. In order to cope with this challenge, we presented a secure and lightweight key establishment protocol. To the best of our knowledge, this protocol is the first application of physically unclonable function (PUF) in the I-CPS-enabled healthcare. The security of the designed protocol is proved with the help of a widely recognized real-or-random (ROR) model. The practical demonstration of our protocol from the network perspective is also measured through broadly recognized NS3 simulator tool.

The rising popularity of ICT and the Internet has enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to offer advantageous assistance to Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET), realizing a relay node’s role among the disconnected segments in the road. In this scenario, the communication is done between Vehicles to UAVs (V2U), subsequently transforming into a UAV-assisted VANET. UAV-assisted VANET allows users to access real-time data, especially the monitoring data in smart cities using current mobile networks. Nevertheless, due to the open nature of communication infrastructure, the high mobility of vehicles along with the security and privacy constraints are the significant concerns of UAV-assisted VANET. In these scenarios, Deep Learning Algorithms (DLA) could play an effective role in the security, privacy, and routing issues of UAV-assisted VANET. Keeping this in mind, we have devised a DLA-based key-exchange protocol for UAV-assisted VANET. The proposed protocol extends the scalability and uses secure bitwise XOR operations, one-way hash functions, including user’s biometric verification when users and drones are mutually authenticated. The proposed protocol can resist many well-known security attacks and provides formal and informal security under the Random Oracle Model (ROM). The security comparison shows that the proposed protocol outperforms the security performance in terms of running time cost and communication cost and has effective security features compared to other related protocols.