The insufficient trustworthiness of fog nodes in fog computing leads to new security and privacy problems in communication between entities. Existing authentication schemes rely on a trusted third party, or assume that fog nodes are trustworthy, or the authentication overhead is high, which is inconsistent with the characteristics of fog computing. To solve the problem of secure communication in the fog computing environment, we propose an efficient blockchain-based secure remote authentication protocol for the fog-enabled Internet of Things (BSRA). Specifically, blockchain is introduced to construct distributed trust for the fog computing environment. Only lightweight cryptographic primitives, such as physical unclonable functions (PUFs) and cryptographic hash functions, are exploited to design the authentication scheme. In addition, we use temporary identities and the authentication-piggybacking-synchronization to ensure the anonymity and effectiveness of the authentication scheme. We conduct security analysis to demonstrate that BSRA can provide guarantees against various known attacks. We also evaluate the performance of BSRA from several aspects, and the results show that BSRA is effective.

Designing an efficient and secure authentication scheme is an significant means to ensure the security of IoT systems. Hundreds of authentication schemes tailored for IoT environments have been proposed in recent years, and regrettably, many of them were soon found to have succumbed to security vulnerabilities. In an effort to investigate the underlying reason for this, Wang et al. (at TIFS’23) recently analyzed the vulnerability of authentication schemes from the perspective of provable security. However, we observe that some authentication schemes with sound security proofs and heuristic security analysis are also not resistant to certain attacks, and even those that have been improved several times are still not immune. To explore the deep-seated reasons for security vulnerabilities in IoT authentication schemes, we divide security attacks into explicit and implicit attacks and find that many authentication schemes exhibit security under explicit attacks but are rendered vulnerable under implicit attacks. Further, we propose the relationship between the design goals of security attributes of authentication schemes and implicit attacks, analyze the vulnerability of three typical authentication schemes under implicit attacks, and find that only the security attributes capable of resisting the strongest implicit attacks are secure. Finally, we offer some specific suggestions on how to achieve the security attribute goals.

Anonymity, robust synchronization, and perfect forward secrecy are the most important security properties of authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocols. Designing AKA protocols that simultaneously achieve these security properties and availability in the IoT environment is a challenging task. AKA protocols built using public key cryptographic primitives have advantages in achieving these critical security properties, but performing expensive public-key cryptographic operations is inefficient for resource-constrained IoT devices. The authentication protocols based on symmetric cryptographic primitives are often subject to various attacks. This paper proposes a secure lightweight AKA protocol with critical security properties (called CS-LAKA) for IoT environments without using public-key cryptographic primitives. LAKA cleverly achieves the security goals of anonymity, robust synchronization, and perfect forward secrecy by embedding dynamic identities in authenticators, and a few additional exchange messages are added. This enables LAKA to have both robust security and high efficiency. Subsequently, we perform a formal security analysis to prove that LAKA is secure, and compared with existing related schemes, LAKA has obvious advantages in terms of security, functionality and running performance.

Wearable computing has been used in a wide range of applications. But wearable computing often suffers from various security and privacy issues. To solve these issues, many effective authentication schemes have been proposed. However, most of the existing schemes are vulnerable to various known attacks (such as desynchronization attack, privileged-insider attack, and anonymity attack), or require high computation and communication costs, and are not suitable for resource-constrained wearable devices, or simultaneous verification of multiple wearable devices is not supported. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new anonymous authentication and group proof protocol for wearable computing, which achieves mutual authentication between the wearable device and user and between user and cloud server, and generates a group proof for multiple wearable devices. Further, we extend the Real-Or-Random (ROR) model to support anonymity and group proof, and formally prove that the proposed scheme is provably secure under the extended security model. In addition, the informal security analysis is demonstrated that the proposed scheme is more resilient against known attacks. Finally, compared with some existing schemes, the proposed scheme offers more functionality features and requires less communication and computation costs.

This paper introduces a new type of behavioral ordered weighted averaging (BOWA) operator, to incorporate decision maker’s gains and losses behavior tendency into the information aggregation process. The main characteristic of this BOWA operator is that it considers behavioral weights and ordered weights in the same formulation. We further provide a calculation method of the behavioral weights, in which various psychological preferences of different attribute types of the decision maker can be expressed intuitively. In addition, we discuss some particular cases of BOWA operator and its main properties. Finally, a numerical example is used to illustrate the use of the proposed method.

To integrate incentives into the information aggregation process in decision making, we propose a new type of aggregation operator, denominated as the quantile induced heavy ordered weighted averaging (QI-HOWA) operator in this paper. A primary characteristic of this type of operator is that the quantile variable can be used not only to measure the relative performance of alternatives but also to facilitate the incentive preference expression of the decision maker. We further provide a calculation technology of the QI-HOWA weights, in which various incentive preferences of the decision maker can be considered through parameter adjustment. In addition, we discuss certain properties of the QI-HOWA operator and note the extent to which they are effective. Finally, a numerical example regarding the selection of optimal alternatives by incentive measures is provided, and the aggregations are compared with those of ordered weighted averaging and unweighted averaging operators to illustrate the validity of the QI-HOWA operator.

Considering the problem of inadequate security in wireless sensor networks. The paper proposes a new key agreement scheme based on bilinear pairing for wireless sensor network. Firstly, the proposed scheme pre-distributes network system parameters using ID-based encryption algorithm and computes nodes' parameters on Bilinear Pairings. Then it broadcasts to networks and exchange parameters between nodes and computes nodes' key using Diffie-Hellman key exchange technology. Analyses show that the proposed scheme which is more efficient than the previous LZC scheme and Shim-Woo scheme, also the proposed scheme satisfies all the required security attributes :implicit key authentication ,known-key security, perfect forward secrecy, key-compromise impersonation resilience and Unknown key security.