Phishing attacks pose significant cybersecurity threats in the metaverse, particularly in virtual gaming environments where sensitive identity information and digital assets are at risk. This paper introduces a blockchain-based anti-phishing authentication protocol that enhances the security and efficiency of virtual game recharge orders. The proposed protocol integrates elliptic curve cryptography, symmetric encryption, and Chebyshev chaotic mapping to establish a robust three-factor authentication mechanism. By leveraging blockchain’s decentralized and tamper-proof properties, the protocol securely stores identity information and authentication keys, enabling users to effectively identify phishing websites and ensure secure cross-platform transactions. Security analysis using the Real-Or-Random (ROR) model demonstrates the protocol’s resistance to phishing attacks, and its provision of forward security and anonymity. Comparative performance evaluation also highlights the protocol’s significant advantages in computational and communication efficiency over existing methods. This study contributes to the advancement of secure virtual transactions, fostering trust and sustainability in the metaverse economy.

Summary Recently, an authentication scheme was presented for health‐care in IoT for WBANs by Fotouhi et al. Authors asserted their scheme to be free from a number of attacks. Here, we find that Fotouhi et al.'s scheme suffers from insider attack, fails to provide proper authentication and bears inefficient password update phase. Therefore their scheme has security pitfalls that can lead to further security breaches. We remove the weaknesses of Fotouhi et al.'s scheme and hence propose a user authentication scheme for patient care. Our scheme is suitable for providing special care to patients in the healthcare industry. The proposed scheme facilitates health professionals to access the real‐time data of patients under treatment for some diseases. It also safeguards the medical staff from catching an infection from the patients by minimizing the need to come in direct contact with the patients. We justify the security of our proposed scheme by applying the random oracle model to it. The proposed scheme is compared with some related works to judge its efficacy over the compared counterparts.

Aiming at the problem of real-time and low accuracy of automatic recognition of human abnormal behaviour in a public area surveillance video, a simple multi-scale human anomaly behaviour detection algorithm based on video was proposed. Firstly, the binary image sequence of human body in surveillance video is acquired by background modelling method based on visual background extraction (ViBe). Then, the simple multi-scale algorithm is constructed by combining the aspect ratio, motion trajectory and video continuous interframe motion acceleration of the minimum circumscribed rectangle of the binarised image. The human target behaviour is judged, and then the normal behaviour of the human body - standing, walking, jogging, and abnormal behaviour - shouting for help, falling, punching, wandering, and sudden running are identified. The experimental results show that the human body moving target recognition by ViBe combined with simple multi-scale algorithm for abnormal behaviour detection has good real-time performance and high accuracy.

While cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have gradually matured, mobile intelligent transportation systems have begun to be widely used. In particular, the application of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is very convenient for real-time collection and analysis of traffic data. VANETs provide a great convenience for drivers and passengers, making it easier to choose routes. Currently, most research on VANETs obtains data through cloud servers. However, there are few studies on cloud servers obtaining vehicle information through the roadside unit (RSU). In the process of reading traffic information, there will be some private and sensitive information, which may be intercepted or tampered with in untrusted public channels. Therefore, it is necessary to propose a protocol to protect vehicle data during the information reading phase. In this paper, we propose a new provably secure authentication protocol to negotiate a session key before transmitting traffic information. This protocol can complete mutual authentication and generate a session key. Finally, security analysis and performance analysis show that our protocol is secure and efficient.

The Internet of things (IoT) has been widely used for various applications including medical and transportation systems, among others. Smart medical systems have become the most effective and practical solutions to provide users with low-cost, noninvasive, and long-term continuous health monitoring. Recently, Jia et al. proposed an authentication and key agreement scheme for smart medical systems based on fog computing and indicated that it is safe and can withstand a variety of known attacks. Nevertheless, we found that it consists of several flaws, including known session-specific temporary information attacks and lack of per-verification. The opponent can readily recover the session key and user identity. In this paper, we propose a secure authentication and key agreement scheme, which compensates for the imperfections of the previously proposed. For a security evaluation of the proposed authentication scheme, informal security analysis and the Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic analysis are implemented. In addition, the ProVerif tool is used to normalize the security verification of the scheme. Finally, the performance comparisons with the former schemes show that the proposed scheme is more applicable and secure.

A multiserver environment can improve the efficiency of mobile network services more effectively than a single server in managing the increase in users. Because of the large number of users, the security of users’ personal information and communication information is more important in a multiserver environment. Recently, Wang et al. proposed a multiserver authentication scheme based on biometrics and proved the security of their scheme. However, we first demonstrate that their scheme is insecure against a known session-specific temporary information attacks, user impersonation attacks, and server impersonation attacks. To solve the security weakness, we propose an improved scheme based on Wang et al.’s scheme. The security of our improved scheme is also validated based on the formal security analysis, Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, ProVerif, and informal security analysis. Security and performance comparisons prove the security and efficiency of our scheme.

The wide applications of the Internet of Things and cloud computing technologies have driven the development of many industries. With the improvement of living standards, health has become the top priority of people’s attention. The emergence of the wireless body area network (WBAN) enables people to master their physical condition all the time and make it more convenient for patients and doctors to communicate with each other. Doctors can provide real-time online treatment with cloud-based smart healthcare environments for patients. In this process, patients, health records, and doctors need to maintain security and privacy. Recently, Kumari et al. proposed a secure framework for the smart medical system. However, we found that their framework cannot provide the anonymity of patients and doctors, data confidentiality, and patient unlinkability and also is subject to impersonation attacks and desynchronization attacks. In order to ensure the security and privacy of patients and doctors, we propose an authentication and key exchange protocol in cloud-based smart healthcare environments. Formal and informal security analyses, as well as performance analysis, demonstrated that our protocol is suitable for these environments.

The wireless sensor network is a network composed of sensor nodes self‐organizing through the application of wireless communication technology. The application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires high security, but the transmission of sensitive data may be exposed to the adversary. Therefore, to guarantee the security of information transmission, researchers propose numerous security authentication protocols. Recently, Wu et al. proposed a new three‐factor authentication protocol for WSNs. However, we find that their protocol cannot resist key compromise impersonation attacks and known session‐specific temporary information attacks. Meanwhile, it also violates perfect forward secrecy and anonymity. To overcome the proposed attacks, this paper proposes an enhanced protocol in which the security is verified by the formal analysis and informal analysis, Burross‐Abadii‐Needham (BAN) logic, and ProVerif tools. The comparison of security and performance proves that our protocol has higher security and lower computational overhead.

Currently how to make the hearing aids more and more intelligent has attracted our interests. In order to realize adaptive amplification strategy to improve the audibility, context-aware hearing is crucial. In context-aware hearing, a big difficulty to be solved is context sensing since it is not applicable to implant multiple sensors in the limited space of hearing devices. Therefore, we propose a new context recognition scheme which adopt smart phone to collect sensing data and infer a scene to adapt level of hearing aid. A context recognition framework with a context reasoning model for scene recognition and activity recognition are given. Once scene and activity are confirmed, the smart phone would send a command to hearing aid to actuate the amplification process by Bluetooth. Since smart phones are carried by people in normal life, employing smart phone to sense context data and inference scene is quite a reasonable way to improve the adaptiveness of hearing aids for most people without any other extra devices or sensors. Our contribution in this paper is that let smart phones stay in pockets or bags as exact normal life, the scene can still be inferred to conduct hearing aids. Besides, we conduct some experiments, the results are encouraging and time cost is acceptable.

In a verifiable multi‐secret sharing (VMSS) scheme, multiple secrets are shared among participants during one sharing process in such a way that some qualified subsets of them can recover these secrets. Verifiable property means that one participant may verify his/her own share, but cannot check the validity of the other participants’ shares. Verifiable property is deficient for some specific applications such as electronic voting and revocable electronic cash. Publicly verifiable property is more applicable than verifiable property because the shares can be verified by any party. In this study, an efficient publicly verifiable multi‐secret sharing (PVMSS) scheme using bilinear pairings is proposed. Under the computational Diffie–Hellman and modified bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumptions, the authors demonstrate that the proposed scheme is a secure PVMSS scheme.

ABSTRACT A signature scheme is one of the important primitives in modern cryptography, which may offer functionalities of user identification, non‐repudiation, and message authentication. With the advent of identity (ID)‐based public key systems with bilinear pairings defined on elliptic curves, many ID‐based signature schemes have been proposed. Like certificate‐based public key systems, any ID‐based public key system must provide a revocation method to revoke misbehaving users. There was little work on studying the revocation problem of ID‐based public key systems, and no ID‐based signature scheme deals with how to revoke the signing ability of misbehaving users. Quite recently, Tseng and Tsai presented a practical revocation mechanism using a public channel for ID‐based public key systems. In this paper, we adopt Tseng and Tsai's revocation concept to define the new framework and security notions of revocable ID‐based signature (RIBS) scheme and propose the first RIBS scheme in the standard model. Under the computational Diffie–Hellman assumption, we demonstrate that the proposed RIBS scheme is provably secure while remaining efficient for signing and verification as compared with previously proposed ID‐based signature schemes. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

ABSTRACT Pairing‐based public key systems have recently received much attention because bilinear property contributes to the designs of many cryptographic schemes. In 2002, Mitsunariet al.proposed the first pairing‐based traitor tracing scheme with constant‐size ciphertexts and private keys. However, their scheme has been shown to be insecure for providing traitor tracing functionality. Recently, many researches still try to propose efficient pairing‐based traitor tracing schemes in terms of ciphertext and private key sizes. In this paper, we present a security claim for the design of pairing‐based traitor tracing schemes. For a pairing‐based traitor tracing scheme with constant‐size ciphertexts and private keys, if the decryption key is obtained by some pairing operations in pairing‐based public key systems, the scheme will suffer from a linear attack and cannot provide the traitor tracing functionality. Finally, we apply our security claim to attack a pairing‐based traitor tracing scheme proposed by Yanget al.to demonstrate our result. Our security claim can offer a notice and direction for designing pairing‐based traitor tracing schemes. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack is the major threat for handheld devices to agree on a session key in which they do not share any prior secret in advance, even if these devices are physically located in the same place. Apart from insecurely typing passwords into handheld devices or comparing long hexadecimal keys displayed on the devices' screens, many other human-verifiable protocols have been proposed in the literature to solve the problem. Unfortunately, most of these schemes are unscalable to more users. Even when there are only three entities attempting to agree on a session key, these protocols need to be rerun three times. In this paper, we present a bipartite and a tripartite authentication protocol using a temporary confidential channel. Besides, we further extend the system into a transitive authentication protocol that allows multiple handheld devices to establish a conference key securely and efficiently. In addition, we provide a formal proof to our protocol to demonstrate our scheme is indeed secure. We also implement the prototype of the system on a mobile phone with satisfying performance.

The identity (ID)-based public-key system using bilinear pairings defined on elliptic curves offers a flexible approach to simplify the certificate management. In 2006, the IEEE P1363.3 committee has defined the ID-based public-key system with bilinear pairings as one of public-key cryptography standards. In this, an authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocol is one important issue that provides mutual authentication and key exchange between two parties. Owing to the fast growth of mobile networks, the computational cost on the client side with low-power computing devices is a critical factor in designing an AKA protocol suited for mobile networks. In this paper, we present an efficient and secure ID-based mutual authentication and key exchange protocol using bilinear pairings. Performance analysis and experimental data are given to demonstrate that our proposed protocol is well suited for a client–server environment with low-power mobile devices. In comparison with the recently proposed ID-based protocols, our protocol has the best performance on the client side.

Many group-oriented applications and multicast communications often need to verify which group members have sent/received a message. However, individual verification of signed messages would require a significant computation cost. A secure signature scheme with supporting variant batch verifications extremely improves performance. In 2003, Cha and Cheon proposed an efficient identity (ID)-based signature scheme with bilinear pairings. Recently, Yoon et al. pointed out that their scheme does not provide batch verifications for multiple signatures. In this paper, we examine and discuss twelve kinds of Cha-Cheon like signature schemes and security properties. We obtain an efficient ID-based signature scheme supporting batch verifications. In the random oracle model and under the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption, we show that this new scheme is secure against existential forgery attacks under various types of batch verifications.

In a client-server network environment, a mutual authentication and key exchange scheme is an important security mechanism to provide two parties with the property that they can authenticate each other's identity while they may construct a common session key. With rapid growth of mobile wireless networks, the computational cost on the client side with low power computing devices is a critical factor of the security scheme design. This paper presents a mutual authentication and key exchange scheme using bilinear pairings. Based on the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption and the random oracle model, we show that the proposed scheme is secure against passive attack, forgery attack and ID attack while it provides mutual authentication, implicit key confirmation and partial forward secrecy. A performance analysis demonstrates that our scheme is well suited for smart cards with limited computing capability.