A significant evolution in healthcare recently uses technological advancements to perform different activities, such as patient electronic medical records (EMRs) data gathering, preserving, processing, diagnosis, and handling. The adaptation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud has further facilitated the enhancement of related healthcare systems, which can considerably improve data connectivity, accessibility, and exchange, which leads to a significant improvement in the quality of services to patients. Furthermore, scientific computations over data in transmission can be exposed to adversaries and may reveal private data for financial benefit. This article uses the Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song fully homomorphic encryption scheme and IOTA Tangle using masked authenticated messaging (MAM) protocol to provide secure communication between patient and doctor. CKKS-FHE-based data encryption provides data privacy, and secured EMRs sharing through IOTA Tangle guarantees data confidentiality. The performance of this work is analyzed in terms of encryption and decryption time, and payload sharing using MAM and NON-MAM protocols results in evidence of the effectiveness of the approach and improves overall security. The proposed scheme performs better overall computation time and performance than other relevant schemes. Further, the security analysis shows that the proposed system is resilient to data immutability and integrity, forward secrecy, and passive and active attacks.

Secure access of the real-time data from the Internet-of-Things (IoT) smart devices (e.g., vehicles) by a legitimate external party (user) is an important security service for big data collection in the IoT-based intelligent transportation system (ITS). To deal with this important issue, we design a new three-factor user authentication scheme, called UAP-BCIoT, which relies on elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC). The mutual authentication between the user and an IoT device happens via the semitrusted cloud-gateway (CG) node in UAP-BCIoT. UAP-BCIoT supports several functionality features needed for IoT-based ITS environment including IoT smart device credential validation and big data analytics. A detailed security analysis is conducted based on the defined threat model to show that UAP-BCIoT is resilient against many known attacks. A thorough comparative study reveals that UAP-BCIoT supports better security, offers various functionality attributes, and also provides similar costs in communication as well computation as compared to other relevant schemes Finally, the practical demonstration of the proposed UAP-BCIoT is also provided to measure its impact on the network performance parameters.

Recent technological evolution in the Internet of Things (IoT) age supports better solutions to magnify the management of the power quality and reliability concerns, and imposes the measures of a smart grid. In smart grid environment, a smart meter needs to securely access the services from a service provider via insecure channel. However, since the communication is via public channel, it imposes various security threats by an adversary. To deal with this, in this article we design a new anonymous signature-based authenticated key exchange scheme for IoT-enabled smart grid environment, called AAS-IoTSG. The dynamic smart meter addition phase is also permissible in AAS-IoTSG after initial deployment. The security of AAS-IoTSG has been tested rigorously using formal security analysis under the real-or-random (ROR) model which is one of the broadly-accepted standard random oracle models, formal security verification under the broadly-used automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) tool and also using informal security analysis. Finally, an exhaustive comparative study unveils that AAS-IoTSG supports better security and functionality features and requires less communication and computation overheads as compared to the existing state-of-art authentication mechanisms in smart grid systems.

Security and privacy are the major concerns in cloud computing as users have limited access on the stored data at the remote locations managed by different service providers. These become more challenging especially for the data generated from the wearable devices as it is highly sensitive and heterogeneous in nature. Most of the existing techniques reported in the literature are having high computation and communication costs and are vulnerable to various known attacks, which reduce their importance for applicability in real-world environment. Hence, in this paper, we propose a new cloud based user authentication scheme for secure authentication of medical data. After successful mutual authentication between a user and wearable sensor node, both establish a secret session key that is used for future secure communications. The extensively-used Real-Or-Random (ROR) model based formal security analysis and the broadly-accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool based formal security verification show that the proposed scheme provides the session-key security and protects active attacks. The proposed scheme is also informally analyzed to show its resilience against other known attacks. Moreover, we have done a detailed comparative analysis for the communication and computation costs along with security and functionality features which proves its efficiency in comparison to the other existing schemes of its category.

With an exponential increase in the popularity of Internet, the real-time data collected by various smart sensing devices can be analyzed remotely by a remote user (e.g., a manager) in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, in the IIoT environment, the gathered real-time data is transmitted over the public channel, which raises the issues of security and privacy in this environment. Therefore, to protect illegal access by an adversary, user authentication mechanism is one of the promising security solutions in the IIoT environment. To achieve this goal, we propose a new user authenticated key agreement scheme in which only authorized users can access the services from the designated IoT sensing devices installed in the IIoT environment. In the proposed scheme, fuzzy extractor technique is used for biometric verification. Moreover, three factors, namely smart card, password and personal biometrics of a legal registered user are applied in the proposed scheme to increase the level of security in the system. The proposed scheme supports new devices addition after initial deployment of the devices, password/biometric change phase and also smart card revocation phase in case the smart card is lost or stolen by an adversary. In addition, the proposed scheme is lightweight in nature. We carry out the formal security analysis using the broadly accepted Real-Or-Random (ROR) model and also the non-mathematical (informal) security analysis on the proposed scheme. Furthermore, the formal security verification using the popularly-used AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool is carried out on the proposed scheme. The detailed security analysis assures that the proposed scheme can withstand several well-known attacks in the IIoT environment. A practical demonstration using the NS2 simulation study is also performed for the proposed scheme and other related existing schemes. Also, a detailed comparative study shows that the proposed scheme is efficient, and provides superior security in comparison to the other schemes.

Secure real-time data about goods in transit in supply chains needs bandwidth having capacity that is not fulfilled with the current infrastructure. Hence, 5G-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) in mobile edge computing is intended to substantially increase this capacity. To deal with this issue, in this article, we design a new efficient lightweight blockchain-enabled radio frequency identification (RFID)-based authentication protocol for supply chains in 5G mobile edge computing environment, called lightweight blockchain-enabled RFID-based authentication protocol (LBRAPS). LBRAPS is based on bitwise exclusive-or (XOR), one-way cryptographic hash and bitwise rotation operations only. LBRAPS is shown to be secure against various attacks. Moreover, the simulation-based formal security verification using the broadly-accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool assures that LBRAPS is secure. Finally, it is shown that LBRAPS has better trade-off among its security and functionality features, communication and computation costs as compared to those for existing protocols.

With the ever increasing adoption rate of Internet-enabled devices [also known as Internet of Things (IoT) devices] in applications such as smart home, smart city, smart grid, and healthcare applications, we need to ensure the security and privacy of data and communications among these IoT devices and the underlying infrastructure. For example, an adversary can easily tamper with the information transmitted over a public channel, in the sense of modification, deletion, and fabrication of data-in-transit and data-in-storage. Time-critical IoT applications such as healthcare may demand the capability to support external parties (users) to securely access IoT data and services in real-time. This necessitates the design of a secure user authentication mechanism, which should also allow the user to achieve security and functionality features such as anonymity and un-traceability. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight anonymous user authenticated session key agreement scheme in the IoT environment. The proposed scheme uses three-factor authentication, namely a user's smart card, password, and personal biometric information. The proposed scheme does not require the storing of user specific information at the gateway node. We then demonstrate the proposed scheme's security using the broadly accepted real-or-random (ROR) model, Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, and automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications (AVISPAs) software simulation tool, as well as presenting an informal security analysis to demonstrate its other features. In addition, through our simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms existing related user authentication schemes, in terms of its security and functionality features, and computation costs.

As the “Internet communications infrastructure” develops to encircle smart devices, it is very much essential for designing suitable methods for secure communications with these smart devices, in the future Internet of Things (IoT) applications context. Due to wireless communication among the IoT smart devices and the gateway node (GWN), several security threats may arise in the IoT environment, including replay, man-in-the-middle, impersonation, malicious devices deployment, and physical devices capture attacks. In this article, to mitigate such security threats, we design a new certificate-based device access control scheme in IoT environment which is not only secure against mentioned attacks, but it also preserves anonymity property. A detailed security analysis using the widely accepted real-or-random (ROR) model-based formal security analysis, informal security analysis, and also formal security verification based on the broadly accepted automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications (AVISPAs) tool has been performed on the proposed scheme to show that it is secure against various known attacks. In addition, a comprehensive comparative analysis among the proposed scheme and other relevant schemes shows that a better tradeoff among the security and functionality attributes, communication, and computational costs is achieved for the proposed scheme as compared to other schemes.