Presently, the Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is very important for the entire traffic management system. The 5th Generation (5G) enables VANET and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) to connect devices in the million/sqkm range with improved performance, incredible transmission speed (terabit), and less cost to serve a vast, transformative, and diverse automobile sector. To ensure security and avoid the free flow of information in highly scalable, dynamic 5G, there are many challenges to restrict unauthenticated users access and proper key agreements with fine-grained access control. Here, a lightweight biometrics-based dynamic Anonymous Key Agreement Scheme (AKAS) with a fine-grained authentication feature is proposed to address challenges related to the restriction of unauthenticated users access and proper key agreement with fine-grained access control specifically for Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication in VANET. In the proposed scheme, registered and authorized users can access services or information as per access privilege only. We have simulated our scheme using Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols (AVISPA), Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO), OMNET$++$(Objective Modular Network Testbed in C$++$), and performed formal security analysis using the Real-or-Random (ROR) oracle model. Analysis and simulation results show that our scheme is secured against various well-known attacks. Further, we have compared the security and efficiency of our scheme with the existing schemes and found that our proposed protocol is more secure, lighter, 5G-friendly, scalable, and even faster than the other related schemes.

Summary The Internet of Drones (IoD) is a layered network or platform that controls and coordinates the drones. The unmanned aerial vehicles also called as drones are objects that utilized in Internet of Things (IoT) smart devices. The security is the major problem in the architecture for IoD. Hence, a multilevel authentication method is devised in this article to enable secure communication in IoD. The analysis of security is depending on four stages, such as pre‐deployment, user registration, login phase, and authentication phase. The drones are registered in the IoD infrastructure in the pre‐deployment phase. Then, the users registration with the drone is done in user registration phase, which is executed to register the users with the drone for accessing the information in real‐time via the user. Then, the user communicates with the server is done in the login phase, and at last, the authentication of drones, servers, and the users are done in authentication phase to offer secured communication. The devised approach attains the maximum performance with a delay, throughput, and packet loss of 0.099 s, 62.855 bps, and 2.52012 s, respectively.

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) allows mobile users to have on-demand access to cloud services. A mobile cloud model helps in analyzing the information regarding the patients' records and also in extracting recommendations in healthcare applications. In MCC, a fine-grained level access control of multiserver cloud data is a prerequisite for successful execution of end-users applications. In this paper, we propose a new scheme that provides a combined approach of fine-grained access control over cloud-based multiserver data along with a provably secure mobile user authentication mechanism for the Healthcare Industry 4.0. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed scheme is the first to pursue fine-grained data access control over multiple cloud servers in a MCC environment. The proposed scheme has been validated extensively in different heterogeneous environment where its performance was found good in comparison to other existing schemes.

The recent proliferation of mobile devices, such as smartphones and wearable devices has given rise to crowdsourcing Internet of Things (IoT) applications. E-healthcare service is one of the important services for the crowdsourcing IoT applications that facilitates remote access or storage of medical server data to the authorized users (for example, doctors, patients, and nurses) via wireless communication. As wireless communication is susceptible to various kinds of threats and attacks, remote user authentication is highly essential for a hazard-free use of these services. In this paper, we aim to propose a new secure three-factor user remote user authentication protocol based on the extended chaotic maps. The three factors involved in the proposed scheme are: 1) smart card; 2) password; and 3) personal biometrics. As the proposed scheme avoids computationally expensive elliptic curve point multiplication or modular exponentiation operation, it is lightweight and efficient. The formal security verification using the widely-accepted verification tool, called the ProVerif 1.93, shows that the presented scheme is secure. In addition, we present the formal security analysis using the both widely accepted real-or-random model and Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic. With the combination of high security and appreciably low communication and computational overheads, our scheme is very much practical for battery limited devices for the healthcare applications as compared to other existing related schemes.

Multi-server environment is the most common scenario for a large number of enterprise class applications. In this environment, user registration at each server is not recommended. Using multi-server authentication architecture, user can manage authentication to various servers using single identity and password. We introduce a new authentication scheme for multi-server environments using Chebyshev chaotic map. In our scheme, we use the Chebyshev chaotic map and biometric verification along with password verification for authorization and access to various application servers. The proposed scheme is light-weight compared to other related schemes. We only use the Chebyshev chaotic map, cryptographic hash function and symmetric key encryption-decryption in the proposed scheme. Our scheme provides strong authentication, and also supports biometrics & password change phase by a legitimate user at any time locally, and dynamic server addition phase. We perform the formal security verification using the broadly-accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool to show that the presented scheme is secure. In addition, we use the formal security analysis using the Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic along with random oracle models and prove that our scheme is secure against different known attacks. High security and significantly low computation and communication costs make our scheme is very suitable for multi-server environments as compared to other existing related schemes.

Abstract For critical applications, real‐time data access is essential from the nodes inside a wireless sensor network (WSN). Only the authorized users with unique access privilege should access the specific, but not all, sensing information gathered by the cluster heads in a hierarchical WSNs. Access rights for the correct information and resources for different services from the cluster heads to the genuine users can be provided with the help of efficient user access control mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a new user access control scheme with attribute‐based encryption using elliptic curve cryptography in hierarchical WSNs. In attribute‐based encryption, the ciphertexts are labeled with sets of attributes and secret keys of the users that are associated with their own access structures. The authorized users with the relevant set of attributes can able to decrypt the encrypted message coming from the cluster heads. Our scheme provides high security. Moreover, our scheme is efficient as compared with those for other existing user access control schemes. Through both the formal and informal security analysis, we show that our scheme has the ability to tolerate different known attacks required for a user access control designed for WSNs. Furthermore, we simulate our scheme for the formal security verification using the widely‐accepted automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications tool. The simulation results demonstrate that our scheme is secure. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Protein-protein interactions are often mediated by flexible loops that experience conformational dynamics on the microsecond to millisecond time scales. NMR relaxation studies can map these dynamics. However, defining the network of inter-converting conformers that underlie the relaxation data remains generally challenging. Here, we combine NMR relaxation experiments with simulation to visualize networks of inter-converting conformers. We demonstrate our approach with the apo Pin1-WW domain, for which NMR has revealed conformational dynamics of a flexible loop in the millisecond range. We sample and cluster the free energy landscape using Markov State Models (MSM) with major and minor exchange states with high correlation with the NMR relaxation data and low NOE violations. These MSM are hierarchical ensembles of slowly interconverting, metastable macrostates and rapidly interconverting microstates. We found a low population state that consists primarily of holo-like conformations and is a "hub" visited by most pathways between macrostates. These results suggest that conformational equilibria between holo-like and alternative conformers pre-exist in the intrinsic dynamics of apo Pin1-WW. Analysis using MutInf, a mutual information method for quantifying correlated motions, reveals that WW dynamics not only play a role in substrate recognition, but also may help couple the substrate binding site on the WW domain to the one on the catalytic domain. Our work represents an important step towards building networks of inter-converting conformational states and is generally applicable.