Mutual authentication

Abstract: We discuss two-party mutual authentication protocols providing authenticated key exchange, focusing on those using asymmetric techniques. A simple, efficient protocol referred to as the station-to-station (STS) protocol is introduced, examined in detail, and considered in relation to existing protocols. The definition of a secure protocol is considered, and desirable characteristics of secure protocols are discussed.

Abstract: In this paper, we quantify the energy cost of authentication and key exchange based on public-key cryptography on an 8-bit microcontroller platform. We present a comparison of two public-key algorithms, RSA and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), and consider mutual authentication and key exchange between two untrusted parties such as two nodes in a wireless sensor network. Our measurements on an Atmel ATmega128L low-power microcontroller indicate that public-key cryptography is very viable on 8-bit energy-constrained platforms even if implemented in software. We found ECC to have a significant advantage over RSA as it reduces computation time and also the amount of data transmitted and stored.

Abstract: By broadcasting messages about traffic status to vehicles wirelessly, a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) can improve traffic safety and efficiency. To guarantee secure communication in VANETs, security and privacy issues must be addressed before their deployment. The conditional privacy-preserving authentication (CPPA) scheme is suitable for solving security and privacy-preserving problems in VANETs, because it supports both mutual authentication and privacy protection simultaneously. Many identity-based CPPA schemes for VANETs using bilinear pairings have been proposed over the last few years to enhance security or to improve performance. However, it is well known that the bilinear pairing operation is one of the most complex operations in modern cryptography. To achieve better performance and reduce computational complexity of information processing in VANET, the design of a CPPA scheme for the VANET environment that does not use bilinear paring becomes a challenge. To address this challenge, we propose a CPPA scheme for VANETs that does not use bilinear paring and we demonstrate that it could supports both the mutual authentication and the privacy protection simultaneously. Our proposed CPPA scheme retains most of the benefits obtained with the previously proposed CPPA schemes. Moreover, the proposed CPPA scheme yields a better performance in terms of computation cost and communication cost making it be suitable for use by the VANET safety-related applications.

Abstract: The idea of the Internet of Things (IOT) notion is that everything within the global network is accessible and interconnected. As such Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) play a vital role in such an environment, since they cover a wide application field. Such interconnection can be seen from the aspect of a remote user who can access a single desired sensor node from the WSN without the necessity of firstly connecting with a gateway node (GWN). This paper focuses on such an environment and proposes a novel user authentication and key agreement scheme for heterogeneous ad hoc wireless sensor networks. The proposed scheme enables a remote user to securely negotiate a session key with a general sensor node, using a lightweight key agreement protocol. The proposed scheme ensures mutual authentication between the user, sensor node, and the gateway node (GWN), although the GWN is never contacted by the user. The proposed scheme has been adapted to the resource-constrained architecture of the WSN, thus it uses only simple hash and XOR computations. Our proposed scheme tackles these risks and the challenges posed by the IOT, by ensuring high security and performance features.