Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has greatly improved safety and quality of services in intelligent transportation system (ITS). However, the deployed dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) protocol broadcasts messages after every 100–300 ms. This presents some challenges in message validation within this short duration. As such, most of the current authentication schemes which incur heavy computation and communication overheads are not suitable in this environment. In this article, an efficient authentication scheme is presented based on lightweight cryptographic primitives, such as collision-resistant one-way hashing functions and exclusive OR (XOR) operations. In our protocol, two-factor authentication is attained using physically unclonable function (PUF) generated identities and random nonces, as well as passwords. Extensive formal security verification using the Real or Random (RoR) model shows that it is provably secure. In addition, elaborate semantic security analysis shows that it offers anonymity, untraceability, and key secrecy as well as resilience against numerous IoV attack vectors. In terms of performance, comparative evaluations demonstrate that it reduces computation and energy consumptions by 42.31%. Moreover, it increases the supported security features by 26.67%.

The advancement of systems with the capacity to compress audio signals and simultaneously secure is a highly attractive research subject. This is because of the need to enhance storage usage and speed up the transmission of data, as well as securing the transmission of sensitive signals over limited and insecure communication channels. Thus, many researchers have studied and produced different systems, either to compress or encrypt audio data using different algorithms and methods, all of which suffer from certain issues including high time consumption or complex calculations. This paper proposes a compressing sensing-based system that compresses audio signals and simultaneously provides an encryption system. The audio signal is segmented into small matrices of samples and then multiplied by a non-square sensing matrix generated by a Gaussian random generator. The reconstruction process is carried out by solving a linear system using the pseudoinverse of Moore-Penrose. The statistical analysis results obtaining from implementing different types and sizes of audio signals prove that the proposed system succeeds in compressing the audio signals with a ratio reaching 28% of real size and reconstructing the signal with a correlation metric between 0.98 and 0.99. It also scores very good results in the normalized mean square error (MSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio metrics (PSNR), and the structural similarity index (SSIM), as well as giving the signal a high level of security.

The incorporation of information and communication technologies in the power grids has greatly enhanced efficiency in the management of demand-responses. In addition, smart grids have seen considerable minimization in energy consumption and enhancement in power supply quality. However, the transmission of control and consumption information over open public communication channels renders the transmitted messages vulnerable to numerous security and privacy violations. Although many authentication and key agreement protocols have been developed to counter these issues, the achievement of ideal security and privacy levels at optimal performance still remains an uphill task. In this paper, we leverage on Hamming distance, elliptic curve cryptography, smart cards and biometrics to develop an authentication protocol. It is formally analyzed using the Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, which shows strong mutual authentication and session key negotiation. Its semantic security analysis demonstrates its robustness under all the assumptions of the Dolev-Yao (DY) and Canetti- Krawczyk (CK) threat models. From the performance perspective, it is shown to incur communication, storage and computation complexities compared with other related state of the art protocols.

This study presents a systematic literature review on blockchain-based authentication in smart environments that include smart city, smart home, smart grid, smart healthcare, smart farming and smart transportation. The review incorporated 39 articles presenting blockchain solutions for security and privacy issues through authentication mechanisms in these smart environments. Guided by three research questions to determine the main issues in smart environment, the availability of blockchain-based authentication solutions and identified research gaps and future research endeavors, this review used PRISMA method to provide insights on the use of blockchain-based authentication schemes. The research gap is that blockchain solutions are mostly at the proposal, and sometimes conceptual stage is in the reviewed articles. In addition, solutions presented in smart environments require exploration into blockchain. The findings show similar situational issues across different smart environments and the flexibility and adaptability of blockchain to provide solutions to the identified issues pertaining to security and privacy. More clearly, the authentication problem posed across different smart environments can be adapted to blockchain technology provided that it is combined with other technologies to increase efficiency, despite the existence of large-scale authentication mechanisms. Now, blockchain still has the unique, distributed feature of converting the current database into blockchain databases. This review guided future research directions which could further contribute to the sustainable management of smart environments.

The continuous increase in the use of smart devices and the need for E2E smart2smart (S2S) services in IoT systems play effective and contemporary roles in the field of communication, and a large amount of resources is required. Thus, IoTs and cloud computing must be integrated. One of the results of this integration is the increase in the number of attacks and vulnerabilities in the E2E S2S message delivery service of such an IoT-cloud system. However, none of the traditional security solutions can be sufficiently regarded as a secure and lightweight mechanism for ensuring that the security requirements for E2E S2S message transmission in the IoT-cloud system are fulfilled. This work aims to provide an efficient and secure, lightweight E2E S2S message delivery function, which includes the E2E S2S secure key and biometric parameter exchange function, a bio-shared parameter and bio-key generation function, secure lightweight E2E S2S communication negotiation and secure E2E S2S lightweight message delivery. The secure, lightweight cryptographic communication procedure is negotiated between a pair of smart devices during each E2E session to minimize the power consumption required of limited-energy devices. Such a negotiation process prevents known attacks by providing responsive mutual authentication. Lightweight message delivery by the two smart devices can satisfy the basic security requirements of E2E communication and ensure that the computational cost required for a real-time system is as low as possible.