The information obtained from external sources within the cloud and the resulting computations are not always reliable. This is attributed to the absence of tangible regulations and information management on the part of the information owners. Although numerous techniques for safeguarding and securing external information have been developed, security hazards in the cloud are still problematic. This could potentially pose a significant challenge to the effective adoption and utilization of cloud technology. In terms of performance, many of the existing solutions are affected by high computation costs, particularly in terms of auditing. In order to reduce the auditing expenses, this paper proposes a well-organised, lightweight system for safeguarding information through enhanced integrity checking. The proposed technique implements a cryptographic hash function with low-cost mathematic operations. In addition, this paper explores the role of a semi-trusted server with regard to smart device users. This facilitates the formal management of information prior to distribution through the IoT-cloud system. Essentially, this facilitates the validation of the information stored and exchanged in this environment. The results obtained show that the proposed system is lightweight and offers features such as a safeguarding capability, key management, privacy, decreased costs, sufficient security for smart device users, one-time key provision, and high degree of accuracy. In addition, the proposed method exhibits lower computation complexity and storage expenses compared with those of other techniques such as bilinear map-based systems.

Precision agriculture encompasses automation and application of a wide range of information technology devices to improve farm output. In this environment, smart devices collect and exchange a massive number of messages with other devices and servers over public channels. Consequently, smart farming is exposed to diverse attacks, which can have serious consequences since the sensed data are normally processed to help determine the agricultural field status and facilitate decision-making. Although a myriad of security schemes has been presented in the literature to curb these challenges, they either have poor performance or are susceptible to attacks. In this paper, an elliptic curve cryptography-based scheme is presented, which is shown to be formally secure under the Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic. In addition, it is semantically demonstrated to offer user privacy, anonymity, unlinkability, untraceability, robust authentication, session key agreement, and key secrecy and does not require the deployment of verifier tables. In addition, it can withstand side-channeling, physical capture, eavesdropping, password guessing, spoofing, forgery, replay, session hijacking, impersonation, de-synchronization, man-in-the-middle, privileged insider, denial of service, stolen smart device, and known session-specific temporary information attacks. In terms of performance, the proposed protocol results in 14.67% and 18% reductions in computation and communication costs, respectively, and a 35.29% improvement in supported security features.

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.

Encryption is one of the best methods to safeguard the security and privacy of an image. However, looking through encrypted data is difficult. A number of techniques for searching encrypted data have been devised. However, certain security solutions may not be used in smart devices in IoT-cloud because such solutions are not lightweight. In this article, we present a lightweight scheme that can enable a content-based search through encrypted images. In particular, images are represented using local features. We develop and validate a secure scheme for measuring the Euclidean distance between two feature vectors. In addition, we use a hashing method, namely, locality-sensitive hashing, to devise the searchable index. The use of an locality-sensitive hashing index increases the proficiency and effectiveness of a system, thereby allowing the retrieval of only relevant images with a minimum number of distance evaluations. Refining vector techniques are used to refine relevant results efficiently and securely. Our index construction process ensures that stored data and trapdoors are kept private. Our system also efficiently supports multi-user authentication by avoiding the expensive traditional method, which enables data owners to define who can search for a specific image. Compared with other similarity-based encryption methods predicated upon searchability, the option presented in this study offers superior search speed and storage efficiency.

Domain name system is among the core part of TCP/IP protocol suite and the standard protocol used by the Internet. The domain name system consists of mapped website names with Internet protocol, which facilitates browsing by not requiring users to remember numeric notation addresses. The nature of the system, which involves transferring information in plain text, makes it vulnerable to security attacks. The domain name system suffers from spoofing and cache poisoning attacks that are intended to steal the private information of users. In this paper, a scheme is proposed to prevent the aforementioned attacks by using an asymmetric cipher to encrypt the important information in messages and to protect these messages from manipulation. The proposed scheme is examined and implemented using Linux platform and C programming language. The proposed scheme protects DNS against spoofing and poisoning attacks while the results show small fraction of delay in time comparing with the applied DNS. There are also additional commercial benefits since it does not result in additional costs.