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.

Data security can involve embedding hidden images, text, audio, or video files within other media to prevent hackers from stealing encrypted data. Existing mechanisms suffer from a high risk of security breaches or large computational costs, however. The method proposed in this work incorporates low-complexity encryption and steganography mechanisms to enhance security during transmission while lowering computational complexity. In message encryption, it is recommended that text file data slicing in binary representation, to achieve different lengths of string, be conducted before text file data masking based on the lightweight Lucas series and mod function to ensure the retrieval of text messages is impossible. The steganography algorithm starts by generating a random key stream using a hybrid of two low-complexity chaotic maps, the Tent map and the Ikeda map. By finding a position vector parallel to the input image vector, these keys are used based on the previously generated position vector to randomly select input image data and create four vectors that can be later used as input for the Lah transform. In this paper, we present an approach for hiding encrypted text files using LSB colour image steganography by applying a low-complexity XOR operation to the most significant bits in 24-bit colour cover images. It is necessary to perform inverse Lah transformation to recover the image pixels and ensure that invisible data cannot be retrieved in a particular sequence. Evaluation of the quality of the resulting stego-images and comparison with other ways of performing encryption and message concealment shows that the stego-image has a higher PSNR, a lower MSE, and an SSIM value close to one, illustrating the suitability of the proposed method. It is also considered lightweight in terms of having lower computational overhead.

Unmanned aerial vehicles have found applications in fields such as environmental monitoring and the military. Although the collected data in some of these application domains are sensitive, public channels are deployed during the communication process. Therefore, many protocols have been presented to preserve the confidentiality and integrity of the exchanged messages. However, numerous security and performance challenges have been noted in the majority of these protocols. In this paper, an elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and symmetric key-based protocol is presented. The choice of ECC was informed by its relatively shorter key sizes compared to other asymmetric encryption algorithms such as the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm. Security analysis showed that this protocol provides mutual authentication, session key agreement, untraceability, anonymity, forward key secrecy, backward key secrecy, and biometric privacy. In addition, it is robust against smart card loss, password guessing, known secret session temporary information (KSSTI), privileged insider, side-channeling, impersonation, denial-of-service (DoS), and man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. The comparative performance evaluation showed that it has relatively low computation, storage, and communication complexities.

Smart grids integrate information technology, decision support systems, communication networks, and sensing technologies. All these components cooperate to facilitate dynamic power adjustments based on received client consumption reports. Although this brings forth energy efficiency, the transmission of sensitive data over the public internet exposes these networks to numerous attacks. To this end, numerous security solutions have been presented recently. Most of these techniques deploy conventional cryptographic systems such as public key infrastructure, blockchains, and physically unclonable functions that have either performance or security issues. In this paper, a fairly efficient authentication scheme is developed and analyzed. Its formal security analysis is carried out using the Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, which shows that the session key negotiated is provably secure. We also execute a semantic security analysis of this protocol to demonstrate that it can resist typical smart grid attacks such as privileged insider, guessing, eavesdropping, and ephemeral secret leakages. Moreover, it has the lowest amount of computation costs and relatively lower communication overheads as well as storage costs.

Wireless networks have continued to evolve to offer connectivity between users and smart devices such as drones and wireless sensor nodes. In this environment, insecure public channels are deployed to link the users to their remote smart devices. Some of the application areas of these smart devices include military surveillance and healthcare monitoring. Since the data collected and transmitted to the users are highly sensitive and private, any leakages can have adverse effects. As such, strong entity authentication should be implemented before any access is granted in these wireless networks. Although numerous protocols have been developed for this purpose, the simultaneous attainment of robust security and privacy at low latencies, execution time and bandwidth remains a mirage. In this paper, a session-dependent token-based payload enciphering scheme for integrity enhancements in wireless networks is presented. This protocol amalgamates fuzzy extraction with extended Chebyshev chaotic maps to boost the integrity of the exchanged payload. The security analysis shows that this scheme offers entity anonymity and backward and forward key secrecy. In addition, it is demonstrated to be robust against secret ephemeral leakage, side-channeling, man-in-the-middle and impersonation attacks, among other security threats. From the performance perspective, the proposed scheme requires the least communication overheads and a relatively low execution time during the authentication process.

Highly sensitive information about people’s social life and daily activities flows in smart home networks. As such, if attackers can manage to capture or even eavesdrop on this information, the privacy of the users can be compromised. The consequences can be far-reaching, such as knowing the status of home occupancy that can then facilitate burglary. To address these challenges, approaches such as data aggregation and signcryption have been utilized. Elliptic curve cryptography, bilinear pairing, asymmetric key cryptosystem, blockchain, and exponential operations are among the most popular techniques deployed to design these security solutions. However, the computational, storage and communication complexities exhibited by the majority of these techniques are too high. This renders these techniques unsuitable for smart home components such as smart switches and sensors. Some of these schemes have centralized architectures, which present some single points of failure. In this paper, symmetric key authentication procedures are presented for smart home networks. The proposed protocol leverages on cryptographic primitives such as one-way hashing and bitwise exclusive-Or operations. The results indicate that this scheme incurs the lowest communication, storage, and computation costs compared to other related state-of-the-art techniques. Empirically, our protocol reduces the communication and computation complexities by 16.7% and 57.7%, respectively. In addition, it provides backward key secrecy, robust mutual authentication, anonymity, forward key secrecy, and unlinkability. Moreover, it can effectively prevent attacks such as impersonation, session hijacking, denial of service, packet replays, man-in-the-middle, and message eavesdropping.