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 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.

Even today, internet users’ data security remains a significant concern. One problem is ARP poisoning, otherwise referred to as ARP spoofing. Such attacks are intended to exploit the identified ARP protocol vulnerability. Despite no straightforward remedy for ARP spoofing being apparent, certain actions may be taken to maintain one’s safety. The most basic and common defence against a poisoning attack is manually adding MAC and IP addresses to the static ARP cache table. However, this solution is ineffective for large networks where static entries require considerable time and effort to maintain, whether by human input or via special tools and settings for the static entries of network devices. Accordingly, this paper aimed to monitor network packet information and detect the behaviour of ARP poison attacks on operating systems, for instance Windows and Linux. The discovery and defence policy systematically and periodically check the MAC addresses in the ARP table, enabling alerts to be issued if a duplicate entry is detected. This enables the poison-IP address to be blocked before a reply is sent. Finally, the results showed that the superiority was successfully achieved in the detection, prevention and reporting mechanisms in the real-world environment.

Within the IoT-cloud, security has a very significant role to play. One of the best means to safeguard confidentially, security and privacy of a biometric image is through encryption. However, looking through encrypted data is a difficult process. A number of different techniques for searching encrypted data have been devised, but certain security solutions may not be used for smart devices within an IoT-cloud, and this is due to the fact that such solutions are not lightweight. In this paper, we present a lightweight scheme that provides the privacy-preserving biometric image search, which is a special case of content-based image retrieval (CBIR). A fusion of homomorphic encryption, cosine similarity and garbled circuit-based approaches are adopted in our scheme to achieve the best performance while simultaneously ensuring the privacy of the biometric image, and protection of any data access patterns and the user's input query. We conduct several empirical analyses on real image collections to demonstrate the performance and security of our work.

Internet of Things is a new generation of network service platform that allows everyday objects including small devices in sensor networks to be capable of connecting to the internet. Such an innovative technology can lead to positive changes in human life. An e-health service based on the Internet of Things has great potential. The popularity of intelligent mobile medical devices, wearable bio-medical sensor devices, cloud computing, and big data analysis have dramatically changed the usage pattern and business rule of e-health services based on the Internet of Things. The rapid development of e-health services based on the Internet of Things poses risks in security and privacy. In this study, we propose a new security scheme for an e-health service. This scheme allows both the local base station and hospital cloud server to authenticate each other, to secure the collection of health data. Our scheme uses the crypto hash function to check the integrity of authentication exchanges. In addition, it provides mutual authentication with anonymity and terminates with a session key agreement between each local base station and the hospital cloud server. To assess our scheme, we conduct performance and security analysis. Results show that our scheme is secure, lightweight, and resistant to different types of attacks.