The unprecedented proliferation of smart home together with wireless sensor networks has enriched human’s daily life. Inevitably, the smart home without the guard of authentication mechanism is bound to bring a series of security issues. Hence, a great number of authentication protocols have been designed to verify the user’s identity and ensure that the data be accessed with authorization in smart home. Recently, (M. Shuai et al., 2019) (Computers & Security, 2019) proposed a two-factor anonymous authentication scheme for smart home and presented that their scheme can be immune to various attacks. However, by careful analysis, we found that (M. Shuai et al.’s, 2019) scheme needed further improvements in session key forward secrecy and against: type-I node capture attack and node impersonation attack. As a going step to this direction, here, we first design a robust two-factor user authentication also for smart home based on the elliptic curve cryptography. Second, we give security proofs to demonstrate that the construction of the proposed scheme can be of user anonymity, session key forward secrecy, and resist all attacks shown in this article. Third, performance comparisons covered in storage/network communication/computation costs are carried out to indicate that our scheme can be comparable to those newly designed schemes, especially, the user and gateway in our scheme need only 352 and 320 bits, respectively.

Vehicular ad-hoc network system provides network communication technology and plays an important role in road safety and traffic control. Conditional privacy-preserving can safeguard privacy as well as trace malicious vehicles, which is critical in the system. However, in the restricted computing and communication resource situation, how to ensure the conditional privacy security remains a challenge. To address this issue, this research work proposes an efficient conditional privacy-preserving scheme. In this scheme, firstly, a certificateless aggregation signature has been performed on board to avoid channel conflicts, and to our best knowledge, this scheme is the first one to propose aggregation on board. Also an elliptic curve point multiplicative operation has been utilized to decrease the cost consumed in computation. Secondly, this paper gives the security proof of the proposed scheme against the existence of unforgeability under adaptively chosen message attack for Type-I and Type-II adversaries in the random oracle model. Lastly, comprehensive performance comparisons covering the computation, communication and storage costs have been done to state that the proposed scheme is more efficient than the existing solutions. Significantly, this scheme saves at least 86% in communication overhead than compared schemes.

Smart grid (SG) achieves more convenient and efficient power transmission through the rapid development of the information and communication technology. In addition to the transmission of electrical energy, the SG system also involves privacy and control information of service providers, which is closely related to people's livelihood. However, at present, the data in the SG system are transmitted in the form of plaintext, which does not have complete protection measures for entity privacy and communication data security. Focusing on preserving entity privacy and data security, this article proposes an anonymous secure authentication protocol (ASAP-SG) for the SG environment. Based on elliptic curve cryptography and physical unclonable function, ASAP-SG can realize authentication and key agreement between smart meters and service providers. The security of ASAP-SG has been verified with proverif tool and proven strictly under the real-or-random model. Furthermore, heuristic analysis manifests that ASAP-SG can successfully resist known security attacks. Finally, a fully comparison with the other five most advanced schemes reveals that ASAP-SG consumes the optimal computation cost on both smart meters and service providers and reduces the communication overhead by 33.3%–45.8%, on the basis of satisfying ten security objectives. These features make ASAP-SG more suitable for resource-constrained SG environment.

As well known, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) produces large amounts of medical data and promotes the medical data sharing which serves the data user (i.e., physicians) to boost the clinical treatment and medical research. To protect data user’s privacy and data security during the sharing of medical data, the data user must have a self-sovereign decentralized identity (DID) and data access authority. In existing solutions, data user’s privacy protection and authentication-key-agreement (AKA) for protecting data security are worked independently, which easily results in typical security attacks (e.g., phishing inquiry attacks and ephemeral secret leakage attacks) during data access and system computing overload. To solve the challenge, a new credential-embedded AKA (CAKA) scheme is proposed, which can seamlessly combine DID-credentials into AKA. First, CAKA supports bilateral authentication by allowing a digital user to authenticate its service provider, which can enhance the security of unilateral scheme (such as CanDID, IEEE S&P, 2021) and prevent phishing query attacks. Second, for secure data session communication, the user’s DID-credentials are used as the kernel of the session key (SK) generation. In security analysis and performance metrics comparisons, the results indicate that CAKA holds a significant advantage, especially, the storage costs, communication costs, and computation costs consumed in CAKA are at least 43% reduction, compared to the alternatives. In simulation experiments of CAKA, the results show that DID authentication and SK agreement are both less than 15 ms, that means CAKA is a practical and promising solution to medical data sharing.