Recently, in 2014, He and Wang proposed a robust and efficient multi-server authentication scheme using biometrics-based smart card and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). In this paper, we first analyze He-Wang's scheme and show that their scheme is vulnerable to a known session-specific temporary information attack and impersonation attack. In addition, we show that their scheme does not provide strong user's anonymity. Furthermore, He-Wang's scheme cannot provide the user revocation facility when the smart card is lost/stolen or user's authentication parameter is revealed. Apart from these, He-Wang's scheme has some design flaws, such as wrong password login and its consequences, and wrong password update during password change phase. We then propose a new secure multi-server authentication protocol using biometric-based smart card and ECC with more security functionalities. Using the Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic, we show that our scheme provides secure authentication. In addition, we simulate our scheme for the formal security verification using the widely accepted and used automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications tool, and show that our scheme is secure against passive and active attacks. Our scheme provides high security along with low communication cost, computational cost, and variety of security features. As a result, our scheme is very suitable for battery-limited mobile devices as compared with He-Wang's scheme.

In recent years, the research in generic Internet of Things (IoT) attracts a lot of practical applications including smart home, smart city, smart grid, industrial internet, connected healthcare, smart retail, smart supply chain and smart farming. The hierarchical IoT network (HIoTN) is a special kind of the generic IoT network, which is composed of the different nodes such as the gateway node, cluster head nodes and sensing nodes organized in a hierarchy In HIoTN, there is a need where a user can directly access the real-time data from the sensing nodes for a particular application in generic IoT networking environment. This paper emphasizes on the design of a new secure lightweight three-factor remote user authentication scheme for HIoTNs, called the user authenticated key management protocol (UAKMP). The three factors used in UAKMP are the user smart card, password and personal biometrics. The security of the scheme is thoroughly analyzed under the formal security in the widely-accepted Real-Or-Random (ROR) model, the informal security as well as the formal security verification using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool. UAKMP offers several functionality features including offline sensing node registration, freely password and biometric update facility, user anonymity and sensing node anonymity compared to other related existing schemes. In addition, UAKMP is also comparable in computation and communication costs as compared to other existing schemes.

The Internet of Drones (IoD) provides a coordinated access to unmanned aerial vehicles that are referred as drones. The on-going miniaturization of sensors, actuators, and processors with ubiquitous wireless connectivity makes drones to be used in a wide range of applications ranging from military to civilian. Since most of the applications involved in the IoD are real-time based, the users are generally interested in accessing real-time information from drones belonging to a particular fly zone. This happens if we allow users to directly access real-time data from flying drones inside IoD environment and not from the server. This is a serious security breach which may deteriorate performance of any implemented solution in this IoD environment. To address this important issue in IoD, we propose a novel lightweight user authentication scheme in which a user in the IoD environment needs to access data directly from a drone provided that the user is authorized to access the data from that drone. The formal security verification using the broadly accepted automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications tool along with informal security analysis show that our scheme is secure against several known attacks. The performance comparison demonstrates that our scheme is efficient with respect to various parameters, and it provides better security as compared to those for the related existing schemes. Finally, the practical demonstration of our scheme is done using the widely accepted NS2 simulation.

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has been used in wide range of applications, such as smart living, smart health and smart transportation. Among all these applications, smart home is most popular, in which the users/residents can control the various smart sensor devices of home by using the ICT. However, the smart devices and users communicate over an insecure communication channel, i.e., the Internet. There might be the possibility of various types of attacks, such as smart device capture attack, user, gateway node and smart device impersonation attacks and privileged-insider attack on a smart home network. An illegal user, in this case, can gain access over data sent by the smart devices. Most of the existing schemes reported in the literature for the remote user authentication in smart home environment are not secure with respect to the above specified attacks. Thus, there is need to design a secure remote user authentication scheme for a smart home network so that only authorized users can have access to the smart devices. To mitigate the aforementioned isses, in this paper, we propose a new secure remote user authentication scheme for a smart home environment. The proposed scheme is efficient for resource-constrained smart devices with limited resources as it uses only one-way hash functions, bitwise XOR operations and symmetric encryptions/decryptions. The security of the scheme is proved using the rigorous formal security analysis under the widely-accepted Real-Or-Random (ROR) model. Moreover, the rigorous informal security analysis and formal security verification using the broadly-accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool is also done. Finally, the practical demonstration of the proposed scheme is also performed using the widely-accepted NS-2 simulation.

A user (external party) is interested in accessing the real-time data from some designated drones of a particular fly zone in the Internet of Drones (IoD) deployment. However, to provide this facility, the user needs to be authenticated by an accessed remote drone and vice-versa. After successful authentication both parties can establish a secret session key for the secure communication. To handle this important problem in IoD environment, we design a novel temporal credential based anonymous lightweight user authentication mechanism for IoD environment, called TCALAS. A detailed security analysis using formal security under the broadly applied real-or-random (ROR) model, formal security verification under the broadly used software verification tool, known as automated validation of internet security protocols and applications, and also informal security analysis reveal that TCALAS has the capability to resist various known attacks against passive/active adversary. In addition, a detailed comparative study has been conducted for TCALAS and other related schemes, and the study also reveals that TCALAS provides better security and functionality features, and lower costs in both computation and communication as compared to existing schemes.

Industrial Wireless Sensor Network (IWSN) is an emerging class of a generalized Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) having constraints of energy consumption, coverage, connectivity, and security. However, security and privacy is one of the major challenges in IWSN as the nodes are connected to Internet and usually located in an unattended environment with minimum human interventions. In IWSN, there is a fundamental requirement for a user to access the real-time information directly from the designated sensor nodes. This task demands to have a user authentication protocol. To satisfy this requirement, this article proposes a lightweight and privacy-preserving mutual user authentication protocol in which only the user with a trusted device has the right to access the IWSN. Therefore, in the proposed scheme, we considered the physical layer security of the sensor nodes. We show that the proposed scheme ensures security even if a sensor node is captured by an adversary. The proposed protocol uses the lightweight cryptographic primitives, such as one way cryptographic hash function, Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) and bitwise exclusive (XOR) operations. Security and performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is secure, and is efficient for the resource-constrained sensing devices in IWSN.