The concept of the smart city and the extensive use of vehicles are evolving progressively. This evolution makes vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) a widely used network for inter-vehicular communication to get information about speed, traffic congestion, road condition, and vehicle location. This information is obtained from a public network, which is prone to various attacks. Generally speaking, data security in VANET is one of the most crucial tasks. We found many authentication protocols for VANETs; however, most of these protocols are insecure due to impersonation, replay, denial of service attacks, etc. Moreover, the existing protocols utilized heavy computation and communication costs, making them incompatible for resource-constrained VANET applications. This article presents a lightweight privacy-preserving authentication protocol for VANETs to offer a secure and efficient data transmission mechanism over a public channel. We analyze that our protocol is lightweight, safe, and scalable compared to related protocols. The communication and computation cost of our protocol is less concerning the state-of-the-art protocols. Hence, it is overt from the observed facts that our protocol is more reliable, convenient, and practical for secure data transmission in VANETs.

The Internet of Drones (IoD) extends the capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles, enabling them to participate in a connected network. In IoD infrastructure, drones communicate not only among themselves but also with users and a control center. This interconnected communication framework holds promise for various applications, from collaborative decision-making to real-time data exchange. However, the expansion of communication in IoD also introduces new challenges, particularly in terms of security, privacy and authentication. Unfortunately, the current authentication protocols are inadequate in offering robust security features against various attacks in the IoD environment. To address these security issues and limitations, we proposed a secure protocol for the IoD environment using chaotic maps and hash functions. In addition, we also employed a physically unclonable function in the development of the proposed protocol. We assess the security of the protocol through both informal and formal security analysis. The formal security analysis is conducted through a widely used random or real (RoR) model. The informal analysis shows the rigorous security features against various attacks, such as masquerading, anonymity violation, and physical cloning attacks. Moreover, we compare the performance of the devised protocol with similar existing protocols across important performance parameters such as communication overhead, computation overhead, and security features. The devised protocol provides a 67.86% and 17.80% reduction in computation and communication overheads, respectively, as compared to related protocols. The analysis demonstrates the proposed protocol’s capacity to support secure communication in the IoD environment and satisfy desirable security attributes.

Cyber-physical-social systems (CPSSs) epitomize an evolving paradigm, including the social, physical, and cyber world. The vital goal of CPSSs is to offer personalized, high-quality, and proactive services for the end-users. An ingenious framework for reliable services is required for CPSSs to achieve this purpose. In this regard, the cloud storage environment of cloud computing (having a great connection with the physical, cyber, and social world) requires a reliable framework for secure communication between cloud and users. Cloud storage provides various services that need scalable, cost-effective, and secure facilities of data management. Public cloud storage bound its users to maintain strict security considerations that are offered by cloud service providers. On the other hand, an opportunity for users is offered by private cloud storage to construct a controlled and self-managed model of data security. This mobile model is responsible for managing the sharing and accessing of data privately. Despite that, it induces new challenges of data security. One censorious problem is to ensure the authenticated and secure model of data-storage for accessing the data under the controlled environment of data accessibility. To tackle this challenge, many protocols have been developed. The problem is that all these protocols are unable to fulfill the required security efficiency and are susceptible to various security attacks. Recently, Tiwari et al. presented an authentication scheme for data sharing and access with a biometric feature. They claimed that their scheme resists significant security attacks. However, in this article, we show that the claim of Tiwari et al. for developing a secure scheme is not valid, and their protocol is insecure against user and server impersonation attacks. Moreover, the protocol of Tiwari et al. do not provide user anonymity. Therefore, we present an enhanced, secure, and convenient scheme for data access. Besides, in order to add the flexible distribution of data that is controlled by data-owner, our protocol provides proxy re-encryption in which the cloud server utilizes the proxy re-encryption key. Then, the data-owner generates the credential token during decryption for controlling user's accessibility. The security analysis determines that our proposed protocol resists numerous security attacks. Furthermore, performance analysis determines that our protocol has practical computation, communication, and storage costs as compared to various related protocols. Consequently, our introduced protocol achieves not only the security goals but also has performance efficiency comparable to numerous relevant protocols of cloud storage.

The continuous revolution in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has played a significant role in the development of key consumer applications, including Industry 5.0, autonomous decision-making, fault diagnosis, etc. In practice, autonomous and intelligent robots and flying vehicles (i.e., drones) are also becoming the integral part of Industry 5.0. These vehicles are attaining significant importance nowadays because of their applications in consumer electronics. However, there may be numerous privacy issues in such an infrastructure. Nevertheless, neural computing-driven security solutions have played a significant role in overcoming the security and privacy issues of AI-driven intelligent flying vehicles. Motivated by these facts, this article presents a neural computing-based access control protocol for AI-driven flying vehicles to prevent all possible security threats. A detailed security evaluation of the devised protocol is done formally using the extensively recognized Real-Or-Random (ROR) oracle model. Similarly, the informal security analysis ensures the resistance of our scheme against various potential attacks under the assumptions of CK and DY adversarial models. Moreover, detailed performance scrutiny of the devised protocol with various existing schemes shows the robustness and supremacy of our scheme in terms of computation, communication overhead, and security attributes.

The Internet of Things (IoT) facilitates different devices and objects to get connected with the Internet. This connectivity helps to switch data via various emerging technologies, which shapes the vision of intelligent identification into reality. As a foremost base of the IoT, the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been practiced in various fields, such as smart transportation and smart healthcare. Due to rapid development of WSNs and wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs), etc., the data security issues and challenges, such as leakage of secret data, have also gained the serious attention of the researchers. Recently, the researchers have devised various authentication protocols for WMSNs, but many of them have serious security flaws. In order to overcome the security flaws of recently designed protocols, Li et al. (IEEE Syst. J., vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 39–50, Mar. 2020) presented a three-factor user authentication protocol for WMSN. Their work claimed that their proposed protocol not only offers user anonymity but also prevents sensor node impersonation attack. In this paper, we present the detailed security analysis of Li et al.’s protocol, which shows that their protocol fails to resist sensor node impersonation attack and does not offer user anonymity. At the end, we suggest the suitable remedy to overcome the deficiencies present in Li et al.’s protocol.