The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in military and civilian systems access sensitive data via cellular networks and are ubiquitous. Therefore, the number of handovers may increase, and the process of sharing authentication keys between drones to new drones may be vulnerable to eavesdropping due to the wireless connectivity. For example, a UAV initially served by cell A may be handed over to cell B after a certain point. Therefore, Security and privacy concerns raise if there is a change in the flight path of the UAV due to wide-area connectivity traffic management, including authentication threats as well as the leakage of identity, location, and flying routes. Also, drones are resource-constrained devices that cannot perform extensive operations, leading to the inability to resist drone capture attacks and impersonation attacks. Therefore, this paper presents a high-performance and efficient anonymous handover authentication protocol to secure the drone traveling path. The protocol utilizes the advantages of the AES-RSA algorithm to provide efficient and secure key management and a fast verification and signature generation that speeds up drone authentication. The protocol's security was proved using the formal verification ROR model and automated security verifier ProVerif tool to validate the protocol resistance against various attacks and provided forward secrecy. In addition, the performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated using the OMNeT++ simulator in terms of communication, computation cost, energy consumption, packet drop ratio, end-to-end delay, and throughput. The results showed that the protocol achieves better security, efficiency, and performance than other protocols.

The development of the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) promotes the integration of the cross-platform systems in fog computing, which enable users to obtain access to multiple application located in different geographical locations. Fog users at the network’s edge communicate with many fog servers in different fogs and newly joined servers that they had never contacted before. This communication complexity brings enormous security challenges and potential vulnerability to malicious threats. The attacker may replace the edge device with a fake one and authenticate it as a legitimate device. Therefore, to prevent unauthorized users from accessing fog servers, we propose a new secure and lightweight multi-factor authentication scheme for cross-platform IoT systems (SELAMAT). The proposed scheme extends the Kerberos workflow and utilizes the AES-ECC algorithm for efficient encryption keys management and secure communication between the edge nodes and fog node servers to establish secure mutual authentication. The scheme was tested for its security analysis using the formal security verification under the widely accepted AVISPA tool. We proved our scheme using Burrows Abdi Needham’s logic (BAN logic) to prove secure mutual authentication. The results show that the SELAMAT scheme provides better security, functionality, communication, and computation cost than the existing schemes.

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is one of the challenging research areas revolving around rapid communication services. Nonetheless, these networks are afflicted by congestion, routing, and security issues, particularly in urban areas, which result in delay and computational complexity issues and late message delivery or data congestion. Sensitive data are collected and transmitted over public channels, which presents challenges for security and authentication. Moreover, the security of ITS-smart vehicle communication is impacted by the complexity of discrete logarithm and factoring problems, which could make data transmission and authentication very difficult in the presence of highly scalable quantum computers. Hence, we present a novel, secure and verifiable post-quantum data transmission and authentication protocol for ITS (RAVEN), specifically designed for smart automobiles. The RAVEN scheme incorporates a discrete Gaussian distribution and lattice-based cryptosystem for enhanced performance and security. We use the formal verification method SVO logic and an informal security analysis against passive and active assaults to validate the security of mutual authentication. The use of a well-known automated AVISPA tool allowed for a further evaluation of the scheme’s security soundness. The OMNeT $++$ simulator is used to evaluate the efficacy of the RAVEN scheme in terms of end-to-end delay, throughput, and energy consumption. The evaluation findings demonstrate that the suggested method achieves reduced costs in terms of computation and communication compared to existing schemes but with comprehensive security that can greatly benefit ITS.

Recent Society 5.0 efforts by the Government of Japan are aimed at establishing a sustainable human-centered society by combining new technologies such as sensor networks, edge computing, Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems, artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and robotics. Many research works have been carried out with an increasing emphasis on the fundamentals of wireless sensor networks (WSN) for different applications; namely precision agriculture, environment, medical care, security, and surveillance. In the same vein, almost all of the known authentication techniques rely on the single gateway node, which is unsuitable for the current sensor nodes that are broadly distributed in the real world. Despite technological advances, resource constraints and vulnerability to an attacker physically capturing some sensor nodes have remained an important and challenging research field for developing wireless sensor network user authentication. This work proposes a new authentication scheme for agriculture professionals based on a multi-gateway communication model using a fuzzy extractor algorithm to support the Society 5.0 environment. The scheme provides a secure mutual authentication using the well-established formal method called BAN logic. The formal security verification of the proposed scheme is validated with the AVISPA tool, a powerful validation method for network security applications. In addition, the security of the scheme was informally analyzed to demonstrate that the scheme is secure from different attacks, e.g., sensor capture, replay, and other network and physical attacks. Furthermore, the communication and computation costs of the proposed scheme are evaluated and show better performance than the existing authentication schemes.

Several wireless devices and applications can be connected through wireless communication technologies to exchange data in future intelligent health systems (e.g., the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)). Smart healthcare requires ample bandwidth, reliable and effective communications networks, energy-efficient operations, and quality of service support (QoS). Healthcare service providers host multi-servers to ensure seamless services are provided to the end-users. By supporting a multi-server environment, healthcare medical sensors produce many data transmitted via servers, which is impossible in a single-server architecture. To ensure data security, secure online communication must be considered since the transmitted data are sensitive. Hence, the adversary may try to interrupt the transmission and drop or modify the message. Many researchers have proposed an authentication scheme to secure the data, but the schemes are vulnerable to specific attacks (modification attacks, replay attacks, server spoofing attacks, Man-in-the middle (MiTM) attacks, etc.). However, the absence of an authentication scheme that supports a multi-server security in such a comprehensive development in a distributed server is still an issue. In this paper, a secure authentication scheme using wireless medical sensor networks for a multi-server environment is proposed (Cross-SN). The scheme is implemented with a smart card, password, and user identity. Elliptic curve cryptography is utilized in the scheme, and Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic is utilized to secure mutual authentication and to analyse the proposed scheme’s security. It offers adequate protection against replies, impersonation, and privileged insider attacks and secure communication in multi-server parties that communicate with each other.

Connected vehicles have emerged as the latest revolution in the automotive industry, utilizing the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, most IoT-connected cars mechanisms currently depend on available network services and need continuous network connections to allow users to connect to their vehicles. Nevertheless, the connectivity availability shortcoming in remote or rural areas with no network coverage makes vehicle sharing or any IoT-connected device problematic and undesirable. Furthermore, IoT-connected cars are vulnerable to various passive and active attacks (e.g., replay attacks, MiTM attacks, impersonation attacks, and offline guessing attacks). Adversaries could all use these attacks to disrupt networks posing a threat to the entire automotive industry. Therefore, to overcome this issue, we propose a hybrid online and offline multi-factor authentication cross-domain authentication method for a connected car-sharing environment based on the user’s smartphone. The proposed scheme lets users book a vehicle using the online booking phase based on the secured and trusted Kerberos workflow. Furthermore, an offline authentication phase uses the OTP algorithm to authenticate registered users even if the connectivity services are unavailable. The proposed scheme uses the AES-ECC algorithm to provide secure communication and efficient key management. The formal SOV logic verification was used to demonstrate the security of the proposed scheme. Furthermore, the AVISPA tool has been used to check that the proposed scheme is secured against passive and active attacks. Compared to the previous works, the scheme requires less computation due to the lightweight cryptographic algorithms utilized. Finally, the results showed that the proposed system provides seamless, secure, and efficient authentication operation for the automotive industry, specifically car-sharing systems, making the proposed system suitable for applications in limited and intermittent network connections.