In Industry 5.0, the massive number of Internet of Things devices have increasing demands for group communication with a high communication efficiency and low energy consumption. However, group communication meets continuously increasing security risk challenges. Existing authentication and group key agreement schemes have encountered many problems, such as lack of anonymity and untraceability. In this article, we propose an anonymous authentication and dynamic group key agreement scheme based on the Blockchain and token mechanism, where each group member can apply for a time-sensitive token during the first authentication and only needs to check the validity of the token in the subsequent authentication, reducing the computational and transmission costs considerably. The verification on the security of the proposed scheme is tackled through mathematical analysis and validated using ProVerif, and comparisons with existing schemes demonstrate that the proposed scheme reduces the security risks and each group member’s energy consumption.

Wireless body area networks play an indispensable role in the medical Internet of Things. It is a network of several wearable or implantable devices that use wireless technologies to communicate. These devices usually collect the wearer’s physiological data and send it to the server. Some health care providers can access the server over the network and provide medical care to the wearer. Due to the openness and mobility of the wireless network, the adversary can easily steal and forge information which exchanged in the communication channel that leaks wearer’s privacy. Therefore, a secure and reliable authentication scheme is essential. Most of existing authentication schemes are based on asymmetric encryption. However, since the sensor devices in wireless body area networks are typically resource-constrained devices, their computing resources cannot afford to use asymmetric encryption. In addition, most of existing lightweight authentication schemes have various security vulnerabilities, especially the lack of forward secrecy. Therefore, we propose a secure lightweight authentication scheme for wireless body area networks. With this scheme, forward secrecy can be guaranteed without using asymmetric encryption. We use the automatic security verification tool ProVerif to verify the security of our scheme and analyze informal security. The experimental results and theoretical analysis indicate that our scheme significantly reduces the computational cost compared with the schemes using asymmetric encryption and that it has a lower security risk compared with the lightweight schemes.

The visual information processing technology based on deep learning can play many important yet assistant roles for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) navigation in complex environments. Traditional centralized architectures usually rely on a cloud server to perform model inference tasks, which can lead to long communication latency. Using transfer learning to unload deep neural networks to the edge-fog collaborative networks has become a new paradigm for dealing with the conflicts between computing resources and communication latency. However, ensuring the security of edge-fog collaborative networks entity remains challenging. For such, we propose an anonymous authentication and group key agreement scheme for the UAV-enabled edge-fog collaborative networks, consisting of the UAV authentication protocol and the collaborative networks authentication protocol. Utilizing the AVISPA assessment tool and security analysis, the security requirements and functional features of the proposed scheme are demonstrated. From the performance results of the proposed scheme, we show that it is superior to existing authentication schemes and promising.

With the rapid development of mobile networks, there are more and more application scenarios that require group communication. For example, in mobile edge computing, group communication can be used to transmit messages to all group members with minimal resources. The group key directly affects the security of the group communication. Most existing group key agreement protocols are often flawed in performance, scalability, forward or backward secrecy, or single node failure. Therefore, this paper proposes a blockchain-based authentication and dynamic group key agreement protocol. With our protocol, each group member only needs to authenticate its left neighbor once to complete the authentication, which improved authentication efficiency. In addition, our protocol guarantees the forward secrecy of group members after joining the group and the backward secrecy of group members after leaving the group. Based on blockchain technology, we solve the problem of single node failure. Furthermore, we use mathematics to prove the correctness and security of our protocol, and the comparison to related protocols shows that our protocol reduces computation and communication costs.