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 rising popularity of ICT and the Internet has enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to offer advantageous assistance to Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET), realizing a relay node’s role among the disconnected segments in the road. In this scenario, the communication is done between Vehicles to UAVs (V2U), subsequently transforming into a UAV-assisted VANET. UAV-assisted VANET allows users to access real-time data, especially the monitoring data in smart cities using current mobile networks. Nevertheless, due to the open nature of communication infrastructure, the high mobility of vehicles along with the security and privacy constraints are the significant concerns of UAV-assisted VANET. In these scenarios, Deep Learning Algorithms (DLA) could play an effective role in the security, privacy, and routing issues of UAV-assisted VANET. Keeping this in mind, we have devised a DLA-based key-exchange protocol for UAV-assisted VANET. The proposed protocol extends the scalability and uses secure bitwise XOR operations, one-way hash functions, including user’s biometric verification when users and drones are mutually authenticated. The proposed protocol can resist many well-known security attacks and provides formal and informal security under the Random Oracle Model (ROM). The security comparison shows that the proposed protocol outperforms the security performance in terms of running time cost and communication cost and has effective security features compared to other related protocols.

The development of the industrial Internet of Things and smart grid networks has emphasized the importance of secure smart grid communication for the future of electric power transmission. However, the current deployment of smart meters and wireless communication methods presents several security concerns that must be addressed to ensure sustainable and resilient smart grid networks for Industry 5.0, with a focus on consumer-centric technologies. In this context, we propose a privacy-focused authentication solution for secure consumer-centric demand response management in smart grid networks, incorporating consumer electronics. Our proposed protocol utilizes blockchain-based authentication to enhance resistance against potential attacks and ensure the integrity of demand response data. Additionally, we have incorporated a PUF to prevent physical attacks. We have conducted informal and formal security analyses to verify the effectiveness of our proposed protocol against various threats and to confirm the session key security. Our comparison study has demonstrated that our protocol provides superior security and added functionalities, with lower computation and communication costs compared to similar protocols. Furthermore, we have measured the computational time for implementing the blockchain component of our protocol while considering the impact of varying numbers of block additions and transactions per block.

Mobile satellite communication is becoming a crucial component for broadcast and broadband coverage in professional, commercial, military and emergency scenarios. Mobile devices and network control center (NCC) are the basic components of Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellites which communicate with each other with the help of gateways. The communication between these components needs high security. The various existing protocols for the environment of mobile satellite communication are insecure against numerous attacks and can be easily attacked by an adversary. So, there is an indispensable requirement of a reliable protocol which can offer efficient and secure communication for mobile satellite system. Therefore, a robust key agreement authentication scheme for mobile satellite environment is proposed in this article. The proposed protocol is developed according to the major security demands in the satellite communication networks. Our protocol provides mutual-authentication, session-key agreement and correct notion of user anonymity. The performance analysis for evaluation shows that the storage, communication and computation cost of the proposed protocol is less than many of existing protocols. Moreover, our protocol offers additional security features than that are available in the existing protocols. Hence, our protocol offers a secure authentication and key agreement for mobile satellite systems.

Globally, the development of Intelligent Cyber-Physical Transportation Systems (ICTS) aims to tackle several challenges, including reducing traffic accidents and fuel usage, alleviating congestion, shortening travel time, and enhancing overall transportation safety. These systems leverage advanced customer-centric communication and networked control methods, such as inter-vehicle, vehicle-to-roadside (V2R), and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication through the use of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to cover all aspects of transportation-based information. In existing systems, once devices are registered with a Trusted Authority (TA), subsequent authentication still relies on the TA’s assistance. However, these devices typically remain stationary, and frequent interaction with the TA becomes impractical and costly in highly mobile VANET environments. To address this challenge, we propose a secure access control protocol with conditional privacy for VANETs. Unlike other protocols, our protocol does not require the TA’s involvement during authentication between vehicles and RSUs. Additionally, our protocol leverages pseudonym mechanisms to provide conditional privacy, enabling legitimate vehicles to remain anonymous while malicious ones can be tracked. Our proposed scheme is supported by both formal and informal security analyses and has been shown to be secure against several known attacks in VANETs. Furthermore, compared to relevant studies, our protocol achieves 30.2505% of efficiency in terms of computation cost and 11.09276% of efficiency in terms of communication cost, respectively.

The emergence of contemporary technologies like cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the trends in the cyber world to serve humanity. There are plenty of applications in which they are being used, especially in smart cities and their constituents, Maritime Transportation System (MTS) is one of them. The IoT-enabled MTS has the potential to entertain the growing challenges of modern-day ship transportation. Secure real-time data access from numerous smart IoT devices is the most critical and crucial exercise for Big Data acquisition in IoT-enabled MTS. Therefore, we have developed a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) based authenticated key agreement solution to deal with this challenge. This solution enables the mobile user and IoT node to mutually authenticate each other via Cloud-Gateway before real-time data exchange and transmission in IoT-enabled MTS. The use of PUF in our solution brings invincibility against physical security threats. An inclusive security analysis under the assumption of the specified threat model is carried out to substantiate the security resilience of our solution. The conduct of our solution is realized through security features, communication, and computation cost and It has been observed that our solution achieves efficiency of 37.3% and 9.7% in communication and computation overhead, respectively. Moreover, the network performance effectiveness of our solution is demonstrated in NS3 implementation.