Automatic Key Update Mechanism for Lightweight M2M Communication and Enhancement of IoT Security: A Case Study of CoAP Using Libcoap Library

The ecosystem for an Internet of Things (IoT) generally comprises endpoint clients, network devices, and cloud servers. Thus, data transfers within the network present multiple security concerns. The recent boom in IoT applications has accelerated the need for a network infrastructure that provides timely and safe information exchange services. A shortcoming of many existing networks is the use of static key authentication. To enable the use of automatic key update mechanisms in IoT devices and enhance security in lightweight machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, we propose a key update mechanism, namely, double OTP (D-OTP), which combines both one-time password (OTP) and one-time pad to achieve an IoT ecosystem with theoretically unbreakable security. The proposed D-OTP was implemented into the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) through the commonly used libcoap library. The experimental results revealed that an additional 8.93% latency overhead was required to obtain an unbreakable guarantee of data transfers in 100 CoAP communication sessions.

Can Formal Security Verification Really Be Optional? Scrutinizing the Security of IMD Authentication Protocols

The need for continuous monitoring of physiological information of critical organs of the human body, combined with the ever-growing field of electronics and sensor technologies and the vast opportunities brought by 5G connectivity, have made implantable medical devices (IMDs) the most necessitated devices in the health arena. IMDs are very sensitive since they are implanted in the human body, and the patients depend on them for the proper functioning of their vital organs. Simultaneously, they are intrinsically vulnerable to several attacks mainly due to their resource limitations and the wireless channel utilized for data transmission. Hence, failing to secure them would put the patient’s life in jeopardy and damage the reputations of the manufacturers. To date, various researchers have proposed different countermeasures to keep the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of IMD systems with privacy and safety specifications. Despite the appreciated efforts made by the research community, there are issues with these proposed solutions. Principally, there are at least three critical problems. (1) Inadequate essential capabilities (such as emergency authentication, key update mechanism, anonymity, and adaptability); (2) heavy computational and communication overheads; and (3) lack of rigorous formal security verification. Motivated by this, we have thoroughly analyzed the current IMD authentication protocols by utilizing two formal approaches: the Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic (BAN logic) and the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA). In addition, we compared these schemes against their security strengths, computational overheads, latency, and other vital features, such as emergency authentications, key update mechanisms, and adaptabilities.

Secure Video Surveillance Framework in Smart City

In the construction process of smart cities, more and more video surveillance systems have been deployed for traffic, office buildings, shopping malls, and families. Thus, the security of video surveillance systems has attracted more attention. At present, many researchers focus on how to select the region of interest (RoI) accurately and then realize privacy protection in videos by selective encryption. However, relatively few researchers focus on building a security framework by analyzing the security of a video surveillance system from the system and data life cycle. By analyzing the surveillance video protection and the attack surface of a video surveillance system in a smart city, we constructed a secure surveillance framework in this manuscript. In the secure framework, a secure video surveillance model is proposed, and a secure authentication protocol that can resist man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM) and replay attacks is implemented. For the management of the video encryption key, we introduced the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) on the basis of group key management to provide an efficient and secure key update. In addition, we built a decryption suite based on transparent encryption to ensure the security of the decryption environment. The security analysis proved that our system can guarantee the forward and backward security of the key update. In the experiment environment, the average decryption speed of our system can reach 91.47 Mb/s, which can meet the real-time requirement of practical applications.

An Efficient Identity Based Encryption in Cloud Computing with Outsourced Revocation

Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) which simplifies the public key and certificate management at Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is an important alternative to public key encryption. However, one of the main efficiency drawbacks of IBE is the overhead computation at Private Key Generator (PKG) during user revocation. Efficient revocation has been well studied in traditional PKI setting, but the cumbersome management of certificates is precisely the burden that IBE strives to alleviate [2]. It aiming at tackling the critical issue of identity revocation, we introduce outsourcing computation into IBE for the first time and propose a revocable IBE scheme in the server-aided setting. Our scheme offloads most of the key generation related operations during key-issuing and key-update processes to a Key Update Cloud Service Provider, leaving only a constant number of simple operations for PKG and users to perform locally [3]. This goal is achieved by utilizing a novel collusion-resistant technique: we employ a hybrid private key for each user, in which an AND gate is involved to connect and bound the identity component and the time component [4]. Furthermore, we propose another construction which is provable secure under the recently formulized Refereed Delegation of Computation model. Finally, we provide extensive experimental results to demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed construction. In public key encryption every user must have a pair of keys, public key and private key, for encrypting and decrypting messages. An Identity-based encryption (IBE) eliminates the need for a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). IBE uses the human intelligible identities (e.g., unique name, email address, IP address, etc) as public keys [5]. The sender using IBE encrypts message with the receivers’ identity rather than looking for receivers’ public key and corresponding certificate. Accordingly, receiver decrypts ciphertext using private key associated with the corresponding identity [6]. The private keys of users are obtained from a trusted third party called as Private Key Generator (PKG). The motivation of this paper is to study and review an efficient and secure Identity based encryption scheme with outsourced revocation for cloud computing [7].