Hash-Chain Fog/Edge: A Mode-Based Hash-Chain for Secured Mutual Authentication Protocol Using Zero-Knowledge Proofs in Fog/Edge

Authentication is essential for the prevention of various types of attacks in fog/edge computing. Therefore, a novel mode-based hash chain for secure mutual authentication is necessary to address the Internet of Things (IoT) devices’ vulnerability, as there have been several years of growing concerns regarding their security. Therefore, a novel model is designed that is stronger and effective against any kind of unauthorized attack, as IoT devices’ vulnerability is on the rise due to the mass production of IoT devices (embedded processors, camera, sensors, etc.), which ignore the basic security requirements (passwords, secure communication), making them vulnerable and easily accessible. Furthermore, crackable passwords indicate that the security measures taken are insufficient. As per the recent studies, several applications regarding its requirements are the IoT distributed denial of service attack (IDDOS), micro-cloud, secure university, Secure Industry 4.0, secure government, secure country, etc. The problem statement is formulated as the “design and implementation of dynamically interconnecting fog servers and edge devices using the mode-based hash chain for secure mutual authentication protocol”, which is stated to be an NP-complete problem. The hash-chain fog/edge implementation using timestamps, mode-based hash chaining, the zero-knowledge proof property, a distributed database/blockchain, and cryptography techniques can be utilized to establish the connection of smart devices in large numbers securely. The hash-chain fog/edge uses blockchain for identity management only, which is used to store the public keys in distributed ledger form, and all these keys are immutable. In addition, it has no overhead and is highly secure as it performs fewer calculations and requires minimum infrastructure. Therefore, we designed the hash-chain fog/edge (HCFE) protocol, which provides a novel mutual authentication scheme for effective session key agreement (using ZKP properties) with secure protocol communications. The experiment outcomes proved that the hash-chain fog/edge is more efficient at interconnecting various devices and competed favorably in the benchmark comparison.

Lightweight and Anonymous Mutual Authentication Protocol for Edge IoT Nodes with Physical Unclonable Function

Internet of Things (IoT) has been widely used in many fields, bringing great convenience to people’s traditional work and life. IoT generates tremendous amounts of data at the edge of network. However, the security of data transmission is facing severe challenges. In particular, edge IoT nodes cannot run complex encryption operations due to their limited computing and storage resources. Therefore, edge IoT nodes are more susceptible to various security attacks. To this end, a lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement protocol is proposed to achieve the security of IoT nodes’ communication. The protocol uses the reverse fuzzy extractor to acclimatize to the noisy environment and introduces the supplementary subprotocol to enhance resistance to the desynchronization attack. It uses only lightweight cryptographic operations, such as hash function, XORs, and PUF. It only stores one pseudo-identity. The protocol is proven to be secure by rigid security analysis based on improved BAN logic. Performance analysis shows the proposed protocol has more comprehensive functions and incurs lower computation and communication cost when compared with similar protocols.

Proving authentication property of PUF-based mutual authentication protocol based on logic of events

PUF (Physical unclonable function) is a new hardware security primitive, and the research on PUFs is one of the emerging research focuses. For PUF-based mutual authentication protocols, a method to abstract the security properties of hardware by using logic of events is proposed, and the application aspects of logic of events are extended to protocols based on hardware security. With the interaction of PUF-based mutual authentication protocol formally described by logic of events, the basic sequences are constructed and the strong authentication property in protocol interaction process is verified. Based on the logic of events, the freshness of nonces is defined, and the persist rule is proposed according to the concept of freshness, which ensures the consistency of the protocol state and behavior predicate in the proof process, and reduces the complexity and redundancy in the protocol analysis process. Under reasonable assumptions, the security of the protocol is proven, and the fact that logic of events applies to PUF-based mutual authentication protocols is shown.