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Summary: Privacy and security present significant challenges in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In order to enhance security, the sensor network is equipped with high throughput. While the importance of both source node (SN) and base station (BS) location privacy and security is acknowledged, recent research has predominantly focused on location privacy. Addressing this gap, the geometric zigzag bidirectional tree effectively tackles privacy and security threats at both the SN and BS locations. Future iterations of WSN are anticipated to integrate additional functionalities to meet diverse requirements in real‐world applications. The absence of robust security constraints leads to an unpredictable sensor network setup. This article aims to reduce energy consumption (EC) while simultaneously enhancing network security and connectivity. To address security challenges in WSN, we propose an optimized meta‐heuristic clustering‐based privacy key‐agreement routing technique. In the suggested system, a gateway‐based network is constructed to devise a key arrangement protocol that promotes privacy during communication. The proposed routing strategy involves forming clusters of sensor nodes (Sn), facilitating the efficient selection of cluster heads (CHs) that prioritize nodes with the least modification. This effectively addresses the EC problem. A comprehensive performance evaluation is conducted, considering improvements in energy efficiency, packet delivery ratio (PDR), throughput, end‐to‐end delay (E2 delay), and EC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sensor clouds are formed by IP-enabled wireless sensors and Internet of Things devices that are used for sensing and actuation in commercial and industrial applications. Data collected by the sensors are consolidated by distributed cloud data consolidation (DCS) servers to be utilized as raw sensory information by applications running data analytics and actuation functions. Alternatively, DC servers may feed sensor data to the cloud-hosted Big Data Analytics (BDS) servers. Sensor clouds and their respective DCS servers, as well as BDS servers, may form different security realms. These security realms' ownership structures are complicated and differ from standard database servers, necessitating a dependable authentication technique to provide trusted access to DC and BDS servers. This paper proposes a new multiparty authentication framework to authenticate applications requesting access to the DCS and BDS servers without direct human or application access to the sensors and actuators. Only DC servers are permitted to communicate with sensors/actuators, and only applications certified by a Session Authority Cloud are granted access to DCS/BDS servers via an authentication protocol that includes many information and key exchanges. This solution may assure the reliable deployment of sensor clouds in different critical application domains (i.e., industry, commercial, national security, and defense, etc.) while reducing the potential of direct espionage of sensed/actuated systems. Linear Temporal Logic is used to explicitly analyze and establish the correctness of the presented framework. OPNET modeling and simulations are used to illustrate the protocol's design and operations. The results demonstrate that multiparty authentication is conceivable for Sensor cloud computing systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless medical sensor network (WMSN) is an application of the Internet of Things (IoT) that plays a very important role in today's era for the healthcare industry, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. To maintain the security and privacy of the real-time health information of the users or patients, the proper mutual authentication and key agreement (AKA) is the foremost necessity. In this context, Shadi Nashwan proposed an end-to-end authentication scheme for a healthcare IoT system i.e. WMSN, and claimed that their scheme could resist so many existing possible threats and could maintain a low computational cost too. Unfortunately, during this research, it is found that their scheme can be threatened by eavesdropping and jamming/desynchronization attacks and have many computational flaws, as well. Moreover, they also assumed that the gateway node (GWN) is always trustworthy, but in reality, it is not always feasible, as the GWN may act as a local server. Hence, in this article, a new AKA scheme has been proposed using the user's physiological information like ECG data in order to make the WMSN more secure and reliable. In addition, the proposed scheme can resist many well-known threats like GWN spoofing attack, key escrow problem and can guard against GWN stolen database problem, also. To proof the superiority of the proposed scheme, the informal and formal security analysis have been performed using automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (i.e. AVISPA) and Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, respectively. Based on the comparative study with existing schemes concerning security features, computational and communicational cost, and storage requirement; the proposed scheme can perform better than the existing schemes and well suitable for practical implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, smart card and password-based user authentication and key agreement schemes have become an integral mechanism to ensure only legitimate users get access to the data of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In the recent past, lots of password-based multi-factor user authentication schemes have been developed by the researchers. However, most of them are not secure against various known attacks. Recently, two user authentication and key agreement schemes for WSNs are suggested by Chen and Chen (J Supercomput 77(12):13653–13675, 2021) and Qi and Chen (J Supercomput 77(12):13897–13910, 2021). They claim that their schemes are secure against all known attacks. We analyze the security of these schemes and demonstrate that these schemes are not secure against some common attacks (such as smart card lost attack) and do not provide common security features such as user untraceability and forward secrecy. By keeping all the merits of these schemes, we suggest a new provably secure user authentication and key agreement scheme using physically unclonable functions and elliptic curve cryptography. To verify the security and authentication properties of the suggested scheme, we use the well-known Proverif tool for formal security verification. We further prove its security informally. Finally, performance comparison with some recent schemes in terms of security features and computational cost is performed. Performance comparison results show the superiority of the suggested scheme over the existing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present the Multidimensional Byzantine Agreement (MBA) Protocol, a leaderless Byzantine agreement protocol defined for complete and synchronous networks that allows a network of nodes to reach consensus on a vector of relevant information regarding a set of observed events. The consensus process is carried out in parallel on each component, and the output is a vector whose components are either values with wide agreement in the network (even if no individual node agrees on every value) or a special value ⊥ that signals irreconcilable disagreement. The MBA Protocol is probabilistic and its execution halts with probability 1, and the number of steps necessary to halt follows a Bernoulli-like distribution. The design combines a Multidimensional Graded Consensus and a Multidimensional Binary Byzantine Agreement, the generalization to the multidimensional case of two protocols presented by Micali et al. (SIAM J Comput 26(4):873–933, 1997; Byzantine agreement, made trivial, 2016). We prove the correctness and security of the protocol assuming a synchronous network where less than a third of the nodes are malicious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 5G, the next generation of technologies like the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) cooperate with networking artifacts to provide seamless connectivity. To provide effective information sharing, the Internet infrastructure integrates various components of medical information systems such as computing devices, software tools, and application services. The information systems access a massive Internet of Medical Things (mIoMT) to discover a series of network infrastructures with technological innovations to offer remote diagnosis and treatment. In collecting healthcare information, innovative applications utilize medical sensor networks to drive extensive information processing including mobility support. However, the convergence of IoT and the cloud addresses the security gap while centralizing the devices into edge computing systems to protect the transmission flow through the device gateway. Considering this fact, an authentication scheme with privacy preservation was proposed using a key exchange protocol and digital signature by Soleymani et al. to guarantee data confidentiality and integrity. However, this scheme is still incapable of validating the integrity of data with the edge systems properly. Thus, this paper presents privacy-preserving authentication with device verification (PP-ADV) for securing healthcare systems in 5G networks. To protect the device privacy and server identities with registered users, the proposed PP-ADV utilizes two cryptographic primitives namely elliptic curve arithmetic and a collision-free hash function to achieve the significant properties of key agreement protocol including authenticity and confidentiality. Formal and informal analyses show that the proposed PP-ADV can restrict vulnerabilities such as privileged insider and forgery to achieve high-level privacy protection with seamless verification to improve system efficiency compared with other state-of-the-art approaches. Also, a board simulation testbed was designed using Raspberry Pi with Arduino IDE to examine the quality metrics including data transmission ratio, authentication delay, and throughput rate. The testbed analysis demonstrates that the proposed PP-ADV gains less delay ≈ 292.28 s and improved throughput ≈ 87.73 to meet the design criteria of 5G-enabled remote healthcare systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is a fundamental functional module of Smart Grid that supports mutual communication between customers and electric companies. In order to secure AMI communication, scholars have proposed many key management schemes, some of which suffer from security issues or high costs. Recently, Mohammadali et al. proposed a key establishment NIKE protocol based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography. In this paper, we demonstrate that the protocol is vulnerable to both replay and tampering attacks and does not provide user anonymity. For the security vulnerabilities of the NIKE protocol, we propose an improvement scheme. And the proposed scheme is analyzed and verified for security based on the random oracle model and formal tools. Finally, we perform performance analysis of the improved scheme and the results show that the scheme has low communication and computation costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), protocols with authentication and key agreement functions can enhance the security of the interaction between users and sensor nodes, guaranteeing the security of user access and sensor node information. Existing schemes have various security vulnerabilities and are susceptible to security attacks (e.g., masquerading user, password guessing, internal privilege, and MITT attacks), so they cannot meet the anonymity requirements or achieve forward security. To effectively improve the security performance of WSNs, an elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)-based three-factor authentication and key agreement scheme for WSNs is proposed. The scheme is based on the ECC protocol and combines biometrics, smart card and password authentication technology; uses a challenge/response mechanism to complete the authentication between users, gateways, and sensors; and negotiates a secure session key. The Burrows, Abadi and Needham logic for formal security analysis proves the correctness and security of the scheme, and the informal analysis of multiple known attacks proves that the scheme can resist various attacks and has high security characteristics. The feasibility of the scheme has been analysed and verified with the ProVerif tool. The efficiency analysis results show that the scheme is suitable for resource-constrained WSNs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A PID tuning approach is presented to achieve an optimal compromise among robustness, performance and control effort in terms of measurement noise amplification. The tuning strategy is based on the concept of fixed robustness tuning line, in which the derivative filter parameter is a key point in finding the compromise between control effort due to noise and performance. The approach allows to find the controller that optimises the performance while fulfils a prescribed robustness constraint and a permitted control effort due to noise. The tuning procedure has been implemented in a software tool that can be freely downloaded from . The robustness can be defined in three different ways, involving the phase margin, the gain margin and the sensitivity peak. The performance can be defined in several ways, including the IAE, ITAE, ISE and other. Some examples show the validity of the approach and the use of the tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A bilinear map whose domain and target sets are identical is called a self-bilinear map. Original self-bilinear maps are defined over cyclic groups. Since the map itself reveals information about the underlying cyclic group, the Decisional Diffie–Hellman Problem (DDH) and the computational Diffie–Hellman (CDH) problem may be solved easily in some specific groups. This brings a lot of limitations to constructing secure self-bilinear schemes. As a compromise, a self-bilinear map with auxiliary information was proposed in CRYPTO'2014. In this paper, we construct this weak variant of a self-bilinear map from generic sets and indistinguishable obfuscation. These sets should own several properties. A new notion, One Way Encoding System (OWES), is proposed to summarize these properties. The new Encoding Division Problem (EDP) is defined to complete the security proof. The OWES can be built by making use of one level of graded encoding systems (GES). To construct a concrete self-bilinear map scheme, Garg, Gentry, and Halvei(GGH13) GES is adopted in our work. Even though the security of GGH13 was recently broken by Hu et al., their algorithm does not threaten our applications. At the end of this paper, some further considerations for the EDP for concrete construction are given to improve the confidence that EDP is indeed hard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hydropower facilities are often remotely monitored or controlled from a centralized remote control room. Additionally, major component manufacturers monitor the performance of installed components, increasingly via public communication infrastructures. While these communications enable efficiencies and increased reliability, they also expand the cyber-attack surface. Communications may use the internet to remote control a facility's control systems, or it may involve sending control commands over a network from a control room to a machine. The content could be encrypted and decrypted using a public key to protect the communicated information. These cryptographic encoding and decoding schemes become vulnerable as more advances are made in computer technologies, such as quantum computing. In contrast, quantum key distribution (QKD) and other quantum cryptographic protocols are not based upon a computational problem, and offer an alternative to symmetric cryptography in some scenarios. Although the underlying mechanism of quantum cryptogrpahic protocols such as QKD ensure that any attempt by an adversary to observe the quantum part of the protocol will result in a detectable signature as an increased error rate, potentially even preventing key generation, it serves as a warning for further investigation. In QKD, when the error rate is low enough and enough photons have been detected, a shared private key can be generated known only to the sender and receiver. We describe how this novel technology and its several modalities could benefit the critical infrastructures of dams or hydropower facilities. The presented discussions may be viewed as a precursor to a quantum cybersecurity roadmap for the identification of relevant threats and mitigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A paradigm that combines cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) allows for more impressive services to be provided to users while addressing storage and computational resource issues in the IoT environments. This cloud-based IoT environment has been used in various industries, including public services, for quite some time, and has been researched in academia. However, various security issues can arise during the communication between IoT devices and cloud servers, because communication between devices occurs in open channels. Moreover, issues such as theft of a user's IoT device or extraction of key parameters from the user's device in a remote location can arise. Researchers interested in these issues have proposed lightweight mutual authentication key agreement protocols that are safe and suitable for IoT environments. Recently, a lightweight authentication scheme between IoT devices and cloud servers has been presented. However, we found out their scheme had various security vulnerabilities, vulnerable to insider, impersonation, verification table leakage, and privileged insider attacks, and did not provide users with untraceability. To address these flaws, we propose a provably secure lightweight authentication scheme. The proposed scheme uses the user's biometric information and the cloud server's secret key to prevent the exposure of key parameters. Additionally, it ensures low computational costs for providing users with real-time and fast services using only exclusive OR operations and hash functions in the IoT environments. To analyze the safety of the proposed scheme, we use informal security analysis, Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic and a Real-or-Random (RoR) model. The analysis results confirm that our scheme is secure against insider attacks, impersonation attacks, stolen verifier attacks, and so on; furthermore, it provides additional security elements. Simultaneously, it has been verified to possess enhanced communication costs, and total bit size has been shortened to 3776 bits, which is improved by almost 6% compared to Wu et al.'s scheme. Therefore, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme is suitable for cloud-based IoT environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multiparty‐mediated quantum secret sharing (MQSS) protocol proposed by Tsai et al. [Quantum Inf. Process., 2022, 21, 63] allows n restricted users with limited quantum capabilities to share secret information using a dishonest third party with full quantum capabilities. Although the MQSS protocol allows restricted users to achieve secret sharing with lightweight quantum capabilities, the qubit efficiency of this protocol can be further improved. Therefore, this study proposes a measurement property of the graph state to design an efficient mediated quantum secret‐sharing protocol in the same quantum environment as that of Tsai et al.'s protocol. The proposed MQSS protocol not only inherits the lightweight property of Tsai et al.'s protocol but also improves the qubit efficiency of Tsai et al.'s protocol by 2n−1$2{\;^{n - 1}}$ times. Security analysis is performed to show that the proposed MQSS protocol can avoid collective, collusion, and Trojan horse attacks. Furthermore, this study uses quantum network simulation software to implement Tsai et al.'s protocol and the proposed protocol to prove the feasibility of the proposed MQSS protocol and show that it is more efficient than Tsai et al.'s protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data privacy and security concerns have attracted significant attention, leading to the frequent occurrence of data silos in deep learning. To address this issue, federated learning (FL) has emerged. However, simple federated learning frameworks still face two security risks during the training process. Firstly, sharing local gradients instead of private datasets among users does not completely eliminate the possibility of data leakage. Secondly, malicious servers could obtain inaccurate aggregation parameters by forging or simplifying the aggregation process, ultimately leading to model training failures. To address these issues and achieve high-performance training models, we have designed a verifiable federated learning scheme called CVFL, where users exist in a serial manner to resist inference attacks and further protect the privacy of user dataset information through serial encryption. We ensure the secure aggregation of models through a verification protocol based on Lagrange interpolation functions. The serial transmission of local gradients effectively reduces the communication burden on cloud servers, and our verification protocol avoids the computational overhead caused by a large number of encryption and decryption operations without sacrificing model accuracy. Experimental results on the MNIST dataset demonstrate that, after 10 epochs of training with 100 users, our solution achieves a model accuracy of 90.63% for MLP architecture under IID data distribution and 87.47% under non-IID data distribution. For CNN architecture, our solution achieves a model accuracy of 96.72% under IID data distribution and 93.53% under non-IID data distribution. Experimental evaluations corroborate the practical performance of the presented scheme with high accuracy and efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a user-friendly encrypted storage scheme named EStore, which is based on the Hadoop distributed file system. Users can make use of cloud-based distributed file systems to collaborate with each other. However, most data are processed and stored in plaintext, which is out of the owner's control after it has been uploaded and shared. Meanwhile, simple encryption guarantees the confidentiality of uploaded data but reduces availability. Furthermore, it is difficult to deal with complex key management as there is the problem whereby a single key encrypts different files, thus increasing the risk of leakage. In order to solve the issues above, we put forward an encrypted storage model and a threat model, designed with corresponding system architecture to cope with these requirements. Further, we designed and implemented six sets of protocols to meet users' requirements for security and use. EStore manages users and their keys through registration and authentication, and we developed a searchable encryption module and encryption/decryption module to support ciphertext retrieval and secure data outsourcing, which will only minimally increase the calculation overhead of the client and storage redundancy. Users are invulnerable compared to the original file system. Finally, we conducted a security analysis of the protocols to demonstrate that EStore is feasible and secure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become increasingly popular in recent years and are applied in various fields, from commercial and scientific to military and humanitarian operations. However, their usage presents many challenges, including limited resources, scalability issues, insecure communication, and inefficient solutions. We developed a secure and scalable registration protocol to address these issues using LoRa technology. Our solution involves the usage of the physical unclonable function (PUF) and blockchain technology for key exchange. PUF also ensures security against physical tampering, and blockchain is applied to share the symmetric key among the base stations. After the registration, the later communication messages are encrypted with AES-GCM to provide authentication and confidentiality between the parties. We conducted a security analysis of the registration protocol using the ProVerif tool, and our solution meets the security requirements, including the mutual authentication of entities, key freshness, key secrecy and also key confirmation properties. Besides the Proverif-based analysis, an informal security analysis is also provided that shows that the registration is protected against a variety of well-known active and passive security attacks. As drone resources are limited, we also prepared a proof of concept to test our solution under real-life conditions, focusing on efficiency and lightweight operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things (IoT) has witnessed significant growth with advancements in Internet and wireless technologies. In the medical field, the Internet of Health Things (IoHT) has emerged as an extension of the IoT, enabling the exchange of remote data and real-time monitoring of patients' health conditions. Through the IoHT, doctors can promptly provide diagnoses and treatment for patients. As patient data are transmitted over public channels, security issues may arise, necessitating security mechanisms. Recently, Amintoosi et al. proposed an authentication protocol for smart medical services in the IoHT. However, their protocol exhibited security weaknesses, including vulnerabilities to privileged insider attacks. To address the security concerns, we propose an enhanced authentication and key agreement protocol. The security of our protocol is rigorously analyzed using the Real-Or-Random model, informal security analysis, and the AVISPA tool. Finally, the results of our analysis demonstrate that our proposed protocol ensures sufficient security while maintaining a performance level similar to existing protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyber-attacks on the internet are not a new phenomenon. Hackers are always looking for ways to breach the security of the internet. Good researchers continuously develop solutions to the problems of breaches in security. Human interaction proofs are also one of the most affordable solutions to problems. The completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart (CAPTCHA) has a wide range of applications, including website authentication, preventing bogus email registration, preventing bogus online polls, preventing bogus ticket booking, and so on. CAPTCHAs come in various formats, but text-based schemes are the most common. Unfortunately, these text-based CAPTCHAs are available in foreign languages and have a high success rate. The usability of these foreign language-based schemes for native people is also very low. These days, Hindi CAPTCHAs are available, but before using them, we must test the security of these schemes. In this study, ten different coloured CAPTCHAs are broken using the k-nearest neighbours, the support vector machine, and the random forest classifiers. The breaking rate for two-colour schemes is 90%, while the breaking rate for multi-colour schemes is 93%. The solving time for the support vector machine and the random forest classifier ranges from 0.06 s to 0.09 s and 0.1 to 0.2 s in the case of two-colour schemes. For multi-colour schemes, it ranges from 0.06 s to 0.09 s and 0.09 s to 0.2 s for the support vector machine and random forest classifier, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Rapid development of wireless networks brings about many security problems in portable communication systems (PCSs), which can provide mobile users with an opportunity to enjoy global roaming services. In this regard, designing a secure user authentication scheme, especially for recognizing legal roaming users, is indeed a challenging task. It is noticed that there is no delegation‐based protocol for PCSs, which can guarantee anonymity, untraceability, perfect forward secrecy, and resistance of denial‐of‐service (DoS) attack. Therefore, in this article, we put forward a novel delegation‐based anonymous and untraceable authentication protocol, which can guarantee to resolve all the abovementioned security issues and hence offer a solution for secure communications for PCSs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Internet of Things (IoT) specifies a transparent and coherent integration of assorted and composite nodes. Unification of these nodes with large resources and servers has brought advancement in technology for industrial and government services. The industrial IoT (IIoT), with smart nodes, enhance the development and manufacturing of industrial process, which is on demand now. However, the security concern is substantial, and it is required to control to perform prosperous assimilation of IIoT. Authentication of these smart nodes and establishing mutual trust among them is essential to keep vulnerabilities and potential risks out. Hence, this paper presents an efficient lightweight secure authentication protocol from the perspective of human‐centered IIoT. This proposed scheme assumes a registration center which simply generates public and secret information for a node when it initially joins the network. Once registration is done, the registration center is not needed anymore, and advanced processes like mutual authentication, secure key exchange, and communications are independently done by nodes involved. Furthermore, we show that this scheme can reduce exponential computations and computational overhead and resolves various possible attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantum one-way function provides security for cryptographic protocols in quantum cryptography. Full quantum one-way function is a type of quantum one-way function that maps between quantum states and deals with pure quantum information. It was initially proposed by means of concatenating 'quantum–classical' and 'classical–quantum' quantum one-way functions. The first full quantum one-way function can be applied to quantum authentication, which uses quantum states to authenticate quantum states directly. However, the concatenation format restricts the implementation and cryptographic applications of this function. Considering the advantage of quantum circuit optimization in implementing quantum circuits to physical quantum devices, we propose a dynamic full quantum one-way function based on quantum circuit mapping. Quantum circuit optimization intrinsically generates the remapped quantum circuit which maps between quantum states but does not destroy them. The dynamic process of quantum circuit mapping contributes to the one-wayness of the dynamic full quantum one-way function. The experimental results show that this function is more realizable than the concatenated full quantum one-way function. The dynamic full quantum one-way function can be employed to construct a full quantum trapdoor one-way function which is 'easy to compute and invert' based on a trapdoor. Meanwhile, this new full quantum one-way function is proved to be very useful in quantum cryptography, especially in quantum currency notes. Our work promotes the development from full quantum one-way functions to future quantum cryptographic applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Handover authentication and key agreement protocol is extremely essential to ensure the security of the Internet of Things (IoT), and it enables mobile devices to access roaming services in the trust domain of the foreign agent. The energy and computing capabilities of mobile devices are extremely limited, and the requirements for storage and computing efficiency are higher in IoT. The problem of large integer decomposition and discrete logarithm can be solved in polynomial time on a quantum computer, which makes the massive traditional handover authentication and key agreement protocols based on bilinear pairing and elliptic curve cryptography no longer safe. Due to the participation of the home agent, the traditional handover authentication protocol has a long communication delay and is vulnerable to the session key compromise attacks. Moreover, the session key between the foreign agent and the home agent is randomly specified in advance, and its generation process is not given, which has poor security and is easy to cause the leakage of the session key. Lattice cipher based on NTRU is the lightweight public key primitive that can resist quantum attacks and has a faster calculation speed and smaller key length, which is more suitable for IoT. Therefore, we proposed a secure and lightweight two-party handover authentication protocol based on NTRU for the mobile device without the home agent to prevent these deficiencies. We employ the BAN logic to validate the correctness of the proposed protocol and utilize the random oracle model to evaluate the security of the proposed protocol. In contrast with other current handover authentication protocols, the proposed protocol has greater security, higher efficiency, and lower communication overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fog and dew computing represent relatively new computing paradigms in the literature. The main idea is to offload the computation processes from the device to a more nearby fog or dew server, who further forwards it to the central server. In the case of dew computing, the dew server is considered to lose connection with the central server and should be able to function autonomously most of the time. In the literature, several public-key-based tripartite schemes, offering a full set of security features, have been proposed that can serve the purpose. However, due to the large difference in performance between symmetric and public key-based cryptographic algorithms, this paper proposes a symmetric key-based authentication and key agreement protocol, consisting of a long and a short authentication process, addressing both fog and dew computing scenarios. Moreover, we conduct the informal and formal (ROR logic, GNY logic, and Scyther tool) security analysis to ensure that the scheme satisfies the most important security features described in the literature, in addition to offering protection against a semi-trusted third party. Furthermore, we assess the performance of the long and the short authentication phases in terms of computational, communication, storage costs, and energy consumption, revealing that it is less expensive than its competitors. Additionally, we show that when compared to its competitors, the long and the short authentication phases have less overhead when unknown attacks occur. We also use the NS2 network simulator tool to execute a real-time implementation of the long and the short authentication phase to ensure that it is realistic in practical implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent developments in quantum computing pose a significant threat to the asymmetric cryptography currently in use. Neural cryptography offers a potential alternative that is resistant to attacks of known quantum computer algorithms. The considered solution is lightweight and computationally efficient. If a quantum computer algorithm were successfully implemented, it could expose IoT sensors and smart grid components to a wide range of attack vectors. Given the lightweight nature of neural cryptography and the potential risks, neural cryptography could have potential applications in both IoT sensors and smart grid systems. This paper evaluates one of the suggested enhancements: the use of integer-valued input vectors that accelerate the synchronization of the Tree Parity Machine. This enhancement introduces a new parameter M that indicates the minimum and maximum values of input vector elements. This study evaluates the nonbinary version of the mutual learning algorithm in a simulated insecure environment. The results indicate that, while the Nonbinary Tree Parity Machine may involve some trade-offs between security and synchronization time, the speed improvement is more substantial than the decrease in security. The impact of this enhancement is particularly significant for smaller adjustments to parameter M. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of things (IoT) has evolved as the internet of everything, and it has grabbed the interest of all the researchers in recent days. Almost all the objects, including nonelectronics devices, can also be connected with the internet through radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The security of the perception layer is crucial to secure the entire IoT network. RFID-enabled IoT perception layer has secured reader-to-server channel and unsecured tag to reader channel. Hence, securing the unsecured communication channel between the reader and the tag is the need of the hour. This work proposes a simple yet secure permutation approximate adder (SYSPXA)-based RFID mutual authentication protocol to address the need. The proposed protocol dramatically reduces the tag's storage and computational overhead. It needs 40% less storage and 66.7% less permutation operation in comparison with the existing protocols. Nondisclosure of the key and freshness of key, IDS and random numbers at every mutual authentication process gives resistance to the protocol against de-synchronization attack, disclosure attack, tag tracking, replay attack. The SYSPXA protocol is validated for its security features using Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic formal verification. The performance and security of the proposed protocol are contrasted with various futuristic permutation-based protocols, and its superiority over other protocols is highlighted. We have simulated the SYSPXA protocol with ModelSim tool for verifying its functionality. The protocol encoder architecture is implemented in the Intel cyclone IV Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) EP4CE115F29C7 device. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to make the quantum key agreement process immune to participant attacks, it is necessary to introduce the authentication in the communication process. A quantum key agreement protocol with identity authentication that exploits the measurement correlation of six-particle entangled states is proposed. In contrast to some recently proposed quantum key agreement protocols with authentication, this protocol requires neither a semi-trusted third party nor additional private keys in the authentication process. The entire process of authentication and key agreement can be achieved using only n six-particle entangled states, which saves communication costs and reduces the complexity of the authentication process. Finally, security analysis shows that this scheme is resistant to some important attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Space–Air–Ground Integrated Network (SAGIN) expands cyberspace greatly. Dynamic network architecture, complex communication links, limited resources, and diverse environments make SAGIN's authentication and key distribution much more difficult. Public key cryptography is a better choice for terminals to access SAGIN dynamically, but it is time-consuming. The semiconductor superlattice (SSL) is a strong Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) to be the hardware root of security, and the matched SSL pairs can achieve full entropy key distribution through an insecure public channel. Thus, an access authentication and key distribution scheme is proposed. The inherent security of SSL makes the authentication and key distribution spontaneously achieved without a key management burden and solves the assumption that excellent performance is based on pre-shared symmetric keys. The proposed scheme achieves the intended authentication, confidentiality, integrity, and forward security, which can defend against masquerade attacks, replay attacks, and man-in-the-middle attacks. The formal security analysis substantiates the security goal. The performance evaluation results confirm that the proposed protocols have an obvious advantage over the elliptic curve or bilinear pairings-based protocols. Compared with the protocols based on the pre-distributed symmetric key, our scheme shows unconditional security and dynamic key management with the same level performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The smart grid designates an innovative technology integrating new information and communication technologies to modernize the energy distribution network and facilitate the transmission of consumption and billing data between production and distribution points. However, the data transmission over the network allows attackers to listen to and subsequently falsify these data, which poses a significant security problem. For this reason, various research works have been very successful in the past decades, with many proposals and improvements over time. However, many suffer from recurring problems regarding high computation and communication costs, and others have been vulnerable to several types of attacks. All these observations have led us to devise a new scheme that provides mutual authentication and authenticated key agreement, which aims to preserve the privacy and security of all communications exchanged in the smart grid against any attack attempt aimed at during network migrations. The experimental results confirm the efficiency and reliability of our contribution in terms of calculation and communication costs and show that our solution provides a high level of security with minimal general costs compared to other competing solutions proposed in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the continuous progress of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, IoT devices have gradually penetrated all aspects of life. However, due to rapid data growth, IoT devices with limited memory resources cannot store massive data. Cloud computing is an Internet-centric network that can provide security services and data storage. The combination of IoT devices with cloud computing considerably promotes resource sharing, facilitates users' access to information at any time, and provides users with corresponding cloud computing services on time. Because the information transmitted through public channels is easily intercepted, tampered with, and eavesdropped on by malicious attackers. As a result, users' and servers' private information are disclosed. Numerous scholars have proposed different authentication protocols in this environment to protect the communications between users and servers. Amin et al. devised a smart card based authentication protocol. Unfortunately, Kang et al. demonstrated that their protocol was insecure. Huang et al. discovered Kang et al.'s improvement also has security flaws and then designed a protocol to enhance security. In this paper, we first show that Huang et al.'s protocol cannot resist privileged insider and temporary value disclosure attacks. Afterward, we propose an enhanced protocol based on their protocol. Finally, we use formal/informal security analysis to demonstrate the security of the improved protocol. The comparison results are indicated that our protocol has lower computational and communication costs under the same security level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Password authentication key agreement can not only establish secure remote communication between client and server, but also amplify a low-entropy password into a high-entropy session key. However, with the rapid development of quantum computing technology, PAKA protocol based on classical mathematical problems such as large number decomposition and discrete logarithm is facing serious security challenges. Thus, in order to construct an efficient and secure post-quantum PAKA protocol, This paper proposes a post-quantum lattice-based anonymous two party PAKA protocol based on the improved BPR model and gives a strict formal security proof. The performance analysis results show that compared with the related PAKA protocol, it has some advantages in security and execution efficiency. So it is more suitable for resource-constrained Internet of Things smart mobile devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(1) Background: Third-generation sequencing (TGS) technique directly sequences single deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecules, enabling real-time sequencing and reducing sequencing time from a few days to a few hours. Sequencing devices can be miniaturized and DNA-reading sensors placed on the body to monitor human health and vital signs, building an "internet of living things" (IoLT) facilitating ubiquitous healthcare services. In many cases, patients may wish to directly connect to each other for purposes of sharing real-time sequencing data, medical status or trading genomic data, etc. (2) Problems: User registration for a specific service may be limited due to some reason. Registering for multiple redundant services would also result in wasted money and possible wasteful communication overhead. In addition, since medical data and health information are very sensitive, security and privacy issues in the network are of paramount importance. (3) Methods: In this article, I propose a cross-server end-to-end (CS-E2E) patient authenticated key agreement protocol for DNA-based healthcare services in IoLT networks. My work allows two patients to mutually authenticate each other through assistance of respective servers, so that they can establish a reliable shared session key for securing E2E communications. The design employs multiple cost-saving solutions and robust cryptographic primitives, including smart-card-based single sign-on, elliptic curve cryptography, biohash function, etc. (4) Results: My proposed protocol is proven to be secure against various attacks and to incur reasonable communication cost compared to its predecessor works. The protocol also provides the support for more security properties and better functionalities. (5) Conclusions: The E2E communications between the patients are properly protected using the proposed approach. This assures a secure and efficient cross-server patient conversation for multiple purposes of healthcare communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless body area networks are gaining popularity due to their innovative applications such as timely analysis, remote monitoring of patients' health, and high patient care quality. However, these healthcare systems that carry patient's physiological data need special attention for the security and privacy of information. Due to the openness of transmitted data, the healthcare system gets prone to several adverse attacks. In this paper, a provably secure remote healthcare system is proposed based on the elliptic curve cryptosystem. The goal is to enable confidentiality and privacy of sensitive information by designing a certificateless authenticated key agreement protocol with low computational cost and higher security. The proposed scheme achieves anonymity, resistance to key escrow problems, mutual authentication between the sensor nodes attached to patients and the application provider. Furthermore, the protocol undergoes formal security analysis using the random oracle model, and the soundness of the proposed scheme is validated using ProVerif. Finally, the performance analysis depicts that the proposed scheme is efficient compared to existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The upcoming paradigm in Internet of Things (IoT) based applications is to afford effective interactional communication strategies between the devices in the smart home system. With the rapid growth of IoT services, the incorporation of security measures becomes a vital concern. The general issue faced in the security of the intercommunication between the devices and the users is improper authentication between them. Also, the access control of devices must be ensured with reliable features for establishing secure communication between the users and devices. Hence, we propose a protocol called Modified Honey Encryption using Inverse Sampling-Conditional Probability Model Transform (MHE-IS-CPMT) with Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to authenticate and perform the key agreement. Here, we employ the following steps: (1) Initialization, (2) Registration, (3) Login and data access Request, (4) Authentication and Session key agreement, and (5) Key update. At the commencement of the session, the users (u), Mobile Users (MU), and the other devices participating in the smart home system are initialized to the Home network head (H). Then, for the registration process, the user and the devices register them into H via the smart gateway (SG) by providing their own identities. The user details and the data about the devices are secured using the MHE-IS-CPMT with the ECC method. Next, during the login process, the registered users connect to the smart home system and send a request to SG to gain access to the devices. After verification, the user is authenticated and the system enables them to acquire the device access control by providing them with the private key of the device. In addition, the proposed system facilitates the secure key change procedure for the legitimate user to update their key whenever required. Hence, the performance of the model is secured against different types of attacks and also obtains more security features than existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fog computing allows to connect the edge of the network, consisting of low cost Internet of Things devices, with high end cloud servers. Fog devices can perform data processing, which can significantly reduce the delay for the application. Moreover, data aggregation can be carried out by fog devices which decrease the bandwidth needed being very important for the wireless part of the communication with the cloud servers. The edge-fog-cloud architecture is currently being rolled out for several applications in the field of connected cars, health care monitoring, etc. In this paper, we propose an identity-based, mutual authenticated key agreement protocol for this fog architecture, in which end device and fog are able to establish a secure communication without leakage of their identities. Only the cloud server is able to control the identities of device and fog. We formally prove that the session keys are also protected in the Canetti–Krawczyk security model, in which adversaries are considered to have access to session state specific information, previous session keys, or long-term private keys. The scheme is very efficient as it only utilises elliptic curve operations and basic symmetric key operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advent of the era of big data, privacy computing analyzes and calculates data on the premise of protecting data privacy, to achieve data 'available and invisible'. As an important branch of secure multi-party computation, the geometric problem can solve practical problems in the military, national defense, finance, life, and other fields, and has important research significance. In this paper, we study the similarity problem of geometric graphics. First, this paper proposes the adjacency matrix vector coding method of isomorphic graphics, and use the Paillier variant encryption cryptography to solve the problem of isomorphic graphics confidentiality under the semi-honest model. Using cryptography tools such as elliptic curve cryptosystem, zero-knowledge proof, and cut-choose method, this paper designs a graphic similarity security decision protocol that can resist malicious adversary attacks. The analysis shows that the protocol has high computational efficiency and has wide application value in terrain matching, mechanical parts, biomolecules, face recognition, and other fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we have proposed a lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for 5G (5GMAKA) using the symmetric-key cryptographic framework. The proposed 5GMAKA protocol has been implemented to overcome the problem associated with the 5G authentication and key agreement (5G AKA) protocol suggested by the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP). 5G AKA is exposed to various sorts of fatal network security attacks and takes excessive time to execute ( ∼ 685.62 milliseconds ) compared to other related authentication and key agreement schemes as per the literature survey. The stability and robustness of the proposed 5GMAKA under safety issues are ensured by the results obtained from the security analysis of the scheme using the well-known rubin logic and automatic validation of internet security protocol applications (AVISPA) simulation tool. The performance analysis of the proposed 5GMAKA shows that this scheme is superior compared to 5G AKA of 3GPP and other standard protocols with respect to enhanced security features, five communication rounds, and shorter execution time ( ∼ 0.72 milliseconds ) which is the lowest among all other related schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things (IoT) has a wide concentration in today's technological world. It has a significant impact on smart infrastructure with a security vision. So, IoT devices with sensors or smart gadgets are used to gather important data. The data gathered from IoT are vulnerable to signal processing attacks due to the interconnection of different network categories. In this paper, a system for securing data in IoT communication is proposed. The proposed system includes two techniques. Initially, a technique with the combination of Fuzzy and Particle swarm optimization (F-PSO) is utilized to determine a secure path. Then a cryptographic technique using the Learning with Errors over Rings (R-LWE) encryption scheme is adopted for data encryption. The trust value of every node in the network is calculated using trustworthiness analysis. Then based on the trust value, the malicious nodes are segregated. After that, the characteristics of secure nodes are utilized to find the secure path between source and destination. The secure path is selected optimally using F-PSO. After finding the secure path, the data are encrypted using the R-LWE technique. The proposed system attained a throughput of 96% with less than 0.1 ms delay. An enhanced trust-based secure routing and message delivery protocol attained better performance than existing such as Advanced Encryption Standard, Tiny Encryption Algorithm, eXtended TEA, and Rivest–Shamir–Adleman encryption schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart grid (SG) recently acquired considerable attention due to their utilization in sustaining demand response management in power systems. Smart meters (SMs) deployed in SG systems collect and transmit data to the server. Since all communications between SM and the server occur through a public communication channel, the transmitted data are exposed to adversary attacks. Therefore, security and privacy are essential requirements in the SG system for ensuring reliable communication. Additionally, an AuthentiCation (AC) protocol designed for secure communication should be lightweight so it can be applied in a resource-constrained environment. In this article, we devise a lightweight AC protocol for SG named LACP-SG. LACP-SG employs the hash function, "Esch256", and "authenticated encryption" to accomplish the AC phase. The proposed LACP-SG assures secure data exchange between SM and server by validating the authenticity of SM. For encrypted communication, LACP-SG enables SM and the server to establish a session key (SEK). We use the random oracle model to substantiate the security of the established SEK. Moreover, we ascertain that LACP-SG is guarded against different security vulnerabilities through Scyther-based security validation and informal security analysis. Furthermore, comparing LACP-SG with other related AC protocols demonstrates that LACP-SG is less resource-intensive while rendering better security characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classical authentication schemes are in treat due to current developments in quantum computing. A new quantum authentication protocol designed based on quantum secure direct communication using single photon is proposed in the paper. It can assist verification of the legitimate user identity without revealing the pre-shared key used in the encryption of secure message through one time pad. In the existing protocol, frequent involvement of Eve during trusted identification obtains important information about the pre-shared key. A random Authentication keys and decoy states were used in checking the presence of Eve by a trusted party in two communication channels. The concept of phase kickback helps in revealing the identification the adversary involvement during authentication key verification by CNOT attack. The security of the proposed protocol analyzed was under impersonates attack, intercept measure-resend attack, and entangle measure attacks. The proposed protocol does not require quantum memory or any other entangles sources; therefore, it is feasible for the implementation of with current technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the limitation of the computing power and storage capacity of the device, the authentication key exchange protocol of the Internet of Things has higher requirements on the computation efficiency and communication efficiency. This paper proposes a lattice-based password authentication key exchange protocol based on key consensus, which can greatly reduce the time of key exchange. The proposed protocol uses the approximate smooth projection hash function and key consensus to design an asymmetric key agreement structure, which enables the device to realize key exchange while storing less authentication information. Compared with the existing password authentication key exchange protocols, the proposed protocol reduces the number of communications and the computation of the device during the protocol operation. In the paper, the computational cost of the prover is reduced to O(mn), and the amount of calculation on the device is cut in half. Finally, a longer session key can be generated by using this scheme. In addition, the security of the proposed protocol is based on the LWE difficulty problem, it can theoretically resist the attacks of the existing quantum algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The healthcare ecosystem is migrating from legacy systems to the Internet of Things (IoT), resulting in a digital environment. This transformation has increased importance on demanding both secure and usable user authentication methods. Recently, a post-quantum fuzzy commitment scheme (PQFC) has been constructed as a reliable and efficient method of biometric template protection. This paper presents a new two-factor-based user authentication protocol for the IoT-enabled healthcare ecosystem in post-quantum computing environments using the PQFC scheme. The proposed protocol is proved to be secure using random oracle model. Furthermore, the functionality and security of the proposed protocol are analyzed, showing that memoryless-effortless, user anonymity, mutual authentication, and resistance to biometric templates tampering and stolen attacks, stolen smart card attack, privileged interior attack are fulfilled. The costs of storage requirement, computation, communication and storage are estimated. The results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is more efficient than Mukherjee et al., Chaudhary et al., and Gupta et al. protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2019, Zhou et al. proposed semi-quantum identification (also known as semi-quantum authentication, SQA), which proceeds under a measure-resend and measurement-free environment. However, Zhou et al.'s SQA protocol suffers from severe information leakages. An eavesdropper can obtain an intact authentication key without being detected under this environment. In particular, Zhou et al.'s measure-resend SQA protocol is vulnerable to double CNOT attacks, while the measurement-free SQA protocol is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Hence, this study reveals the severe security issues of Zhou et al.'s SQA protocol and proposes an improved protocol with guaranteed security. The proposed measure-resend SQA protocol is immune to double CNOT attacks. Since the photons sent back and forth are identical, Eve cannot obtain any information by cross-comparing these photons. In the proposed measurement-free SQA protocol, the eavesdropper cannot obtain the order of the transmitted photons because it was previously a pre-shared key to decide the order of the photons. Hence, the proposed measurement-free SQA protocol can withstand man-in-the-middle attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Internet of Things (IoT) is a newly emerged paradigm where multiple embedded devices, known as things, are connected via the Internet to collect, share, and analyze data from the environment. In order to overcome the limited storage and processing capacity constraint of IoT devices, it is now possible to integrate them with cloud servers as large resource pools. Such integration, though bringing applicability of IoT in many domains, raises concerns regarding the authentication of these devices while establishing secure communications to cloud servers. Recently, Kumari et al proposed an authentication scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for IoT and cloud servers and claimed that it satisfies all security requirements and is secure against various attacks. In this paper, we first prove that the scheme of Kumari et al is susceptible to various attacks, including the replay attack and stolen‐verifier attack. We then propose a lightweight authentication protocol for secure communication of IoT embedded devices and cloud servers. The proposed scheme is proved to provide essential security requirements such as mutual authentication, device anonymity, and perfect forward secrecy and is robust against security attacks. We also formally verify the security of the proposed protocol using BAN logic and also the Scyther tool. We also evaluate the computation and communication costs of the proposed scheme and demonstrate that the proposed scheme incurs minimum computation and communication overhead, compared to related schemes, making it suitable for IoT environments with low processing and storage capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most recent challenges in communication system and network system is the privacy and security of information and communication session. Blockchain is one of technologies that use in sensing application in different important environments such as healthcare. In healthcare the patient privacy should be protected use high security system. Key agreement protocol based on lattice ensure the authentication and high protection against different types of attack especially impersonation and man in the middle attack where the latticebased protocol is quantum-withstand protocol. Proposed improved framework using lattice based key agreement protocol for application of block chain, with security analysis of many literatures that proposed different protocols has been presented with comparative study. The resultant new framework based on lattice overcome the latency limitation of block chain in the old framework and lowered the computation cost that depend on Elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman. Also, it ensures high privacy and protection of patient's information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing lattice-based key exchange protocols generally base on the single-stage security models like Bellare-Rogaway, which ignoring the stage separation of session key’s construction in secure communication. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposed a lattice-based multi-stage authenticated key exchange protocol based on MSKE model. The scheme used pre-shared password for authentication, and the construction of multi-stage key exchange adopted the Peikert error-reconciliation mechanism and the server’s static key. The security analysis shows that the protocol only introduces a small computing overhead, allow the mutual authentication, two-stage perfect forward-secrecy, and resists quantum attack. This protocol meets the KD-2 FS-M security level under MSKE model. It is a simple and efficient post-quantum multi-stage key exchange protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authenticated key agreement is a process in which protocol participants communicate over a public channel to share a secret session key, which is then used to encrypt data transferred in subsequent communications. LLAKEP, an authenticated key agreement protocol for Energy Internet of Things (EIoT) applications, was recently proposed by Zhang et al. While the proposed protocol has some interesting features, such as putting less computation on edge devices versus the server side, its exact security level is unclear. As a result, we shed light on its security in this paper through careful security analysis against various attacks. Despite the designers' security claims in the random oracle model and its verification using GNY logic, this study demonstrates that this protocol has security weaknesses. We show that LLAKEP is vulnerable to traceability, dictionary, stolen smart glass, known session-specific temporary information, and key compromise impersonation attacks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that it does not provide perfect forward secrecy. To the best of our knowledge, it is the protocol's first independent security analysis. To overcome the LLAKEP vulnerabilities, we suggested the LLAKEP + protocol, based on the same set of cryptographic primitives, namely the one-way hash function and ECC point multiplication. Our comprehensive security analysis demonstrates its resistance to different threats, such as impersonation, privileged insider assaults, and stolen smart glass attacks, along with its resistance to sophisticated assaults, such as key compromised impersonation (KCI) and known session-specific temporary information (KSTI). The overhead of the proposed protocol is acceptable compared to the provided security level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The remote authentication scheme is a cryptographic protocol incorporated by user–server applications to prevent unauthorized access and security attacks. Recently, a two-factor authentication scheme using hard problems in elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)—the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP), elliptic curve computational Diffie–Hellman problem (ECCDHP), and elliptic curve factorization problem (ECFP)—was developed, but was unable to address several infeasibility issues while incurring high communication costs. Moreover, previous schemes were shown to be vulnerable to privileged insider attacks. Therefore, this research proposes an improved ECC-based authentication scheme with a session key agreement to rectify the infeasible computations and provide a mechanism for the password change/update phase. The formal security analysis proves that the scheme is provably secure under the random oracle model (ROM) and achieves mutual authentication using BAN logic. Based on the performance analysis, the proposed scheme resists the privileged insider attack and attains all of the security goals while keeping the computational costs lower than other schemes based on the three hard problems. Therefore, the findings suggest the potential applicability of the three hard problems in designing identification and authentication schemes in distributed computer networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]