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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 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.

The epidemic growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) objects have revolutionized Maritime Transportation Systems (MTS). Though, it becomes challenging for the centralized cloud-centric framework to fulfil the application requirements such as low latency and power utilization. The introduction of the distributed edge-centric framework has recently helped the IoT-enabled MTS to meet these requirements by manipulating the tasks at the edge of the networks. Despite the fact that MTS leverages mobile subscribers by overcoming inherent cloud computing limitations, data security and user privacy requirements in establishing the MTS setup are still non-trivial challenges. In this article, we develop a key agreement solution for mobile users to realize mutual authentication in a single round. Our protocol offers user anonymity to maintain user privacy, and it can prevent physical attacks by physically unclonable functions. Initially, the security analysis is conferred to substantiate our protocol’s security persistence or strength. Later, its performance correlation is observed under the assumption of diverse metrics in a predefined empirical setup. The meticulous performance correlation endorses the precedence of our protocol over specified related protocols.

The idea of a smart city and the utilization of vehicles are emerging rapidly. For inter-vehicular communication, this progression builds Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) an extensively used network. The VANET is used to obtain information regarding the road's condition, location of vehicles, speed, and traffic congestion description. The exchange of information in VANET is public which leads to severe security threats. Generally, one of the most crucial tasks in VANET is the security of data. So it becomes one of the urgent tasks of researchers. We have reviewed several authentication schemes for VANETs. Still, most schemes are not secure due to several attacks such as replay, denial of services, impersonation attacks, etc. Furthermore, the existing schemes used higher communication and computational costs, and they are also incompatible with VANET applications that are resource-constrained. This article presents the lightweight and secure multi-factor authenticated key agreement scheme for VANETs to ensure efficient and secure transmission of data via an open channel. Our presented scheme is secure, scalable, and lightweight compared to existing schemes due to its low computation and communication cost. The formal and informal security analysis proved that our scheme is more reliable, practical, and secure against several unknown adversarial attacks in VANETs.