Vehicular Ad hoc networks (VANETs) as spontaneous wireless communication technology of vehicles has a wide range of applications like road safety, navigation and other electric car technologies, however its practicability is greatly hampered by cyber-attacks. Due to message broadcasting in an open environment during communication, VANETs are inherently vulnerable to security and privacy attacks. However to address the cyber-security issues with optimal computation overhead is a matter of current security research challenge. So this paper designs a secure and efficient certificate-less aggregate scheme (ECLAS) for VANETs applicable in a smart grid scenario. The proposed scheme is based on elliptic curve cryptography to provide conditional privacy-preservation by incorporating usage of time validated pseudo-identification for communicating vehicles besides sorting out the KGC (Key Generation Center) escrow problem. The proposed scheme is comparatively more efficient to relevant related research work because it precludes expensive computation operations likes bilinear pairings as shown by the performance evaluation. Similarly, communication cost is within the ideal range to most related works while considering the security requirements of VANETs system applicable in a smart grid environment.

No abstract

Abstract. Although cloud computing provides a platform for numerous adorable applications, users are still detracts from fully utilizing its services, for fear of jeopardizing data confidentiality and privacy by surrendering maintenance and management roles in the hands of cloud service providers (CSPs). A natural resolution to users' concern is employing cryptographic measures which allow searching for a particular keyword flexibly stored in the cloud without divulging data privacy to any unwanted party even the CSP itself. Already there has been many keyword searchable encryption researches done, but they mostly bear a weakness of offline keyword guessing attack, besides they are based on the heavier pairing computation. We therefore devise an efficient public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) protocol that is pairing-free and is resilient against offline keyword guessing attack for cloud storage services. Our basic construction is based on the Diffie-Hellman problem and the El Gamal encryption scheme to achieve a secure channel-free public key encryption with keyword searching (SCF-PEKS). In this design a user sends a key allowing the CSP to only identify words containing a specific keyword and return search results and learn nothing else besides.

No abstract

The modern grid has various functionalities by using remote sensor automation in power management, monitoring and controlling the system. Thus, it is imperative to ensure secure communications for various agents in smart grid, since the system is information communication based. Being information based the smart grid encounters security and privacy challenges impeding its adoption. One way of dealing with these cyber concerns is in devising robust cryptosystem for data encryption and authenticated key agreement in the communications of these remotely controlled smart devices. However, many proposed solutions are provided at the expense of computations cost. Thus, this paper designs a novel authenticated key agreement scheme with anonymity based on widely acceptable elliptic curve cryptography with efficiency. The scheme ensures optimal computation and communication overload whilst achieving mutual authentication and anonymity in the key agreement process. The scheme is proven in both formal and informal security analysis in portraying its satisfaction of the standard and extended Canetti–Krawczyk (eCK) security requirements. A comparative analysis with related schemes indicates that the proposed scheme have merits over others.