With the widespread use of Internet of Things and cloud computing in smart cities, various security and privacy challenges may be encountered.The most basic problem is authentication between each application, such as participating users, IoT devices, distributed servers, authentication centers, etc. In 2020, Kang et al. improved an authentication protocol for IoT-Enabled devices in a distributed cloud computing environment and its main purpose was in order to prevent counterfeiting attacks in Amin et al.’ protocol, which was published in 2018. However, We found that the Kang et al.’s protocol still has a fatal vulnerability, that is, it is attacked by offline password guessing, and malicious users can easily obtain the master key of the control server. In this article, we extend their work to design a lightweight pseudonym identity based authentication and key agreement protocol using smart card. For illustrating the security of our protocol, we used the security protocol analysis tools of AVISPA and Scyther to prove that the protocol can defend against various existing attacks. We will further analyze the interaction between participants authentication path to ensure security protection from simulated attacks detailedly. In addition, based on the comparison of security functions and computing performance, our protocol is superior to the other two related protocols. As a result, the enhanced protocol will be efficient and secure in distributed cloud computing architecture for smart city.

With the rapid development of mobile communication technology, the spatial information networks (SIN) have been used for various space tasks’ coverage in commercial, meteorology, emergency, and military scenarios. In SIN, one basic issue is to achieve mutual authentication and secret communication among the participants. Although many researches have designed authentication schemes for SIN, they have not considered the situation where the clock is not synchronized as the broad coverage space in wireless environment. In this paper, we disclose several flaws of Altaf et al.’s scheme (2020), in which the main weakness is that a malicious user can easily obtain the master key of the network control center after launching the offline password-guessing attack. Then, we design an authentication scheme against clock asynchronous for SIN by utilizing elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) and identity-based cryptography (IBC). Based on a brief introduction to the main design ideas of our scheme, the security protocol analysis tools of Scyther and AVISPA are used to prove that the scheme can resist various existing active and passive attacks. We further discuss our scheme that provides five essential requirements of security properties to design a robust scheme for SIN and is superior in terms of resistance to security functionality and computational performance by comparison with two other representative schemes. As a result, our scheme will be workable and efficient security for mobile users in the actual environment.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract