An authentication scheme with identity-based cryptography for M2M security in cyber-physical systems

Abstract

The Internet has made the world smaller while there is still a gap between the cyber world and our physical world. In the future cyber‐physical system (CPS), all objects in cyber world and physical world would be connected, and the concepts of cyber world and physical world will no longer exist. The speed of information transmitting and processing will be faster, the abilities of controlling facilities and handling events will be more powerful, and our lives will be better. In the CPS, machine to machine (M2M) communication is in charge of data collecting and transmitting, which utilizes both wireless and wired systems to monitor physical or environmental conditions and exchange the information among different systems without direct human intervention. As a part of CPS, M2M communication is considerably important while being fragile at the same time because M2M communication still faces lots of security threats that are not only from outside but also from inside. In traditional M2M communication, the M2M service provider (MSP) is always assumed to be trusted. However, the MSP could be compromised in real world. In that case, the previous security solutions would fail because the most confidential materials are kept in the MSP by the conventional solutions. How to protect the entire system from the compromised MSP is one important problem the paper intends to solve. In addition, the communication bandwidth and energy resource for the M2M devices are precious. Another issue the paper is addressing is the design of efficient security schemes being able to save both energy and communication bandwidth. In this paper, an authentication scheme applying authenticated identity‐based cryptography without key‐escrow mechanism has been proposed. In the proposed scheme, only partial secrets instead of full secrets are stored in the MSP, which could prevent the compromised MSP from endangering the whole system. The authenticated encryption property of the proposed scheme could leave out the work of signature generation, transmission, and verification so as to save the computation and communication resource of the whole system. The security analysis with Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic (BAN Logic) and Simple Promela Interpreter (SPIN) shows that the proposed scheme is well designed and could withstand Man‐in‐the‐Middle attacks, impersonation attacks, replay attacks, DoS attacks, and compromised attacks. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Anatomy of Threats to the Internet of Things

“…Correspondingly, authors in [168] propose an identitybased cryptographic authentication scheme without the need of a Key-escrow mechanism to secure M2M interactions in CPS. The scheme saves upon precious computation and communication resources by averting the process of signature generation, transmission and verification.…”

“…For instance, issues concerning device security such as device identity [154,155,156], tamperproofing [154,160], registration and management [43], and secure boot [158] have been addressed by various tech giants including IBM, AT&T, TCG and Juniper Networks. Similarly, issues concerning data security and network access including authenticated encryption [168,169,170], privacy preserving computation (homomorphic encryption) [161], secure cloud access [17], mutual device and gateway authentication [86], and secure network access control [86,167] have also been meticulously tackled. Whenever we talk about cryptographic security, key management is an associated challenge, and it is always considered to be an open research issue [200].…”

Design of a Secure Password-Based Authentication Scheme for M2M Networks in IoT Enabled Cyber-Physical Systems

“…Recently, in [1], ID-based cryptosystems were employed, combined with key exchange strategies, in particular, the Authenticated Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC) without Key-Escrow (AIBCwKE) mechanism. The scheme seems to withstand most of the known attacks; however, the scheme requires the target sensors and mobile devices to perform computationally expensive cryptographic operations.…”

“…In the near future, this gap will vanish and all objects in the physical world will be connected to the cyber world by the Cyber-Physical System (CPS). Hence, there will be no longer a distinction between the cyber world and the physical world [1], [2]. Objects and devices over CPS are capable of capturing a variety of multimedia contents, are able to exchange information (e.g.…”

“…In M2M, sensors and smart/mobile devices communicate with each other utilizing both wired and wireless links. The communication system of an M2M consists of three domains that are interlinked together [5], [1]. As shown in Figure 1, we have, (i) Gateways, representing M2M area domain including M2M area networks.…”