Fog-Orchestrated and Server-Controlled Anonymous Group Authentication and Key Agreement

Abstract

Fog architectures are currently present in many applications. Constrained devices equipped with sensors produce measurements that will be sent to a nearby gateway, called the fog. The fog verifies, aggregates and forwards them to the server. Group authentication among these devices allows them to securely accept messages of the group members, resulting in faster updates in their process. When defining a security scheme, it should be considered that edge and fog devices are susceptible to attacks. Privacy of the devices should be guaranteed, with respect to outsiders and the fog. It should be impossible to track the connection pattern of devices with different fogs, even if several fogs are captured by an attacker. Inclusion of protection against potentially malicious fogs has not yet been considered in literature, especially not for group-based communications. We present a server-controlled group authentication and key agreement scheme, executed by the fog in collaboration with the devices that it can reach. The server, assumed to be fully trusted, is responsible for the registration and authorisation of the devices and initiates the key update process, whereas the fog takes care of the secure distribution process among its members. At the end, all entities in the group are ensured to possess the correct group key. Moreover, a pairwise secret key between device and server is obtained during the process. The proposed scheme is very efficient as it relies on elliptic curve cryptography and Lagrange interpolation. No initially shared secret key material among the entities needs to be pre-stored. INDEX TERMS Edge-fog-cloud architecture, elliptic curve cryptography, group authentication, group key, Rubin logic.

Provable Secure Group Key Establishment Scheme for Fog Computing

“…Finally, a performance analysis of the communication and computation costs will be presented. The results show that the computation and communication costs is less than existing approaches [10].…”

“…Zhu, Hongfeng [26] developed an authenticated key agreement protocol with chaotic maps that can apply to a group of users without involving any central server. Recently, the approaches [10,27,28,29] proposed group key establishment schemes based on elliptic curve cryptography. In [17], the GSK is established using point operation and exclusive-or operation.…”

“…Shabisha Placide, et al [10] developed an authentication and key agreement mechanism for groups of IoTs devices. In the authentication and key agreement mechanism, the cloud server, the fog node and devices compute the GSK with certain points on elliptic curves (EC) by using the Lagrange interpolation.…”

“…This mechanism thus reduces the computation overheads of the cloud server. The previous study of establishing GSK in the fog computing paradigms [10] involves many rounds of messages exchanged, resulting a high latency. In this paper, we reduce the communication overheads between the cloud server and the fog nodes by first authenticating the fog node and then delegating the authentication tasks to the authenticated fog nodes.…”

Security Enhanced Emergency Situation Detection System for Ambient Assisted Living

“…We choose to use Rubin-logic [29] to perform the verification of the protocol. Rubin-logic is a method used to do security protocols analysis by several authentications and key agreement protocols [30]- [33]. This method is based on welldefined specifications and uses Global sets, local sets, secret sets and actions.…”