An efficient and authenticated key establishment scheme based on fog computing for healthcare system

Because of its closeness to users,fog computing responds faster than cloud computing.Thus,it has been deployed to various applications,such as healthcare system.Recently,to ensure the secure communication of the fog-based healthcare system,Jia et al.proposed an authenticated key agreement scheme.Moreover,in view of the high computation cost existing in Jia et al.’s scheme,Ma et al.presented an efficient one using elliptic curve cryptography.In this paper,we observe that both the two schemes may potentially risk ephemeral key compromise attacks and need improving.Therefore,to overcome this potential risk,we propose a new authenticated scheme based on Jia et al.’s scheme using elliptic curve computational Diffie-Hellman hypothesis and hash functions.Additionally,we provide provable security under the adopted adversarial model and ProVerif simulation,and also analyze the performance in terms of computation and communication costs by comparisons.The analysis results show that the improved scheme resists the common attacks,reduces computation overhead,and has a certain significance.

A three-level authenticated conference key establishment protocol for UMTS networks

A conference key establishment protocol allows a group of conferees to agree on a secret key shared among them for secure group communication.This paper proposes a three-level conference key establishment protocol based on the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) framework to establish a group-level key,home location register (HLR) level keys,and visitor location register (VLR) level keys simultaneously for a group of conferees.The group-level key is used to secure the communications for all conferees,the HLR-level key is for those within the same HLR domain,and the VLR-level key is for those within the same VLR domain.The group-level key can be used for securing inter-domain group-oriented applications such as commercial remote conferencing systems.The HLRand VLR-level keys can be used for securing intra-domain subgroup applications (e.g.,location-based or context-aware services) and dynamic key updating.Since our proposed protocol exploits existing UMTS security functions and the exclusive-or operation,it is compatible with UMTS architecture.This means that it is fast and easy to implement on the existing UMTS architecture.Furthermore,the proposed protocol has low computational complexities and can provide cost effectiveness,load-amortization,scalability,user authentication,key establishment,key confirmation,key updating,and lawful interception.

A General Pairwise Key Predistribution Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper develops a general hypercube-based key predistribution scheme for establishing pairwise keys between sensor nodes using polynomials, which is parameterized by the dimension of hypercube and the Hamming distance threshold variables. The scheme addresses the weaknesses of existing key predistribution schemes, which have either worse security or lower efficiency. It exhibits a nice property--when the Hamming distance between any two neighboring sensor nodes is less than the pre-defined threshold, the pairwise key can be established directly. Extensive performance and security analysis shows that by increasing Hamming distance threshold value, we can trade off the resilience against node capture attack for higher probability of direct pairwise key establishment, so as to save the energy consumption which is the most important issue for sensor networks.