A Blockchain-Assisted Security Protocol for Group Handover of MTC Devices in 5G Wireless Networks.

In the realm of the fifth-generation (5G) wireless cellular networks, renowned for their dense connectivity, there lies a substantial facilitation of a myriad of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, which can be supported by the massive machine-type communication (MTC) technique, a fundamental communication framework. In some scenarios, a large number of machine-type communication devices (MTCD) may simultaneously enter the communication coverage of a target base station. However, the current handover mechanism specified by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 16 incurs high signaling overhead within the access and core networks, which may have negative impacts on network efficiency. Additionally, other existing solutions are vulnerable to malicious attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, and the failure of Key Forward Secrecy (KFS). To address this challenge, this paper proposes an efficient and secure handover authentication protocol for a group of MTCDs supported by blockchain technology. This protocol leverages the decentralized nature of blockchain technology and combines it with certificateless aggregate signatures to mutually authenticate the identity of a base station and a group of MTCDs. This approach can reduce signaling overhead and avoid key escrow while significantly lowering the risk associated with single points of failure. Additionally, the protocol protects device anonymity by encrypting device identities with temporary anonymous identity markers with the Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) to abandon serial numbers to prevent linkage attacks. The resilience of the proposed protocol against predominant malicious attacks has been rigorously validated through the application of the BAN logic and Scyther tool, underscoring its robust security attributes. Furthermore, compared to the existing solutions, the proposed protocol significantly reduces the authentication cost for a group of MTCDs during handover, while ensuring security, demonstrating commendable efficiency.

ASAP-IIOT: An Anonymous Secure Authentication Protocol for Industrial Internet of Things.

With the increasing demand for a digital world, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is growing rapidly across various industries. In manufacturing, particularly in Industry 4.0, the IIoT assumes a vital role. It encompasses many devices such as sensing devices, application servers, users, and authentication servers within workshop settings. The security of the IIoT is a critical issue due to wireless networks' open and dynamic nature. Therefore, designing secure protocols among those devices is an essential aspect of IIoT security functionality and poses a significant challenge to the IIoT systems. In this paper, we propose a lightweight anonymous authentication protocol to preserve privacy for IIoT users, enabling secure IIoT communication. The protocol has been validated to demonstrate its comprehensive ability to overcome various vulnerabilities and prevent malicious attacks. Finally, the performance evaluation confirms that the proposed protocol is more effective and efficient than the existing alternatives.

Secure Vehicular Platoon Management against Sybil Attacks.

The capacity of highways has been an ever-present constraint in the 21st century, bringing about the issue of safety with greater likelihoods of traffic accidents occurring. Furthermore, recent global oil prices have inflated to record levels. A potential solution lies in vehicular platooning, which has been garnering attention, but its deployment is uncommon due to cyber security concerns. One particular concern is a Sybil attack, by which the admission of fake virtual vehicles into the platoon allows malicious actors to wreak havoc on the platoon itself. In this paper, we propose a secure management scheme for platoons that can protect major events that occur in the platoon operations against Sybil attacks. Both vehicle identity and message exchanged are authenticated by adopting key exchange, digital signature and encryption schemes based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). Noteworthy features of the scheme include providing perfect forward secrecy and both group forward and backward secrecy to preserve the privacy of vehicles and platoons. Typical malicious attacks such as replay and man-in-the-middle attacks for example can also be resisted. A formal evaluation of the security functionality of the scheme by the Canetti-Krawczyk (CK) adversary and the random oracle model as well as a brief computational verification by CryptoVerif were conducted. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme was evaluated to show its time and space efficiency.

A Secure Blockchain-Based Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for 3GPP 5G Networks.

The futuristic fifth-generation cellular network (5G) not only supports high-speed internet, but must also connect a multitude of devices simultaneously without compromising network security. To ensure the security of the network, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has standardized the 5G Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol for mutually authenticating user equipment (UE), base stations, and the core network. However, it has been found that 5G-AKA is vulnerable to many attacks, including linkability attacks, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. To address these security issues and improve the robustness of the 5G network, in this paper, we introduce the Secure Blockchain-based Authentication and Key Agreement for 5G Networks (5GSBA). Using blockchain as a distributed database, our 5GSBA decentralizes authentication functions from a centralized server to all base stations. It can prevent single-point-of-failure and increase the difficulty of DDoS attacks. Moreover, to ensure the data in the blockchain cannot be used for device impersonation, our scheme employs the one-time secret hash function as the device secret key. Furthermore, our 5GSBA can protect device anonymity by mandating the encryption of device identities with Subscription Concealed Identifiers (SUCI). Linkability attacks are also prevented by deprecating the sequence number with Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH). We use Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and the Scyther tool to formally verify our protocol. The security analysis shows that 5GSBA is superior to 5G-AKA in terms of perfect forward secrecy, device anonymity, and mutual Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA). Additionally, it effectively deters linkability attacks, replay attacks, and most importantly, DoS and DDoS attacks. Finally, the performance evaluation shows that 5GSBA is efficient for both UEs and base stations with reasonably low computational costs and energy consumption.

Early Warning Scheme of COVID-19 related Internet Public Opinion based on RVM-L Model.

Internet public opinion is affected by many factors corresponding to insufficient data in the very short period, especially for emergency events related to the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). To effectively support real-time analysis and accurate prediction, this paper proposes an early warning scheme, which comprehensively considers the multiple factors of Internet public opinion and the dynamic characteristics of burst events. A hybrid relevance vector machine and logistic regression (RVM-L) model is proposed that incorporates multivariate analysis, which adopts Lagrange interpolation to fill in the gaps and improve the forecasting effect based on insufficient data for COVID-19-related events. In addition, a novel metric critical interval is introduced to improve the early warning performance. Detailed experiments show that compared with existing schemes, the proposed RVM-L-based early warning scheme can achieve the prediction accuracy up to 96%, and the intervention within the critical interval can reduce the number of public opinions by 60%.

A Malicious Behavior Awareness and Defense Countermeasure Based on LoRaWAN Protocol.

Low power wide area network (LoRaWAN) protocol has been widely used in various fields. With its rapid development, security issues about the awareness and defense against malicious events in the Internet of Things must be taken seriously. Eavesdroppers can exploit the shortcomings of the specification and the limited consumption performance of devices to carry out security attacks such as replay attacks. In the process of the over-the-air-activation (OTAA) for LoRa nodes, attackers can modify the data because the data is transmitted in plain text. If the user's root key is leaked, the wireless sensor network will not be able to prevent malicious nodes from joining the network. To solve this security flaw in LoRaWAN, we propose a countermeasure called Secure-Packet-Transmission scheme (SPT) which works based on the LoRaWAN standard v1.1 to prevent replay attacks when an attacker has obtained the root key. The proposed scheme redefines the format of join-request packet, add the new One Time Password (OTP) encrypted method and changes the transmission strategy in OTAA between LoRa nodes and network server. The security evaluation by using the Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic (BAN Logic) and the Scyther shows that the security goal can be achieved. This paper also conducts extensive experiments by simulations and a testbed to perform feasibility and performance analysis. All results demonstrate that SPT is lightweight, efficient and able to defend against malicious behavior.

Minimum Connected Dominating Set Algorithms for Ad Hoc Sensor Networks.

To achieve effective communication in ad hoc sensor networks, researchers have been working on finding a minimum connected dominating set (MCDS) as a virtual backbone network in practice. Presently, many approximate algorithms have been proposed to construct MCDS, the best among which is adopting the two-stage idea, that is, to construct a maximum independent set (MIS) firstly and then realize the connectivity through the Steiner tree construction algorithm. For the first stage, this paper proposes an improved collaborative coverage algorithm for solving maximum independent set (IC-MIS), which expands the selection of the dominating point from two-hop neighbor to three-hop neighbor. The coverage efficiency has been improved under the condition of complete coverage. For the second stage, this paper respectively proposes an improved Kruskal-Steiner tree construction algorithm (IK-ST) and a maximum leaf nodes Steiner tree construction algorithm (ML-ST), both of which can make the result closer to the optimal solution. Finally, the simulation results show that the algorithm proposed in this paper is a great improvement over the previous algorithm in optimizing the scale of the connected dominating set (CDS).

Achieve Location Privacy-Preserving Range Query in Vehicular Sensing.

Modern vehicles are equipped with a plethora of on-board sensors and large on-board storage, which enables them to gather and store various local-relevant data. However, the wide application of vehicular sensing has its own challenges, among which location-privacy preservation and data query accuracy are two critical problems. In this paper, we propose a novel range query scheme, which helps the data requester to accurately retrieve the sensed data from the distributive on-board storage in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) with location privacy preservation. The proposed scheme exploits structured scalars to denote the locations of data requesters and vehicles, and achieves the privacy-preserving location matching with the homomorphic Paillier cryptosystem technique. Detailed security analysis shows that the proposed range query scheme can successfully preserve the location privacy of the involved data requesters and vehicles, and protect the confidentiality of the sensed data. In addition, performance evaluations are conducted to show the efficiency of the proposed scheme, in terms of computation delay and communication overhead. Specifically, the computation delay and communication overhead are not dependent on the length of the scalar, and they are only proportional to the number of vehicles.

Maximum-Likelihood Estimator of Clock Offset between Nanomachines in Bionanosensor Networks.

Recent advances in nanotechnology, electronic technology and biology have enabled the development of bio-inspired nanoscale sensors. The cooperation among the bionanosensors in a network is envisioned to perform complex tasks. Clock synchronization is essential to establish diffusion-based distributed cooperation in the bionanosensor networks. This paper proposes a maximum-likelihood estimator of the clock offset for the clock synchronization among molecular bionanosensors. The unique properties of diffusion-based molecular communication are described. Based on the inverse Gaussian distribution of the molecular propagation delay, a two-way message exchange mechanism for clock synchronization is proposed. The maximum-likelihood estimator of the clock offset is derived. The convergence and the bias of the estimator are analyzed. The simulation results show that the proposed estimator is effective for the offset compensation required for clock synchronization. This work paves the way for the cooperation of nanomachines in diffusion-based bionanosensor networks.

A group neighborhood average clock synchronization protocol for wireless sensor networks.

Clock synchronization is a very important issue for the applications of wireless sensor networks. The sensors need to keep a strict clock so that users can know exactly what happens in the monitoring area at the same time. This paper proposes a novel internal distributed clock synchronization solution using group neighborhood average. Each sensor node collects the offset and skew rate of the neighbors. Group averaging of offset and skew rate value are calculated instead of conventional point-to-point averaging method. The sensor node then returns compensated value back to the neighbors. The propagation delay is considered and compensated. The analytical analysis of offset and skew compensation is presented. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the protocol and reveal that the protocol allows sensor networks to quickly establish a consensus clock and maintain a small deviation from the consensus clock.

CCS-DTN: clustering and network coding-based efficient routing in social DTNs.

With the development of mobile Internet, wireless communication via mobile devices has become a hot research topic, which is typically in the form of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). One critical issue in the development of DTNs is routing. Although there is a lot research work addressing routing issues in DTNs, they cannot produce an advanced solution to the comprehensive challenges since only one or two aspects (nodes' movements, clustering, centricity and so on) are considered when the routing problem is handled. In view of these defects in the existing works, we propose a novel solution to address the routing issue in social DTNs. By this solution, mobile nodes are divided into different clusters. The scheme, Spray and Wait, is used for the intra-cluster communication while a new forwarding mechanism is designed for the inter-cluster version. In our solution, the characteristics of nodes and the relation between nodes are fully considered. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme can significantly improve the performance of the routing scheme in social DTNs.