Ali Shahidinejad

Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading is a modern technique that revolutionizes how energy is distributed and consumed. Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) plays a crucial role in enabling renewable energy trading. It provides both physical and virtual channels for exchanging electricity and information between peers. Thus far, several authentication protocols (APs) have been suggested to secure information exchange in the AMI. However, most of them are just anonymous from the view of external adversaries making them improper for P2P energy trading systems. Therefore, to fully address critical privacy concerns in the AMI, this paper proposes a novel AP that presents the following distinct contributions. First and the foremost, our suggested AP provides “conditional unlinkability” of consumer smart meters (SMs) and “conditional anonymity” of producer SMs during the session key agreement. More specifically, by employing an innovative zero-knowledge authentication approach, producer SMs would not require any certificate for authenticating consumer SMs. Second, to add the unclonability property to SMs, the suggested AP uses physical unclonable function (PUF) and to alleviate noise consequences on PUF, it uses enhanced “soft-BD-PUF.” Third, since in P2P energy trading both parties are resource-limited, we have tried to diminish the overhead of AP and provided a computational balance between SMs. Last but not least, our AP can offer desired security properties like perfect forward secrecy and unlike blockchain-based APs can resist distributed denial of service attacks. Security and efficiency improvements of our suggested AP have been both supported by comparative performance and property analyses.

Ultradense networks (UDNs) provide enhanced coverage and improve capacity to meet the ever-growing demand of data. In UDNs, users experience high data rates, low latency, and many other significant features; however, with the continuous growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), the IoT-UDNs in the future will face multiple significant hurdles. In this article, we particularly focus on higher packet drop rate issue in the IoT-UDNs environment. We propose a simple and effective approach to alleviate packet drop rate. Our early evaluation provides meaningful insights in the design and implementation of IoT-UDN architectures.

Although recent advancements in the information and communication technologies have facilitated the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled telecare medical information systems (TMISs), security concerns have greatly hindered their acceptability. A good deal of session key generation protocols (SKGPs) has been proposed recently to bring a secure medium for medical data transfer in the TMISs. Nevertheless, careful investigation indicates that there are two critical gaps in current schemes. First and the foremost, most lightweight schemes are insecure against advanced threats and relatively secure schemes have a delay in each shared key generation. Second, most schemes are designed using the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) or EC cryptosystem (ECC) cryptosystem, making them insecure against quantum attacks. To fill these gaps, this article proposes a low-latency high-reliability SKGP for resource-limited IoT devices using only symmetric encryption/decryption and hash functions. Since the proposed scheme is only based on the AES-256 and is free from the RSA or ECC cryptosystem, it can also resist quantum attacks. To support the security and efficiency claims, we have provided extensive formal security analyses and all-inclusive literature review. Our comparative results indicate that the proposed protocol is the best compared to even top 10 protocols considering both execution and communication costs. Our implementation results also indicate that the protocol execution on the selected IoT device only takes almost $80\:\mu $ s and it is scalable enough so that servers can service thousands of devices.

Recent advances in quantum computing threaten key exchange protocols based on problems like prime factorization and discrete logarithms. In response, NIST is standardizing post-quantum cryptographic methods, selecting CRYSTALS-Kyber for its efficiency. However, Kyber’s key exchange protocol assumes prior authenticated communication and requires significant computational overhead. To address these limitations, we propose a NIST-compliant, quantum-resistant, password-authenticated key exchange protocol for mobile devices. Built on Kyber’s encryption primitives, it achieves mutual authentication and perfect forward secrecy. Compared to Kyber’s original protocol, ours reduces communication and computation costs by 46% and 67%, respectively. It also ensures strong anonymity and resists common attacks. Formal proofs and hardware implementation confirm its security and efficiency.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has advanced smart grid (SG) infrastructure by providing smart meters (SMs) with enhanced capabilities such as the ability to leverage the Internet platform for bidirectional information exchange. Cryptographic keys are necessary for securely exchanging sensitive information between SMs and energy providers. To manage these keys, a secure key management protocol (KMP) with little overhead and influence on the SG’s overall performance is necessary. Although various KMPs are available for IoT-enabled SG environments, exiting solutions have several flaws in terms of certificate revocation, security requirements, and overall SG performance. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a blockchain-based computationally-efficient and highly-secure KMP for IoT-enabled SG environments. We show that, compared to existing solutions, the proposed KMP has better SM side efficiency with improved security and more properties such as perfect forward secrecy, conditional anonymity, and simple SM revocation.

Authentication and Session Key Generation Protocols (SKGPs) play an essential role in securing the communication channels of connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Recently, through blockchain integration, scholars have tried to enhance the security and applicability of SKGPs. In brief, blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that can provide interesting features such as immutability, transparency, and accountability without any need for the active participation of trusted parties. This survey presents a comprehensive critical review of blockchain-assisted authentication and SKGPs, suggested for different IoT domains, including Internet of Vehicles, Internet of Drones, and Industrial IoT. Our survey categorizes existing schemes based on several criteria, including IoT application domains, security aspects, and blockchain components. By presenting an unbiased critical review and taxonomy of protocols, we aim to clarify the key challenges. Our review will specifically indicate what properties authors gained or lost through the integration of blockchain. To our best knowledge, this survey is the only one that offers all prerequisites for interested readers in blockchain-integrated SKGPs, such as security features and attacks, attack models, verification tools, blockchain types, blockchain platforms, and consensus mechanisms. Further, our survey elaborates existing research gaps in blockchain-assisted SKGPs. In doing so, we aim to guide future research in this field and provide researchers with the essential information they require.