Biblio

In order to protect user privacy and provide better access control in Internet of Things (IoT) environments, designing an appropriate two-party authentication and key exchange protocol is a prominent challenge. In this paper, we propose a lightweight certificateless non-interactive authentication and key exchange (CNAKE) protocol for mutual authentication between remote users and smart devices. Based on elliptic curves, our lightweight protocol provides high security performance, realizes non-interactive authentication between the two entities, and effectively reduces communication overhead. Under the random oracle model, the proposed protocol is provably secure based on the Computational Diffie-Hellman and Bilinear Diffie-Hellman hardness assumption. Finally, through a series of experiments and comprehensive performance analysis, we demonstrate that our scheme is fast and secure.

The rapid evolution of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) services transforms the conventional electrical grid into a new paradigm called Smart Grid (SG). Even though SG brings significant improvements, such as increased reliability and better energy management, it also introduces multiple security challenges. One of the main reasons for this is that SG combines a wide range of heterogeneous technologies, including Internet of Things (IoT) devices as well as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. The latter are responsible for monitoring and controlling the automatic procedures of energy transmission and distribution. Nevertheless, the presence of these systems introduces multiple vulnerabilities because their protocols do not implement essential security mechanisms such as authentication and access control. In this paper, we focus our attention on the security issues of the IEC 60870-5-104 (IEC-104) protocol, which is widely utilized in the European energy sector. In particular, we provide a SCADA threat model based on a Coloured Petri Net (CPN) and emulate four different types of cyber attacks against IEC-104. Last, we used AlienVault's risk assessment model to evaluate the risk level that each of these cyber attacks introduces to our system to confirm our intuition about their severity.