Lightweight Hash-Based Authentication Protocol for Smart Grids.

Smart grids integrate information and communications technology into the processes of electricity production, transportation, and consumption, thereby enabling interactions between power suppliers and consumers to increase the efficiency of the power grid. To achieve this, smart meters (SMs) are installed in households or buildings to measure electricity usage and allow power suppliers or consumers to monitor and manage it in real time. However, SMs require a secure service to address malicious attacks during memory protection and communication processes and a lightweight communication protocol suitable for devices with computational and communication constraints. This paper proposes an authentication protocol based on a one-way hash function to address these issues. This protocol includes message authentication functions to address message tampering and uses a changing encryption key for secure communication during each transmission. The security and performance analysis of this protocol shows that it can address existing attacks and provides 105,281.67% better computational efficiency than previous methods.

An Improved Lightweight User Authentication Scheme for the Internet of Medical Things.

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is used in the medical ecosystem through medical IoT sensors, such as blood glucose, heart rate, temperature, and pulse sensors. To maintain a secure sensor network and a stable IoMT environment, it is important to protect the medical IoT sensors themselves and the patient medical data they collect from various security threats. Medical IoT sensors attached to the patient's body must be protected from security threats, such as being controlled by unauthorized persons or transmitting erroneous medical data. In IoMT authentication, it is necessary to be sensitive to the following attack techniques. (1) The offline password guessing attack easily predicts a healthcare administrator's password offline and allows for easy access to the healthcare worker's account. (2) Privileged-insider attacks executed through impersonation are an easy way for an attacker to gain access to a healthcare administrator's environment. Recently, previous research proposed a lightweight and anonymity preserving user authentication scheme for IoT-based healthcare. However, this scheme was vulnerable to offline password guessing, impersonation, and privileged insider attacks. These attacks expose not only the patients' medical data such as blood pressure, pulse, and body temperature but also the patients' registration number, phone number, and guardian. To overcome these weaknesses, in the present study we propose an improved lightweight user authentication scheme for the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). In our scheme, the hash function and XOR operation are used for operation in low-spec healthcare IoT sensor. The automatic cryptographic protocol tool ProVerif confirmed the security of the proposed scheme. Finally, we show that the proposed scheme is more secure than other protocols and that it has 266.48% better performance than schemes that have been previously described in other studies.