Khalique Aqeel, Siddiqui Farheen, Ahad Mohd Abdul, Hussain Imran
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SEST, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi, India.
Sci Rep. 2025 Jul 14;15(1):25410. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-10181-0.
As smart cities evolve to meet sustainability goals; the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices presents both opportunities and challenges. Due to constrained nature of IoT, ensuring security in IoT enabled network is a challenge. However, growing urban population and exponential rise in IoT enabled devices make it challenging to implement and ensure security mechanisms. Several attacks such as device compromise, hijacking, tampering, man in the middle attack, replay attack, insider attack may lead to security breach. The reason behind these kinds of attacks is that an adversary has successfully obtained credentials for authentication. Several algorithms in smart cities domain have been proposed but most of them are computationally intensive schemes and some algorithms do not have password update feature. In this paper, we propose a 4-phase lightweight authentication algorithm for IoT devices in sustainable smart cities (SSC) utilizing elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) with password update phase and improved computational and communication cost. We perform a formal security analysis of the proposed algorithm using AVISPA tool and informal semantic analysis to demonstrate that our algorithm is secure against different types of attacks including MITM attack, insider attack, replay attack smart device capture attack and others. The proposed algorithm shows remarkable improvement having 1.248 ms computational time and 1036 bits communication cost. The performance analysis shows that the proposed algorithm is lightweight and shows 22.19%, 28.05% and 22.19% improvement in computation, communication and energy costs respectively as compared to the closest counterpart in existing state-of-the-art approaches.
随着智慧城市不断发展以实现可持续发展目标，物联网（IoT）设备的激增带来了机遇和挑战。由于物联网的受限特性，确保物联网网络中的安全性是一项挑战。然而，不断增长的城市人口以及物联网设备的指数级增长使得实施和确保安全机制变得具有挑战性。诸如设备被攻破、劫持、篡改、中间人攻击、重放攻击、内部人员攻击等多种攻击可能导致安全漏洞。这些攻击背后的原因是对手成功获取了用于认证的凭证。智慧城市领域已经提出了几种算法，但其中大多数是计算密集型方案，并且一些算法没有密码更新功能。在本文中，我们提出了一种用于可持续智慧城市（SSC）中物联网设备的4阶段轻量级认证算法，该算法利用椭圆曲线密码学（ECC），具有密码更新阶段，并降低了计算和通信成本。我们使用AVISPA工具对所提出的算法进行了形式化安全分析，并进行了非形式化语义分析，以证明我们的算法对包括中间人攻击、内部人员攻击、重放攻击、智能设备捕获攻击等不同类型的攻击具有安全性。所提出的算法表现出显著的改进，计算时间为1.248毫秒，通信成本为1036位。性能分析表明，与现有最先进方法中最接近的对应算法相比，所提出的算法是轻量级的，在计算、通信和能源成本方面分别提高了22.19%、28.05%和22.19%。
