A Provably Secure Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol in Cloud-Based Smart Healthcare Environments

The wide applications of the Internet of Things and cloud computing technologies have driven the development of many industries. With the improvement of living standards, health has become the top priority of people’s attention. The emergence of the wireless body area network (WBAN) enables people to master their physical condition all the time and make it more convenient for patients and doctors to communicate with each other. Doctors can provide real-time online treatment with cloud-based smart healthcare environments for patients. In this process, patients, health records, and doctors need to maintain security and privacy. Recently, Kumari et al. proposed a secure framework for the smart medical system. However, we found that their framework cannot provide the anonymity of patients and doctors, data confidentiality, and patient unlinkability and also is subject to impersonation attacks and desynchronization attacks. In order to ensure the security and privacy of patients and doctors, we propose an authentication and key exchange protocol in cloud-based smart healthcare environments. Formal and informal security analyses, as well as performance analysis, demonstrated that our protocol is suitable for these environments.

Optimal Key Handover Management for Enhancing Security in Mobile Network

The 3GPP long term Evolution or System Architecture Evolution (LTE/SAE) was designed for the dispositioning of the mobile networks towards 4G. The significant hurdle of 4G is about cementing the privacy and security gap. Due to the disclosures in the connectivity of public networks, a single malicious device could jeopardize the operation of a whole network of devices. The key deliverance handling within the 3GPP LTE/SAE is developed to unauthorize the keys that are being attacked and, in result, to alienate the miscreant keys off the chain of network. The proposed article recognizes the attacks that jeopardize the safe connectivity among the stops in the network chain and details the vulnerability of the key deliverance administration to desynchronization attacks. Even though the periodic upgrade of the root could prove to be a fundamental part of the system, the work proposed brings an emphasis on reducing the impact of desynchronization attacks which currently are unable to be prevented efficiently. The main focus of the design is to shed light on the ways the network operators work to confirm the optimal intervals for the periodic updates to reduce the signal weightage while providing secure user mobility. The analysis and model simulations intend to disclose the influence of the period of root key upgrade on integral operational levels such as constellation and user experience.

Screen-Cam Robust Image Watermarking with Feature-Based Synchronization

The screen-cam process, which is taking pictures of the content displayed on a screen with mobile phones or cameras, is one of the main ways that image information is leaked. However, traditional image watermarking methods are not resilient to screen-cam processes with severe distortion. In this paper, a screen-cam robust watermarking scheme with a feature-based synchronization method is proposed. First, the distortions caused by the screen-cam process are investigated. These distortions can be summarized into the five categories of linear distortion, gamma tweaking, geometric distortion, noise attack, and low-pass filtering attack. Then, a local square feature region (LSFR) construction method based on a Gaussian function, modified Harris–Laplace detector, and speeded-up robust feature (SURF) orientation descriptor is developed for watermark synchronization. Next, the message is repeatedly embedded in each selected LSFR by an improved embedding algorithm, which employs a non-rotating embedding method and a preprocessing method, to modulate the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) coefficients. In the process of watermark detection, we fully utilize the captured information and extract the message based on a local statistical feature. Finally, the experimental results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the method against common attacks and screen-cam attacks. Compared to the previous schemes, our scheme has not only good robustness against screen-cam attack, but is also effective against screen-cam with additional common desynchronization attacks.

Commutative Watermarking-Encryption of Multimedia Data Based on Histograms

Histogram-based watermarking schemes are invariant to pixel permutations and can thus be combined with permutation-based ciphers to form a commutative watermarking-encryption scheme. In this chapter, the authors demonstrate the feasibility of this approach for audio data and still image data. Typical histogram-based watermarking schemes based on comparison of histogram bins are prone to desynchronization attacks, where the whole histogram is shifted by a certain amount. These kind of attacks can be avoided by synchronizing the embedding and detection processes, using the mean of the histogram as a calibration point. The resulting watermarking scheme is resistant to three common types of shifts of the histogram, while the advantages of previous histogram-based schemes, especially commutativity of watermarking and permutation-based encryption, are preserved. The authors also report on the results of testing robustness of the still image watermark against JPEG and JPEG2000 compression and on the possibility of using histogram-based watermarks for authenticating the content of an image.