Ring-LWE based Post-Quantum Authentication Protocols for Internet of Things and Blockchain Applications

Abstract

Authentication and access control protocols must be robust enough to enable security in the communication networks. Authentication verifies the identity of a user, process, or device, often as a prerequisite to allowing access to resources in a system and, therefore, the integrity of data. Several authentication schemes are proposed in the literature based on number-theoretic assumptions such as integer factorization and discrete logarithm problems. These schemes are proved vulnerable to quantum attacks once quantum computer comes into reality. Most importantly, the infrastructures are made up of wireless communication and sensing devices like the Internet of Things. Cryptosystems built on lattice structures is considered as lattice based cryptography have emerged as a promising and popular domain in the post quantum cryptography to deal with quantum attacks. Its considered as dominant among other categories due to its high efficiency and strong security. The lattice based cryptosystems operate relatively small integers because it uses matrices and vectors for computation in specified rings or fields of small order. A few authentication schemes with lattice assumptions were proposed in the lit erature. But, most of the schemes are not modeled for resource constrained devices with reduced key size, cipher texts and signature lengths. We propose an authen tication and key exchange protocol for a client node-cloud server with a variant of lattice assumptions in ring structure called Ring-Learning With Error(Ring-LWE) for sensor network environment. The scheme is implemented in the IoT-Cloud environ ment scenario for its performance and compared with relevant protocols. Our scheme has reduced key size and contains fewer operations in key generation, authentication, and verification. We also propose a node-to-node authentication scheme, where two nodes in the network will communicate with lattice assumptions. In addition to two nodes, there exists an intermediatory device gateway device which generates the ses sion key for the communication. We extended the quantum security to cloud level and proposed a lattice-based encryption scheme for the privacy of data in the cloud environment that meets homomorphic properties. The primary goal of the scheme iii is to employ fully homomorphic data management with efficiency and security. The proposed scheme surpasses the traditional encryption schemes. All Our schemes are designed based on the Ring-LWE problem in the lattice and its correctness is proved formally and verified with standard protocol verification tool called AVISPA. The informal analysis of these schemes demonstrates security against known attacks in the internet of things environment. All these schemes are proved formally based on hardness of lattice problem in ring structure. As the discrete logarithm problem in the elliptic curve cryptography(ECDLP) also proved vulnerable to quantum attacks, we proposed a post-quantum blockchain using Ring-LWE signature algorithm . We analysed blockchain vulnerabilities and existing lattice signature techniques. We used a modified Ring-TESLA algorithm to validate blockchain transactions. We also proposed a randomized consensus to avoid the dominant validator problem and maintain the decentralization property among the nodes in the blockchain. We provide comprehensive security proof and analysis of the proposed scheme in the presence of a quantum adversary.