Smart architecture is the concept to manage the facilities via internet utilization in a proper manner. There are various technologies used in smart architecture such as cloud computing, internet of things, green computing, automation and fog computing. Smart medical system (SMS) is one of the application used in architecture, which is based on communication networking along with sensor devices. In SMS, a doctor provides online treatment to patients with the help of cloud-based applications such as mobile device, wireless body area network, etc. Security and privacy are the major concern of cloud-based applications in SMS. To maintain, security and privacy, we aim to design an elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) based secure and efficient authentication framework for cloud-assisted SMS. There are six phases in the proposed protocol such as: patient registration phase, healthcare center upload phase, patient data upload phase, treatment phase, checkup phase and emergency phase. In CSEF, there are four entities like healthecare center, patient, cloud and doctor. In CSEF, mutual authentication establishes between healthcare center and cloud, patient and cloud, doctor and cloud, and patient and healthcare center by the using ECC and hash function. The CSEF is secure against security attacks, and satisfies many security attributes such as man-in-the-middle attack, impersonation attack, data non-repudiation, doctor anonymity, replay attack, known-key security property, message authentication, patient anonymity, data confidentiality, stolen-verifier attack, parallel session attack and session key security. Further, the CSEF is efficient in terms of computation and communication compared to others related frameworks. As a result, CSEF can be utilized in cloud-based SMS.

Recently, Ostad-Sharif et al. pointed out the susceptibility of three different authentication schemes themed for telecare medicine/medical information systems to key compromise impersonation attack (KCIA). To further address this issue, they proposed an ECC-based authentication and key generation scheme for healthcare applications. In this paper, we show that Ostad-Sharif et al.'s scheme is not only affected with key compromise impersonation attack but also suffers from a key compromise password guessing attack. Several papers have been published by the researchers by applying KCIA on existing authentication protocols. Before any further move in research in this direction, researchers must contemplate about KCIA. We conclude this article with a rigorous analysis of KCIA along with two questions to ponderon for the research community working in this field.INDEX TERMS Authentication, key-agreement, key compromise password guessing attack, key compromise impersonation.

Mobile satellite communication is becoming a crucial component for broadcast and broadband coverage in professional, commercial, military and emergency scenarios. Mobile devices and network control center (NCC) are the basic components of Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellites which communicate with each other with the help of gateways. The communication between these components needs high security. The various existing protocols for the environment of mobile satellite communication are insecure against numerous attacks and can be easily attacked by an adversary. So, there is an indispensable requirement of a reliable protocol which can offer efficient and secure communication for mobile satellite system. Therefore, a robust key agreement authentication scheme for mobile satellite environment is proposed in this article. The proposed protocol is developed according to the major security demands in the satellite communication networks. Our protocol provides mutual-authentication, session-key agreement and correct notion of user anonymity. The performance analysis for evaluation shows that the storage, communication and computation cost of the proposed protocol is less than many of existing protocols. Moreover, our protocol offers additional security features than that are available in the existing protocols. Hence, our protocol offers a secure authentication and key agreement for mobile satellite systems.

Rapid evolution in information and communication technologies has facilitated us to experience mobile communication in our daily routine. Mobile user can only avail the services from the server, once he/she is able to accomplish authentication process successfully. In the recent past, several researchers have contributed diverse authentication protocols for mobile client-server environment. Currently, Lu et al designed two-factor protocol for authenticating mobile client and server to exchange key between them. Lu et al emphasized that their scheme not only offers invincibility against potential security threats but also offers anonymity. Although this article reveals the facts that their protocol is vulnerable against client and server impersonation, man-in-the-middle, server key breach, anonymity violation, client traceability, and session-specific temporary attacks, therefore, we have enhanced their protocol to mitigate the above mention vulnerabilities. The enhanced protocol's security strength is evaluated through formal and informal security analysis. The security analysis and performance comparison endorses the fact that our protocol is able to offer more security with least possible computation complexity. KEYWORDSanonymity, authentication protocol, cryptanalysis, impersonation attack, key-exchange, secret key breach, security attacks Int J Commun Syst. 2020;33:e4253.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dac

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