Session-Dependent Token-Based Payload Enciphering Scheme for Integrity Enhancements in Wireless Networks

Wireless networks have continued to evolve to offer connectivity between users and smart devices such as drones and wireless sensor nodes. In this environment, insecure public channels are deployed to link the users to their remote smart devices. Some of the application areas of these smart devices include military surveillance and healthcare monitoring. Since the data collected and transmitted to the users are highly sensitive and private, any leakages can have adverse effects. As such, strong entity authentication should be implemented before any access is granted in these wireless networks. Although numerous protocols have been developed for this purpose, the simultaneous attainment of robust security and privacy at low latencies, execution time and bandwidth remains a mirage. In this paper, a session-dependent token-based payload enciphering scheme for integrity enhancements in wireless networks is presented. This protocol amalgamates fuzzy extraction with extended Chebyshev chaotic maps to boost the integrity of the exchanged payload. The security analysis shows that this scheme offers entity anonymity and backward and forward key secrecy. In addition, it is demonstrated to be robust against secret ephemeral leakage, side-channeling, man-in-the-middle and impersonation attacks, among other security threats. From the performance perspective, the proposed scheme requires the least communication overheads and a relatively low execution time during the authentication process.