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Academic Editor:Sk Md Mizanur Rahman
Department of Information Management, National Dong Hwa University, Hualien 97401, Taiwan
Received 16 June 2015; Accepted 20 August 2015; 1 November 2015
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
The rapid growth of population in cities calls for adequate provision of services and infrastructure to meet the needs of urban inhabitants. Various information and communications technologies (ICTs), such as Bluetooth, WiFi, 3G/4G, and NFC/RFID, go a long way to achieving this objective and create the possibility of smart cities where human based services and city monitoring are more aware, interactive, and efficient. Following this trend, the comprehensive evolution of the traditional Internet has given rise to a ubiquitous network consisting of interconnected objects (or things), called the Internet of Things (IoT). In IoT based environments, information sensing and human interaction with the physical world are fundamental concepts for the provision of human value-added services. Among these services, in particular, IoT oriented healthcare support systems are among the most promising and important directions for development and are therefore a major focus of government and industry.
Cyber attackers generally exploit security vulnerabilities in computer hardware, software, and communications protocols to target the IoT ecosystems within enterprise, industrial, and government systems. The confidentiality, integrity, and availability of these systems are thus undermined, and serious attacks (e.g., ones resulting in financial losses, property damage, etc.) may be launched on IoT based environments. It is known that the IoT brings with it a broad array of new security challenges for the research community with respect to general system security, network security, and application security. We present the following observations:
(i) Securing IoT-networked devices requires implementation of secure cryptographic primitives on the devices. However, the limited computational resources of low-power-consuming and low-cost IoT based devices make the design of security components for such devices difficult. As it stands, some devices cannot even execute the currently existing encryption schemes. Hence, we must reconsider the implementation efficiency of security primitives (or cryptocomponents) on IoT-networked devices. In other words, a new lightweight cryptographic technique is urgently needed to meet the critical security and performance...