Privacy Dream: A Malware Propagation‐Inspired Attack on Authentication Protocols
Meysam Ghahramani · Security and Privacy · 2025
ABSTRACT Ensuring users' privacy is a basic need in today's world, and one of the most challenging issues in information security. Users resort to cryptographic techniques to protect their privacy, unaware that hackers are up to date with technology. Smart saboteurs can detect vulnerabilities in the latest security methods and seize vital user information. This paper introduces a severe attack on authentication and key agreement protocols. The proposed attack acts as malware, enabling malicious users to disclose all confidential network information. The proposed algorithm detects vulnerabilities and calculates session keys by finding the relationship between the user and the servers. These vulnerabilities typically exist in ultra‐lightweight authentication and key agreement protocols that use ‐shaped parameters. The time complexity and space complexity of this attack is . In addition, the attack on one of the lightweight protocols, introduced in 2022, proves the efficiency of this attack. Also, this paper presents a secure, lightweight protocol to counter the proposed attack, which has an execution time and communication overhead of and 4992 bits, respectively. The upgraded version reduces runtime and communication overhead by 3% and 15%, respectively.