Quantum-Secure N2N Authentication Protocol Model for IoT Sensor Networks

The infrastructure of the Internet of Things (IoT) is made up of wireless communication and sensing devices that are highly vulnerable. The authentication of the participating nodes, the confidentiality of the information transferred through an insecure channel, and access control are the major issues to be resolved in the IoT infrastructure. The security protocols used in the IoT are based on integer factorization (IF) and discrete logarithm problems (DLP), which have been proven vulnerable to quantum attacks. This paper proposes a model for a quantum-secure node-to-node authentication protocol for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) infrastructure. The protocol is modeled, and its correctness is proved formally based on the hardness of the inhomogeneous short integer solution (ISIS) problem on lattices. The security of the protocol model is verified against known attacks on the IoT infrastructure. We considered the well-known three-party protocol model to analyze the performance of the proposed model. It is analyzed for a 100-bit security level with specified security parameters. The average computation cost is computed for the number of hash functions(h(.)) and polynomial multiplication (PM) operations. The proposed model, required 2h(.) + 3PM for the IoT node,1h(.) + 2PM for the Gateway device, and in total 3h(.) + 5PM operations are needed. We also compare our protocol model to similar protocols and demonstrate that it is both computationally efficient and quantum-safe.