LAAP: Lightweight Anonymous Authentication Protocol for IoT Edge Devices Based on Elliptic Curve

The massive heterogeneous devices and open channels of the Internet of Things (IoT) lead to low efficiency and privacy leakage in the authentication process, which brings great challenges to identity authentication. This paper focuses on the anonymous authentication between the IoT edge device and the cloud server. In this work, we first propose a novel lightweight anonymous authentication protocol (LAAP) to meet security and efficiency requirements. Especially, the proposed protocol uses dynamic pseudonyms to prevent the traceable attacks caused by fixed identity identification and also uses symmetric encryption to optimize the server's search for anonymous device information, and the time complexity is reduced from O(n) to O(1). Then, the formal security analysis and informal security analysis are provided to prove the security of the proposed protocol. Finally, extensive numerical results indicate that the proposed LAAP protocol is superior to the benchmarks in terms of computing overhead and communication overhead, while the storage overhead is consistent with the lowest level among other protocols.