A Quantum-Safe User Authentication Protocol for the Internet of Things

The forthcoming of the Internet of Things has opened the gates for numerous applications in several domains. Unfortunately, it also has brought along with it several security challenges. IoT devices, being compact in size, has several constraints. Therefore, it becomes a challenging task to define security protocols suitable for such constrained devices. Also, the significant strides made towards the development of Quantum computers pose a huge threat to traditionally used cryptosystems. It is known that a sufficiently large Quantum Computer running Shor's Algorithm can solve the integer factorization problem and the discrete logarithm problem. Thus, in our research, we provide an authentication protocol that utilizes Gate Way Node for high-end processing and suggest the usage of NTRU cryptosystem as the cipher suite. We suggest our authentication protocol in terms of cloud computing, as the number of IoT devices would be immense and cloud computing is better suited for processing and storing such large volumes of data. We also suggest the use of One Time Password, for adding another layer of security on top of the public-key cryptosystem. We analyze our authentication protocol and find that it is safe.