Secure and Efficient Authentication Scheme in IoT Environments

Optimization of resource consumption and decreasing the response time of authentication requests is an immense urgent requirement for supporting the scalability of resources in IoT environments. The existing research attempts to design lightweight authentication protocols to address these issues. However, the schemes proposed in the literature are lacking in the creation of a lightweight (i.e., low computing, communication, and storage cost) and secure architecture. IoT devices in existing approaches consume high electricity and computing power, despite the fact that IoT devices have limited power and computing capabilities. Furthermore, the existing approaches lead to an increase in the burden on storage memory and also create heavy traffic on a communication channel, increasing the response time of device authentication requests. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel lightweight and secure architecture that uses crypto-modules, which optimize the usage of one-way hash functions, elliptic-curve cryptography, and an exclusive-or operation. We demonstrate the proposed scheme's security strength using informal security analysis and verified it by considering the widely used automated validation of internet security protocol application (AVISPA) and the ProVerif tool. The result shows that the proposed scheme is effective against active and passive security attacks and satisfies secure design. Moreover, we calculate the proposed scheme's working cost by implementing it using a widely accepted standard pairing-based cryptography (PBC) library on embedded devices. The implementation proves that the proposed scheme is lightweight and reduces computation time by 0.933 ms, communication cost by 1408 bits, and storage cost by 384 bits, and removes the existing gaps.