Secure Protocol for Resource-Constrained IoT Device Authentication

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are crucial components of internet of things (IoT) and have been deployed in numerous fields such as battlefield surveillance. The exploitation of broadcasts in WSNs renders these networks susceptible to numerous attacks. Consequently, to boost security, reliability, and successful cooperation, trust must be established among the sensor nodes. Unfortunately, the current authentication and authorization approaches exhibit high key management overheads, depend on static digital signatures or trusted third parties, and have both high communication latencies and computational complexity that render them inefficient. In this paper, challenge-response mutual authentication protocol is proposed for enhancing security in WSN-based IoT environment. The simulation results showed that the proposed protocol has the least transaction costs, time complexity, end-to-end delays, and energy consumptions. It is also resilient against dictionary, side channel, cloning, man-in-the-middle (MitM), denial of service (DoS), and next password prediction attacks.