Secure and lightweight authentication protocol for anonymous data access in cloud assisted IoT system

Rapid evolution of IoT technologies has virtually made connectivity of all the real world objects to the internet possible with the help of tiny embedded devices also known as IoT devices. The IoT devices are equipped with some type of sensors which enables it to integrate with real world objects and gather different information from its surrounding environment and communicate to the user through internet (Perera et al. in IEEE Trans Emerg Top Comput 3(4):585–598, 2015). But constrained resources like compute, memory and power limits its application areas. Integration of IoT devices with cloud server overcomes these limitations and makes it suitable for practical applications (Nikooghadam and Amintoosi in Int J Commun Syst 36(1):e4332, 2020; Guntuku and Pasupuleti in 2018 3rd International Conference on Internet of Things: Smart Innovation and Usages (IoT-SIU), 2018). Often these IoT devices are positioned at network edge and communicates using wireless insecure channel which leaves all messages exposed to adversary and creates a severe security concern. Authentication between IoT device and cloud server is the first and important step to achieve secure communication. Due to limited power and demand of long life for deployed IoT device, the authentication protocols must be highly secure and lightweight. In this paper, we propose a mutual authentication scheme which is more secure and performance optimized and accomplish authentication with minimum message exchange. We prove its security with informal analysis, formal BAN logic based verification and RoR model. We have also simulated this protocol using AVISPA tool and shows protocol as attack safe.