A PUF-based Authentication Mechanism for OSCORE

Abstract

Within environment generated when deploying Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, there is a need to do it securely. Authentication of the devices against the applications deployed on the servers, which receive or send data to the IoT devices must be carried out. Standard IoT protocols, such as CoAP or MQTT, define secure communica- tions through protocols on transport, network or application layers. Nevertheless, a shortcoming when protocols using secret keys are used lies in the management of such keys, which is out of scope of the specifications. For this reason, this article presents an authenti- cation solution for OSCORE (Object Security for Constrained RESTful Environments) based on PUFs (Physical Unclonable Functions) that makes it possible to establish a secure mechanism for the exchange and management of keys. The performance of this proposal has been evaluated, showing its viability.