A Group Authentication Protocol on Multilayer Structure for Privacy-Preserving IoT Environment

Abstract

In the Internet of Things (IoT) systems, large amounts of data are accumulated from anywhere at any time, which may attack individuals' privacy, especially when systems are utilized in medical and everyday environments. With the promise of IoT's proactive systems, the integration of smart things into standard Internet creates several security challenges, because most Internet technologies, communication protocols and sensors are not designed to support IoT. Recent research studies have shown that launching security / privacy attacks against IoT active systems, in particular, Wearable Medical Sensor (WMS) systems, may lead to catastrophic situations and life-threatening conditions. Therefore, security threats and privacy concerns in the IoT area should be actively studied. This causes us in this paper to create a privacy authentication protocol for IoT end-devices on a four-layer structure that does not have the ability to accurately identify the device of request's sender so that some attacks can be minimized. We used the Blakley Sharing scheme to design a key generation and distribution system for secure communications between edge devices and end devices and examined the security properties of the protocol for the five common attacks in the IoT. The results of the experiments show that the proposed authentication protocol by the Blakley method is more efficient with increasing number of instructions in both fog structures and in a without fog structure, which shows a higher flexibility of the Blakley method than the Schemer because of the increasing number of instructions indicating increasing the number of nodes in the network.