Resource-Constrained IoT Authentication Protocol: An ECC-Based Hybrid Scheme for Device-to-Server and Device-to-Device Communications

Abstract

Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as one of the building blocks of future digital industrial technologies. Along with its huge open opportunities, it is also coming with different challenges, in which security issues are especially getting more and more attention. The resource constraints of IoT devices makes them even more difficult for us to develop secure authentication protocols that can be actually applied in practice. In this paper, we propose an extended authentication scheme which not only provides a centralized management from powerful servers to lower the burden on the device ends, but also allows direct connections between devices in the same networks. Computations in the proposed protocol are designed to use Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and only low-cost operations such as exclusive-or, concatenation, and hash function to provide efficient resource consumption. This study includes our security analysis which proves the proposed scheme is resilient to common attacks to IoT systems. The performance analysis is also given to show that it is applicable for practical applications as the process only consumes at most 38.2 mJ on each device in addition to the amount required by the original protocol.