Lightweight anonymity-preserving authentication and key agreement protocol for the internet of things environment

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) creates a world-wide network of interconnected objects or things that will have an active role in the Future Internet (FI). Such things will be readable, recognizable, locatable, addressable, and/or controllable via the Internet; in order for the IoT to expand there should be a trust in the IoT security infrastructure. The number of applications and services expected to be numerous so in order to access these applications and services a secure and robust authentication protocol is required. In this paper, we propose a robust and lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement protocol for the IoT environment. We have used lightweight computational cryptographic functions to maintain low computational, memory and energy consumption. The security analysis and performance evaluation prove the protocol is lightweight and resist most of known security related attacks Moreover, formal security verification was conducted using AVISPA tool. The result shows that the proposed protocol is secure and safe.