An Enhanced Lightweight IoT-based Authentication Scheme in Cloud Computing Circumstances

Abstract

With the rapid deployment of the Internet of Things and cloud computing, it is necessary to enhance authentication protocols to reduce attacks and security vulnerabilities which affect the correct performance of applications. In 2019 a new lightweight IoT-based authentication scheme in cloud computing circumstances was proposed. According to the authors, their protocol is secure and resists very well-known attacks. However, when we evaluated the protocol we found some security vulnerabilities and drawbacks, making the scheme insecure. Therefore, we propose a new version considering login, mutual authentication and key agreement phases to enhance the security. Moreover, we include a sub-phase called evidence of connection attempt which provides proof about the participation of the user and the server. The new scheme achieves the security requirements and resists very well-known attacks, improving previous works. In addition, the performance evaluation demonstrates that the new scheme requires less communication-cost than previous authentication protocols during the registration and login phases.

Lightweight Authentication Protocol for M2M Communications of Resource-Constrained Devices in Industrial Internet of Things

“…Five authentication protocols with similar architectures to the proposed scheme were used for comparison. The followed methodology is similar to the work in [59], where the performance was based on the execution-time and communication-cost of the protocols. The next two subsections present the execution-time and communication-cost analysis, respectively.…”

“…In the execution-time calculation, what is contemplated is the cost of executing hash functions and cipher algorithms; the cost of very lightweight operations, such as xor, addition, and subtraction is considered negligible. Two metrics were used for the hashing and encrypting/decrypting cost, similar to [59]. They are described in Table 4.…”

“…The communication-cost was analyzed according to the number of bits that have to transmit the principals to authenticate, as in [44,59,64,65]. To compute the communication-cost, the size of each transmitted datum in the protocol was obtained and added to get the total amount of transmitted bits.…”

“…To compute the communication-cost, the size of each transmitted datum in the protocol was obtained and added to get the total amount of transmitted bits. Two metrics were used to obtain the size of the transmitted data, similarly to the methodologies in [44,59]. They are described in Table 6.…”

“…In the first metric, denominated Case 1, it is considered that hash outputs, random numbers, timestamps, identities, and keys are 128 bits long, and for Case 2 they are 256 bits long. In both cases, the encryption output is of 128 bits per block [59]. The sizes of 128 and 256 bits of the metrics follow the conventional size of data in security.…”