A Lightweight Authentication Protocol using Implicit Certificates for Securing IoT Systems

Abstract

IoT’s population is converging at a rate exceeding the population rate of many countries. IoT environment consist of many heterogeneous entities which are interconnected, controlled and monitored through internet. One of the most challenging tasks in IoT is providing authentication in the heterogeneous environment. Authentication ensures the security of the devices and information that are interconnected in the IoT network. In this paper, the authors proposed a light weight authentication protocol which uses implicit certificates to provide mutual authentication and key agreement between the IoT devices. The proposed protocol (LAPIC) is resistant to various attacks such as replay, masquerade, node compromise and man in the middle attack. The efficiency and reliability of the proposed technique is verified through performance, security and comparative analysis. The results revealed that proposed authentication protocol consumes nominal time and energy for its operation and is found to be resistant against many attacks which make it a suitable approach for resource constrained IoT applications.