Enhanced lightweight and secure certificateless authentication scheme (ELWSCAS) for Internet of Things environment

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a fast-growing technology that enable existing systems to communicate with one another by using new devices such as sensors and other smart devices. The IoT devices such as wireless sensors and other smart devices are often very cheap, very small, and have limited power sources, memories, and processing capabilities. These devices are used in numerous critical applications, in which confidential information is sent across wireless channels among other devices participating in the system. This communication is vulnerable to multiple cyber-attacks due to the insecure wireless channel between them and without strong security mechanism, the important credential can be stolen by network attackers. One of the most important aspects of securing IoT communication is the authentication mechanism, used to validate the identity of authorized devices and users in IoT networks and to ensure data confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity for secure communication. Several authentication schemes for IoT environment have been proposed in the literature, none of these approaches entirely fulfil the necessary security and lightweight feature requirements. Some schemes fulfill the required security features but are unable to provide lightweight features. Similarly, other schemes provide lightweight features, but their security features are unsatisfactory. Therefore, it is necessary to design an effective security mechanism to ensure secure communication in IoT environments. In this paper, we propose Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) based Enhanced Lightweight and Secure Certificateless Authentication Scheme (ELWSCAS) for IoT environment to fulfill the required security and lightweight performance features. The security of the proposed solution is evaluated using formal and informal security analysis. For formal security analysis we used RoR model and AVISPA tool. We have implemented the proposed solution in network simulator (NS3.35) by using Python and C++ to measure the network parameters such as throughput and packet delivery ratio (PDR). The computational and communication cost of the proposed scheme shows that in comparison to the existing state-of-the-art, our approach is considerably less costly and is a viable option for constrained IoT environment.