Hierarchical architecture and protocol for mobile object authentication in the context of IoT smart cities

Abstract

The deployment of smart technologies such as smart meters, smart phones, and smart chips has facilitated the development of smart cities. Smart cities include different smart systems such as smart homes, smart grids, etc. These smart systems should be connected together along with huge number of smart objects in the world largest network known as the Internet of Things (IoT). Trusted communication between an IoT object, which could be any device, and smart systems is an essential objective for the security over the IoT. This can be supported by authentication enforcers which, with the large number of connected objects in the IoT, should impose efficient and scalable mobile object authentication solutions. In this paper, a four-layer architecture for mobile object authentication in the context of IoT smart cities is proposed. This architecture is designed to address different IoT challenges such as scalability, mobility, and heterogeneity. Moreover, the architecture is supported by the applicability of a proposed hierarchical elliptic curve identity based signature authentication protocol. The proposed architecture and the proposed authentication protocol have been compared with other related works proposed in the literature. Various design goals of IoT in smart cities have been considered in the comparison along with the computation cost on both the sender and the receiver entities. Results show that the proposed architecture supports more design goals of IoT in smart city than its rival architectures and the proposed authentication protocol has lower computation cost than the other related protocols.