Lightweight and Secure Mutual Authentication Scheme for IoT Devices Using CoAP Protocol

Abstract

Internet of things enables every real world objects to be seamlessly integrated with traditional internet. Heterogeneous objects of real world are enhanced with capability to communicate, computing capabilities and standards to interoperate with existing network and these entities are resource constrained and vulnerable to various security attacks. Huge number of research works are being carried out to analyze various possible attacks and to propose standards for securing communication between devices in internet of things (IoT). In this article, a robust and lightweight authentication scheme for mutual authentication between client and server using constrained application protocol is proposed. Internet of things enables devices with different characteristics and capabilities to be integrated with internet. These heterogeneous devices should interoperate with each other to accumulate, process and transmit data for facilitating smart services. The growth of IoT applications leads to the rapid growth of IoT devices incorporated to the global network and network traffic over the traditional network. This scheme greatly reduces the authentication overhead between the devices by reducing the packet size of messages, number of messages transmitted and processing overhead on communicating devices. Efficiency of this authentication scheme against attacks such as DoS (denial of service), replay attacks and attacks to exhaust the resources are also examined. Message transmission time reduced upto 50% of using proposed techniques.