Lightweight Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Edge Computing Applications

Abstract

Edge computing is one of the most promising decentralized network paradigms in the proliferation era of the Internet of Things. Although this paradigm has high potential in terms of performance, it carries several security concerns. Indeed, the wireless communication medium in the three-tier cloud-edge-IoT framework opens the door for many security threats. On the other hand, the existing public key cryptography protocols are heavyweight and not suitable for the low-end IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a lightweight symmetric key-based protocol which provides edge-IoT mutual authentication, forward secrecy, backward secrecy, and anonymity. We prove the security goals of the protocol and compare it to other lightweight authentication protocols. The computational complexity of our protocol is only 1 pseudo-random function evaluation, 1 random number generation, 5 hash, and 4 xor operations. The communication overhead and IoT-device storage requirements for our protocol are 171 Bytes and 160 Bytes, respectively.