SecFHome: Secure remote authentication in fog-enabled smart home environment

Abstract

Fog computing is the best solution for IoT applications with low latency and real-time interaction. Fog can endow smart home with many smart functions and services. One of the most important services is that users can remotely access and control smart devices. Since remote users and smart homes communicate through insecure channels, it is necessary to design a secure and effective remote authentication scheme to guarantee secure communications. The existing authentication schemes designed for smart homes have some security issues and are not suitable for fog-enabled smart home environments. Therefore, this paper designs a secure remote user authentication scheme, SecFHome. It supports secure communication at the edge of the network and remote authentication in fog-enabled smart home systems. Specifically, We present an efficient authentication mode in the fog-enabled environment, which includes the edge negotiation phase and the authentication phase. SecFHome adds updated information to the authenticator, which can verify the message synchronization simultaneously with the authentication, thus improving the authentication efficiency. In addition, SecFHome does not store sensitive information of users and smart devices in the memory of the smart gateway, which can avoid various attacks caused by the compromised gateway. The formal security proof and informal security analysis show that the SecFHome is secure and can resist known attacks. Compared with the related authentication schemes, SecFHome only needs fewer communication costs and computation costs, and achieves more security features.