TACAS-IoT: Trust Aggregation Certificate-Based Authentication Scheme for Edge-Enabled IoT Systems

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of interconnected, Internet-connected items (i.e., smart devices) that can collect and transmit data across a wireless network without the need for human intervention. IoT enables the systems to have higher efficiency and dependability in their day-to-day operations due to its strong focus on machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity, big data, and machine learning. While IoT has many advantages over traditional techniques, it also has a number of security and privacy concerns. Trust is a belief in the competence of a device (computing machine) to act dependably, securely and reliably in some specific context. In an M2M (one IoT device to other IoT device) communication, trust is accomplished by making the use of cryptographic operations (i.e., digital signatures and electronic certificates). Various security threats and attacks have been launched on IoT connectivity in recent years. A trust mechanism is necessary to ensure the quality of collaborative service behaviors and to build confidence between IoT devices. As a result, how to create an effective trust computing mechanism has become an emerging topic in IoT. Therefore, we provide the design of a novel trust-aggregation-based authentication scheme for secure communication of edge-enabled IoT (in short, TACAS-IoT). The security analysis shows that TACAS-IoT is secured against a variety of attacks. Moreover, TACAS-IoT delivers greater security and capabilities with less communication and computation overheads, according to the performance comparison. Finally, a practical implementation of TACAS-IoT is provided in order to assess its impact on the key performance parameters.