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IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing

PUF-Based Mutual Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol for Peer-to-Peer IoT Applications

Yue Zheng, Wenye Liu, Chongyan Gu, Chip-Hong Chang

Published Jul 25, 2022• 120 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Peer to Peer (P2P) or direct connection IoT has become increasingly popular owing to its lower latency and higher privacy compared to database-driven or server-based IoT. However, wireless vulnerabilities raise severe concerns on IoT device-to-device communication. This is further aggravated by the challenge to achieve lightweight direct mutual authentication and secure key exchange between IoT peer nodes in P2P IoT applications. Physical unclonable function (PUF) is a key enabler to lightweight, low-power and secure authentication of resource-constrained devices in IoT. Nevertheless, current PUF-enabled authentication protocols, with or without the challenge-response pairs (CRPs) of each of its interlocutors stored in the verifier’s side, are incompatible for P2P IoT scenarios due to the security, storage and computing power limitations of IoT devices. To solve this problem, a new lightweight PUF-based mutual authentication and key-exchange protocol is proposed. It allows two resource-constrained PUF embedded endpoint devices to authenticate each other directly without the need for local storage of CRP or any private secrets, and simultaneously establish the session key for secure data exchange without resorting to public-key algorithm. The proposed protocol is evaluated using the Mao and Boyd logic as well as the automatic security analysis tool ProVerif to corroborate its mutual authenticity, secrecy, and resistance against replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. Using two Avnet Ultra96-V2 boards to emulate the two IoT endpoint devices of a network, a physical prototype system is also constructed to demonstrate and validate the feasibility of the proposed secure P2P connection scheme.

DOI
10.1109/tdsc.2022.3193570

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Peer to Peer (P2P) or direct connection IoT has become increasingly popular owing to its lower latency and higher privacy compared to database-driven or server-based IoT. However, wireless vulnerabilities raise severe concerns on IoT device-to-device communication. This is further aggravated by the challenge to achieve lightweight direct mutual authentication and secure key exchange between IoT peer nodes in P2P IoT applications. Physical unclonable function (PUF) is a key enabler to lightweight, low-power and secure authentication of resource-constrained devices in IoT. Nevertheless, current PUF-enabled authentication protocols, with or without the challenge-response pairs (CRPs) of each of its interlocutors stored in the verifier’s side, are incompatible for P2P IoT scenarios due to the security, storage and computing power limitations of IoT devices. To solve this problem, a new lightweight PUF-based mutual authentication and key-exchange protocol is proposed. It allows two resource-constrained PUF embedded endpoint devices to authenticate each other directly without the need for local storage of CRP or any private secrets, and simultaneously establish the session key for secure data exchange without resorting to public-key algorithm. The proposed protocol is evaluated using the Mao and Boyd logic as well as the automatic security analysis tool ProVerif to corroborate its mutual authenticity, secrecy, and resistance against replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. Using two Avnet Ultra96-V2 boards to emulate the two IoT endpoint devices of a network, a physical prototype system is also constructed to demonstrate and validate the feasibility of the proposed secure P2P connection scheme.
Device authentication and key exchange protocol are essential front line of access controls in IoT security, and physical unclonable function (PUF) is a key enabler to lightweight, low-power and secure authentication of internet enabled endpoint devices in IoT. Current PUF-enabled authentication protocol requires the verifier to store a sufficiently large number of challenge-response pairs (CRPs) of each of its interlocutors, which makes the protocol impractical in application scenarios where the verifier is a resource-constrained device, especially when the verifier needs to communicate with multiple PUF- embedded endpoints. To solve this problem, a new lightweight PUF-based mutual authentication and key-exchange protocol is proposed in this paper to allow two resource-constrained PUF embedded endpoint devices to authenticate each other without the need to store the CRPs locally, and simultaneously establish the session key for secure data exchange without resorting to public-key algorithm. The PUF response reliability is mitigated by the use of reverse fuzzy extractor to offload the compute- intensive error decoding to the server during the initialization phase of the protocol. The proposed protocol is evaluated using ProVerif to corroborate its secrecy, mutual authenticity as well as resistance against replay and man-in-the-middle attacks.
The immense potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenged by grave security vulnerabilities that are easily exploitable in resource-constrained environments. We propose a lightweight Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol to derive a shared session key for each communicating node in amutually communicating cluster of IoT nodes. Each IoT device is embedded with a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF), and a Fuzzy Extractor (FE) is deployed to correct and reproduce the private key and public helper data pair from the possibly erroneous PUF response. This secret raw PUF response is not stored explicitly in the server. A forward-secure authenticated key agreement is achieved by incorporating Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange (ECDH) protocol. The security of the proposed scheme has been formally verified while considering both active and passive attackers using the Verifpal tool. A prototype implementation with the Arbiter PUF circuit, FE, and associated software has successfully demonstrated the efficacy of our scheme.
We propose a lightweight end-to-end authentication and key-exchange protocol for resource-constrained IoT devices that avoids computationally expensive cryptographic operations by leveraging Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and employs a lightweight Fuzzy Extractor (FE) to reliably handle PUF noise. The protocol relies exclusively on lightweight hash, XOR, and symmetric encryption/decryption operations. Moreover, the proposed protocol mitigates the storage overhead by avoiding the maintenance of large CRP repositories at the server. Security properties are formally verified using the scyther tool. A prototype implementation using two ESP32-based IoT nodes and a server further demonstrates its practicality for real-world deployments. Finally, benchmarking against state-of-the-art schemes indicates that the proposed protocol incurs comparatively low computation time and communication cost, highlighting its efficiency and lightweight nature.
The Internet of Things (IoT), as a new type of communication network, is involved in developing and applying secure transmission and storing a large amount of sensitive information. Due to the IoT devices' constrained resources, high connection costs, sluggish transmission speeds, and the inapplicability of security fundamentals like public key methods and digital signatures for simple device authentication, this paper presents a lightweight anonymous key-sharing authentication protocol for IoT devices. The protocol utilizes the tamper-resistant and anti-cloning properties of Hardware Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) to generate shared keys. In addition, it incorporates security primitives such as the MASK algorithm and Hash functions. The security analysis and verification using Ban logic and the proper tool ProVerif demonstrate that the protocol can defend against attacks such as man-in-the-middle, de-synchronization, impersonation, and modeling attacks. Compared with other protocols, this protocol exhibits the characteristics of low computational cost, minimal communication overhead and storage capacity, and high-security performance, making it suitable for secure communication and transmission in resource-constrained devices.
Device authentication and key exchange are essential issues for Internet of Things (IoT) which plays an indispensable role in modern life. Many sensor devices in IoT, with limited resources and poor self-protection capabilities, are deployed in the unattended and open places, making them vulnerable to physical attacks while facing traditional security threats. Despite several researches have been conducted by using the physical unclonable function (PUF) to immune the communication between IoT devices from the security threats above, as per the knowledge of the authors, current solutions rely on the participation of the server to distribute the key parameters, which requires high message overhead and markedly influences the efficiency. To fill this gap, this article proposes an end-to-end mutual authentication and key exchange protocol for IoT by combining PUF with certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) on elliptic curve, which only needs “three handshakes” without the real-time participation of the server. The security analysis shows that the proposed protocol can not only secure the IoT devices from various attacks, but also provide perfect forward secrecy. Moreover, the experimental validation and performance analysis show the proposed protocol outperforms existing related protocols in terms of security features, protocol rounds and communication cost.
Recently, Zerrouki et al. proposed a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) mutual authentication and session key establishment protocol for IoT (Internet of Things) devices. Zerrouki et al.’s PUF protocol is interesting because it does not require the storage of any sensitive information on the local memory of the IoT device, which avoids many potential attacks, especially side-channel attacks. Therefore, we carefully investigate the security of Zerrouki et al.’s PUF protocol under the leakage assumption of the session key. Our findings are in the following. First, Zerrouki et al.’s PUF protocol fails to provide known-key security. That is, the adversary can impersonate not only the server to cheat the IoT device but also the IoT device to cheat the server when the adversary corrupts a session key between the server and the IoT device. Second, Zerrouki et al.’s PUF protocol suffers from the key-compromise impersonation attack. It means that the adversary can impersonate the IoT device to cheat the server if the adversary discloses the server’s secret key. Third, Zerrouki et al.’s PUF protocol does not support backward secrecy for the session key. That is, the adversary is always able to derive the session key from the previous session key. We also suggest the root cause of these security flaws in Zerrouki et al.’s PUF protocol. As a case study, our cryptanalysis results would promote a security model for more robust and efficient PUF authentication and session key establishment protocol. Moreover, our idea of the key compromise can be used to evaluate other novel PUF protocol designs.