Securing applications that gather and transfer confidential information has become a critical challenge in the rapidly evolving Internet of Things (IoT) landscape. Such data’s authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality must be guaranteed while reducing security functions’ computation and communication overhead to accommodate the numerous constrained devices involved. Group authentication and key management are essential aspects of IoT security, but existing protocols often need to be more computationally expensive for IoT applications and must take care of anonymization. Consequently, IoT devices may be open to potential cyber-attacks due to the use of simple security primitives. Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) can enable in lightweight approach to authentication and key distribution among group members. The factorial tree and Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) can minimize communication messages required to renew the keys. This paper presents a novel protocol, Anonymized Lightweight PUF-based group Authentication with Key distribution (ALPAK) for IoT Devices, which improves the PUF-Based Lightweight Group Authentication and Key Distribution Protocol (PLGAKD) to enhance the anonymity of IoT devices. The paper further presents the formal verification of the ALPAK scheme with the Scyther tool and detailed security analysis.
Securing applications that gather and transfer confidential information has become a critical challenge in the rapidly evolving Internet of Things (IoT) landscape. Such data’s authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality must be guaranteed while reducing security functions’ computation and communication overhead to accommodate the numerous constrained devices involved. Group authentication and key management are essential aspects of IoT security, but existing protocols often need to be more computationally expensive for IoT applications and must take care of anonymization. Consequently, IoT devices may be open to potential cyber-attacks due to the use of simple security primitives. Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) can enable in lightweight approach to authentication and key distribution among group members. The factorial tree and Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) can minimize communication messages required to renew the keys. This paper presents a novel protocol, Anonymized Lightweight PUF-based group Authentication with Key distribution (ALPAK) for IoT Devices, which improves the PUF-Based Lightweight Group Authentication and Key Distribution Protocol (PLGAKD) to enhance the anonymity of IoT devices. The paper further presents the formal verification of the ALPAK scheme with the Scyther tool and detailed security analysis.
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.
With the rapid development of quantum computing, in response to its disruptive threats to traditional cryptosystems and the urgent demand for lightweight and highly scalable secure group communication among resource-constrained devices in large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, this paper proposes a lightweight anonymous group authentication scheme that integrates Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), distributed Gossip algorithms, and quantum key distribution. By exploiting the uniqueness and unclonability derived from the inherent physical characteristics of PUF hardware, the scheme fundamentally eliminates attack vectors against quantum computers without requiring devices to pre-store any secret keys in their memory, while the QKCS pre-provisions CRPs and key seeds, which is the standard enrollment procedure in PUF-based systems. Combined with information-theoretically secure quantum keys as session keys, it forms a dual protection mechanism: anti-forgery at the physical layer and anti-quantum attack at the cryptographic layer. Innovatively, the Gossip algorithm is deeply integrated with group key agreement, converting global broadcast into local iterative interactions between nodes, which effectively alleviates broadcast storms and improves the scalability and fault tolerance of the protocol. Meanwhile, a pseudonym mechanism is introduced to achieve anonymous identity protection, and a dynamic key update strategy guarantees forward and backward security when members join or leave the group. Formal verification based on BAN logic and security analysis show that the proposed protocol can resist typical attacks such as replay attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, and impersonation attacks. Performance evaluations demonstrate that our scheme outperforms existing comparable schemes in terms of computational cost, communication overhead, and dynamic group management efficiency, demonstrating its potential for resource-constrained IoT environments, pending further validation on real hardware platforms.
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.
The remarkable growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has paved the way for the interconnection of a wide variety of mobile devices. To protect data confidentiality and user privacy in public networks, most key sharing and management protocols have gained wide attention. Due to the limited resources of IoT devices, relevant security primitives with high communication overhead and slow transmission rates are not suitable for the authentication of lightweight devices. To solve these problems, physical unclonable function (PUF) is lightweight security primitive that exploits the frequency difference during the chip fabrication process for the key generation or device authentication. In this paper, we flexibly configure the oscillation period of the reconfigurable HCRO-PUF to generate a shared key on the hardware side, which solve related security problems such as device cloning and key tampering. Furthermore, we propose a lightweight key sharing and management (LKSM) protocol based on HCRO-PUF for various devices and multi-server architectures. We prove that the proposed protocol satisfies the corresponding security and resistance properties through Ban logic. Compared with existing relevant protocols, security analysis and simulation results show that our protocol defends against multiple attacks. The low computational and communication costs indicate that our protocol is suitable for resource-constrained IoT devices.
The advent of Internet of Things (IoT) ushers in a significant potential to integrate individuals, devices, and data, leading to a profound change in our professional and social environments. The small, resource-constrained IoT devices are usually deployed to collect various types of critical data in remote or unmonitored locations. Due to extensive interconnectivity, limited resources, and inadequate security design, IoT systems are vulnerable to communication-specific cyber threats, which aim to disrupt operations, steal sensitive information, or cause damage. To resolve the security concerns in IoT communications, many recent efforts have been devoted to designing authenticated key agreement protocols for IoT systems. However, not only most of the existing solutions fail to adopt cost-effective techniques for resource-limited IoT devices, but also they ignore the differentiation among various data types in the established session keys. A few approaches use traditional physical unclonable functions (PUFs) to address resource concerns, yet they introduce new security issues into IoT systems. Once the PUF cryptographic information is compromised by machine learning attacks, the entire authentication framework collapses. Therefore, in this paper we propose an authenticated key agreement protocol for device-to-gateway communication in IoT systems based on Chebyshev polynomial and probability-based PUF. We examine the proposed protocol’s security features through formal security validation. We also conduct performance evaluation through a simulation-oriented study, and the results clearly prove that the proposed protocol offers superior security and privacy, while maintaining low computational overhead.
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.