A Lightweight Continuous Authentication Protocol for the Internet of Things

Modern societies are moving toward an information-oriented environment. To gather and utilize information around people’s modern life, tiny devices with all kinds of sensing devices and various sizes of gateways need to be deployed and connected with each other through the Internet or proxy-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Within this kind of Internet of Things (IoT) environment, how to authenticate each other between two communicating devices is a fundamental security issue. As a lot of IoT devices are powered by batteries and they need to transmit sensed data periodically, it is necessary for IoT devices to adopt a lightweight authentication protocol to reduce their energy consumption when a device wants to authenticate and transmit data to its targeted peer. In this paper, a lightweight continuous authentication protocol for sensing devices and gateway devices in general IoT environments is introduced. The concept of valid authentication time period is proposed to enhance robustness of authentication between IoT devices. To construct the proposed lightweight continuous authentication protocol, token technique and dynamic features of IoT devices are adopted in order to reach the design goals: the reduction of time consumption for consecutive authentications and energy saving for authenticating devices through by reducing the computation complexity during session establishment of continuous authentication. Security analysis is conducted to evaluate security strength of the proposed protocol. In addition, performance analysis has shown the proposed protocol is a strong competitor among existing protocols for device-to-device authentication in IoT environments.