HCRO-LKSM: A Lightweight Key Sharing and Management Protocol Based on HCRO-PUF for IoT Devices

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.