A provably secure and PUF-based authentication key agreement scheme for cloud-edge IoT

With the exponential growth of intelligent Internet of Things (IoT) applications, Cloud-Edge (CE) paradigm is emerging as a solution that facilitates resource-efficient and timely services. However, it remains an underlying issue that frequent end-edge-cloud communication is over a public or adversary-controlled channel. Additionally, with the presence of resource-constrained devices, it's imperative to conduct the secure communication mechanism, while still guaranteeing efficiency. Physical unclonable functions (PUF) emerge as promising lightweight security primitives. Thus, we first construct a PUF-based security mechanism for vulnerable IoT devices. Further, a provably secure and PUF-based authentication key agreement scheme is proposed for establishing the secure channel in end-edge-cloud empowered IoT, without requiring pre-loaded master keys. The security of our scheme is rigorously proven through formal security analysis under the random oracle model, and security verification using AVISPA tool. The comprehensive security features are also elaborated. Moreover, the numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms existing related schemes in terms of computational and communication efficiency.