An Authentication Mechanism Based on Zero Trust With Radio Frequency Fingerprint for Internet of Things Networks

With the development of Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud networks, the security of edge networks, borderless networks, and obscure networks are essential, so there are many security problems that need to be tackled, including over-trust in trust areas and security only based on security boundaries in traditional security architecture. According to characters of zero trust security architectures and integrative trust model (ITM), the zero trust architectures (ZTAs) better adapt to handle these security problems compared to the ITM for the IoT networks. Meanwhile, the radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) identification keeps high accuracy and high stability with researchers’ investigation, which makes RFF authentication feasible. Therefore, we propose a mechanism that combines the RFF authentication technique and ZTA to improve security in IOT networks, including edge networks, borderless networks, and obscure networks. The method resolves the difficulty of over-reliance on a trustable center or trust chain, and the method is suitable for borderless networks and obscure networks. Besides, this method resists data leakage, counterfeit attack and rouge access point (AP) attack with RFF authentication, and it can reduce the risk caused by compromised devices with zero trust concepts. With the analysis in this article, the proposed method keeps high-level security and performance that method effectively against spoofing identity, tampering, and information disclosure. The authentication accuracy of the method has reached 99%, and the authentication owns robustness in time cost and collision-resistant.