Smart Home Security: An Efficient Multi-Factor Authentication Protocol

The benefits of smart homes have made them a necessary part of modern human life. It is, however, essential to ensure the security of smart homes in order to protect personal information, prevent unauthorized access, provide physical security, and defend against cyberattacks. One of the most crucial steps towards securing smart homes is developing efficient authentication protocols. In this article, we considered a typical architecture for smart homes based on the Internet of Things (IoT) and studied various recent authentication protocols presented for this scenario. These protocols were assessed using several security criteria to determine their security features and weaknesses. Our investigations revealed that due to the resource constraints of most smart devices, lightweight multi-factor authentication protocols are a suitable choice for securing smart homes. Furthermore, physical attacks can be prevented with the use of Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) chips. Therefore, in this paper, we present a lightweight multi-factor authentication protocol based on PUFs that overcomes the shortcomings of existing protocols. We conducted an informal security analysis of the proposed protocol and compared it with similar schemes. In addition, we formally analyzed the protocol using ProVerif. A brief guide to using the ProVerif tool was also included. The results show that the proposed scheme provides essential security features and resists several well-known attacks. Evaluating the computation complexity and space complexity of the proposed protocol also verifies its superior performance compared with similar schemes.