A smart-phone based privacy-preserving security framework for IoT devices

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are getting increasingly popular, becoming a core element for the next generations of informational architectures: smart city, smart factory, smart home, smart health-care and many others. IoT systems are mainly comprised of embedded devices with limited computing capabilities while having a cloud component which processes the data and delivers it to the end-users. IoT devices access the user private data, thus requiring robust security solution which must address features like usability and scalability. In this paper we discuss about an IoT authentication service for smart-home devices using a smart-phone as security anchor, QR codes and attribute based cryptography (ABC). Regarding the fact that in an IoT ecosystem some of the IoT devices and the cloud components may be considered untrusted, we propose a privacy preserving attribute based access control protocol to handle the device authentication to the cloud service. For the smart-phone centric authentication to the cloud component, we employ the FIDO UAF protocol and we extend it, by adding an attributed based privacy preserving component.