Physically Secure Lightweight Anonymous User Authentication Protocol for Internet of Things Using Physically Unclonable Functions

The Internet of Things (IoT) acts as an umbrella for the Internet-enabled devices for various applications, such as smart home, smart city, smart grid, and smart healthcare. The emergence of the immense economic potential necessitates a robust authentication mechanism that needs to be lightweight and suitable for real-time applications. Moreover, the physical integrity of these devices cannot be assumed as these are designed to be deployed in an unattended environment with minimum human supervision. A user authentication mechanism for the IoT, in addition to guaranteeing user anonymity and un-traceability functionality requirements, must also be resistant to device physical capture and related misuses. In this paper, we present a novel lightweight anonymous user authentication protocol for the IoT environment by utilizing “cryptographic one-way hash function”, “physically unclonable function (PUF)” and “bitwise exclusive-OR (XOR)” operations. The broadly accepted Real-Or-Random (ROR) model-based formal security analysis, formal security verification using the automated software verification tool, namely “automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA)” and also non-mathematical (informal) security analysis have been carried out on the proposed scheme. It is shown that the proposed scheme has the ability to resist various well-known attacks that are crucial for securing the IoT environment. Through a detailed comparative study, we show that the proposed scheme outperforms other existing related schemes in terms of computation and communication costs, and also security & functionality features. Finally, a practical demonstration of the proposed scheme using the NS3 simulation has been provided for measuring various network performance parameters.