An Improved Authentication Protocol Using Smart Cards for the Internet of Things

With the continuous development of IoT (Internet of Things) technology, IoT has become a typical representative of the development of new generation of information technology. The IoT allows people to use our data and computing resource anytime and everywhere. In the context of the IoT, the security of the vast amount of data generated by smart devices is one of the biggest concerns. To meet the challenge, the user authentication scheme in IoT should ensure the essential security performance protection and low computing costs. A authentication protocol preserving user anonymity was proposed by Nikooghadam et al. in 2017. In this paper, we further analyze the security of Nikooghadam et al.'s protocol and propose an improved anonymous authentication protocol for IoT. We use the timestamp mechanism and rely on CDH (Computational Diffie-Hellman) problem to improve security primarily. The security of the proposed protocol is verified using BAN logic and the performance comparison and efficiency analysis are carried out. The results show that our improved protocol has higher security with little more computation cost.