Secure and Lightweight Mutual Multi-Factor Authentication for IoT Communication Systems

Authentication is critical for any digital system as it represents the first step towards accessing data and resources. Authentication of entities, especially devices in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) system, is one of the most important security challenges that needs to be addressed; otherwise, it will hinder the deployment of IoT applications. The most widely used authentication mechanisms in IoT are based on one-factor cryptographic techniques. These techniques are often not sufficient in the context of IoT due to the limited computational power of IoT devices and the severity of security concerns, especially that these devices are physically not well protected. Consequently, any weakness in the identification/authentication schemes would allow a compromised entity to perform dangerous attacks. To overcome the above-mentioned limitations and achieve high authentication accuracy, we propose an efficient two-factor lightweight mutual authentication scheme for IoT entities, which can be deployed at various levels; device, control, aggregation node, gateway, and server. The first factor is based on a cryptographic protocol which employs a configurable Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) along with a nonce extracted from the physical channel. The second factor is an entity-based fingerprint that uses specific information (i.e., features that can be extracted from various layers of the communication protocol) to construct a unique fingerprint for each entity. The proposed scheme is designed to require the minimum possible overhead in terms of computation and communication overhead, and ensure maximum security resilience against authentication attacks.