ALAM: Anonymous Lightweight Authentication Mechanism for SDN-Enabled Smart Homes

The smart connected devices are the first choice of cybercriminals for spreading spy wares and different security attacks. The current security standards and protocols for Internet of Things (IoT) have failed in providing security to these devices. In addition, IoT market giants are producing nonsecure smart products in order to grab the open market. Furthermore, low resources of IoT devices, limits the traditional host-based protection solutions like anti-virus, IDS, IPS, etc. To overcome the resource constraintness and security barriers of smart devices, a network-level security architecture based on lightweight cryptographic parameters is required. Software-defined networking (SDN) is a new networking paradigm to overcome the control, management, and security issues in traditional networking. The SDN controller handles all the computation and complexities at the network level, rather than smart devices. In this research, we first present a new privacy-preserving security architecture for SDN-based smart homes. Subsequently, an anonymous lightweight authentication mechanism (ALAM) is designed based on the proposed security architecture core foundations. Furthermore, the security characteristics of the proposed protocol are formally analyzed using Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic and ProVerif, followed by informal security analysis. Finally, performance evaluation and comparative analysis of the scheme is carried out.