Efficient Inter-Cloud Authentication and Micropayment Protocol for IoT Edge Computing

In this paper, we present a $\textsf {S}$ ymmetric $\textsf {K}$ ey $\textsf {I}$ nter- $\textsf {C}$ loud $\textsf {A}$ uthentication and redeemable micropayment $\textsf {P}$ rotocol ( $\textsf {SKICAP}$ ) for IoT-Edge computing applications. The proposed protocol takes into account the mobile and limited resource nature of IoT devices by enabling them to register with their home cloud admin for computation offloading service provided by foreign Edge-Cloud instances. More precisely, $\textsf {SKICAP}$ ensures that mobile IoT devices can be authenticated and serviced by edge nodes outside of their home cloud coverage, while guaranteeing the associated charge redemption. Additionally, since our protocol considers the mobile and anywhere deployable requirements of IoT devices, we utilize physical unclonable function and cryptographic hash function to make it privacy-preserving and resilient to hardware compromise. Under the assumption of an indistinguishably secure physical unclonable function, we provide a formal security analysis of our protocol. Finally, we report $\textsf {SKICAP}$ performance on an ARM Cortex-A72 processor, and compare it with other closely related protocols.