PMsec: Physical Unclonable Function-Based Robust and Lightweight Authentication in the Internet of Medical Things

Various commercial off-the-shelf components are available for the development of communication-enabled consumer electronics devices. This opens new doors to attackers who can take advantage of various vulnerabilities to attack the entire network and compromise the integrity of the system and the environment. If a malicious device enters the environment and the attacker gains access to the server or transmits malicious data to the server or cloud, the entire network can be jeopardized. To avoid such cases, this paper presents a device authentication scheme which uses physical unclonable functions (PUFs) and is suitable for the Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT). The main advantage of this authentication scheme is that no data related to the IoMT devices are stored in server memory. The time taken to authenticate the devices completely was 1.2 s to 1.5 s. A hybrid oscillator arbiter physical unclonable function was used for validation of the proposed authentication scheme. From the PUF module used during experimental validation, the number of keys that could be potentially used for the authentication protocol from each design is approximately 240. The proposed authentication scheme increases the robustness of the design while being lightweight to be deployed in various designs and supports scalability.