Efficient and Secure Whole-network Authentication Protocol

With the widespread deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT), efficiently and securely authenticating wholenetwork end devices is a major challenge. In this paper, we propose a lightweight whole-network authentication protocol for spanning-tree-like IoT systems, e.g. smart health system and Internet of Vehicle system etc, that can be proved as a sound and zero-knowledge protocol. Moreover, we propose an improved protocol over a special unknown order group called the hard subgroup membership (HSM) group. The HSM group can be used to construct an efficient additively homomorphic encryption with a trustless setup, which is considered a good choice for privacy protection in IoT systems. However, it is a heavy cost to issue public-key certificates for each IoT nodes in the additively homomorphic encryption scheme. Our improved protocol can be used to authenticate each node's public key over the HSM group without relying on the public key infrastructure (PKI), which saves much more resources for the IoT systems. Our improved protocol is a sound and zero-knowledge protocol, and the performance analysis shows that it is suitable for resourcelimited IoT end devices