A Flexible and Efficient Authentication and Secure Data Transmission Scheme for IoT Applications

Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications have been rapidly deployed into pervasive environment, where both challenges and opportunities abound. On the one hand, a large number of IoT devices and their rich functions contribute significant volumes of data, which has brought tremendous convenience to the daily lives of end users. On the other hand, the heterogeneous IoT devices and a large amount of private information transmitted through networks also bring serious security and privacy issues. It is a big challenge to model IoT systems and trust relationships between different entities with a large number of heterogeneous IoT devices. In this article, we study a general IoT system architecture with consideration of heterogeneous IoT devices. Different trust models are proposed and analyzed based on the trust relationships between different entities in the IoT system. We propose a flexible and efficient authentication scheme with a consideration of heterogeneous IoT devices based on the least trust-required model. The proposed scheme provides security and privacy to resource-limited IoT devices flexibly and efficiently by utilizing IoT devices with better storage and computational ability. Moreover, secure data transmission is presented with contextual privacy and data integrity services. The proposed scheme achieves not only the mutual authentication, initial session key agreement, and data integrity but also anonymity, contextual privacy, forward security, end-to-end security, and key escrow resilience. Security analysis is presented to provide verification of the proposed protocol and security objectives. Moreover, performance evaluation is presented with comparison to the other schemes in terms of security features, computational overhead, and communication overhead. The performance comparisons show that our proposed scheme provides flexible and efficient security by consideration of heterogeneous IoT devices. With the higher proportion of resource-limited IoT devices, our proposed scheme outperforms other similar schemes.