A Flexible and Lightweight Group Authentication Scheme
This addresses the scalability and security challenges of authenticating millions of IoT devices, particularly for agile 6G networks, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing group authentication schemes.
The paper tackles the problem of inefficient and insecure group authentication for resource-constrained IoT devices in mMTC networks, proposing a lightweight scheme that reduces energy consumption by almost 80% compared to state-of-the-art solutions while resisting replay and man-in-the-middle attacks.
Internet of Things (IoT) networks are becoming a part of our daily lives, as the number of IoT devices around us are surging. The authentication of millions of connected things and the distribution and management of secret keys between these devices pose challenging research problems. Current one-to-one authentication schemes do not take the resource limitations of IoT devices into consideration. Nor do they address the scalability problem of massive machine type communication (mMTC) networks. Group authentication schemes (GAS), on the other hand, have emerged as novel approaches for many-to-many authentication problems. They can be used to simultaneously authenticate numerous resource-constrained devices. However, existing GAS are not energy efficient, and they do not provide enough security for widespread use. In this paper, we propose a lightweight GAS that significantly reduces energy consumption on devices, providing almost 80% energy savings when compared to the state-of-the-art solutions. Our approach is also resistant to the replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. The proposed approach also includes a solution for key agreement and key distribution problems in mMTC environments. Moreover, this approach can be used in both centralized and decentralized group authentication scenarios. The proposed approach has the potential to address the fast authentication requirements of the envisioned agile 6G networks, supported through aerial networking nodes.