A Fast and Scalable Authentication Scheme in IoT for Smart Living
This addresses the security flaw that hinders IoT adoption in smart living, offering a scalable solution for authenticating large volumes of devices, though it appears incremental by building on existing fog computing and microservice concepts.
The paper tackles the security and scalability challenges of authenticating numerous resource-limited IoT devices in smart living by leveraging fog computing and microservices to push certificate authority functions closer to data sources, resulting in minimized attack surfaces and authentication latency with lightweight protocols that avoid bilinear pairing on client-side.
Numerous resource-limited smart objects (SOs) such as sensors and actuators have been widely deployed in smart environments, opening new attack surfaces to intruders. The severe security flaw discourages the adoption of the Internet of things in smart living. In this paper, we leverage fog computing and microservice to push certificate authority (CA) functions to the proximity of data sources. Through which, we can minimize attack surfaces and authentication latency, and result in a fast and scalable scheme in authenticating a large volume of resource-limited devices. Then, we design lightweight protocols to implement the scheme, where both a high level of security and low computation workloads on SO (no bilinear pairing requirement on the client-side) is accomplished. Evaluations demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our scheme in handling authentication and registration for a large number of nodes, meanwhile protecting them against various threats to smart living. Finally, we showcase the success of computing intelligence movement towards data sources in handling complicated services.