Comparison on resilience and energy efficiency of authentication schemes in IoT networks

Abstract

AbstractNetwork security is one of the primary concerns when deploying IoT applications. A proper authentication scheme can strengthen network security and resilience against malicious attacks. The quantitative comparison among authentication schemes is rarely found. Thus, it is difficult to choose the appropriate authentication scheme objectively. This paper presents a quantitative comparison of three authentication schemes, including blockchain‐based authentication, a widely discussed new approach for IoT security. This paper focuses on network‐level simulation instead of the protocol, providing a different angle when evaluating an authentication scheme. The simulations include five common topologies in IoT networks under five different attack strategies. The results show that the blockchain‐based scheme has the most substantial resilience compared to PKI‐based and PSK methods, while the computational cost is 1% less than the PKI‐based method. In addition, the PSK method is most energy efficient as its computational cost is only around 1% of PKI‐based and blockchain‐based methods.