An Identity-Based Anonymous Three-Party Authenticated Protocol for IoT Infrastructure

Abstract

The rapid advancement in the field of wireless sensor and cellular networks have established a rigid foundation for the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT has become a novel standard that incorporates various physical objects by allowing them to collaborate with each other. A large number of services and applications emerging in the field of IoT that include healthcare, surveillance, industries, transportation, and security. A service provider (SP) offers several services that are accessible through smart applications from any time, anywhere, and any place via the Internet. Due to the open nature of mobile communication and the Internet, these services are extremely susceptible to various malicious attacks, e.g., unauthorized access from malicious intruders. Therefore, to overcome these susceptibilities, a robust authentication scheme is the finest solution. In this article, we introduce a lightweight identity-based remote user authentication and key agreement scheme for IoT environment that enables secure access to IoT services. Our introduced scheme utilizes lightweight elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), hash operations, and XOR operations. The theoretical analysis and formal proof are presented to demonstrate that our scheme provides resistance against several security attacks. Performance evaluation and comparison of our scheme with several related schemes for IoT environment are carried out using the PyCrypto library in Ubuntu and mobile devices. The performance analysis shows that our scheme has trivial storage and communication cost. Hence, the devised scheme is more efficient not only in terms of storage, communication, and computation overheads but also in terms of providing sufficient security against various malicious attacks.