PUF-Based Lightweight and Anonymity-Preserving Continuous Authentication Protocol for IoT Devices

We propose a novel mutual and continuous authentication protocol for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The proposed protocol is based on generating encryption keys via Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), achieves confidentiality and message integrity, and preserves the anonymity of the communicating devices. It is lightweight in nature since it uses only simple operations such as hash and XOR computations and symmetric key encryption and decryption. We provide a detailed analysis of the proposed protocol’s security against common security attacks. Using numerical computations, we show that the proposed protocol significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art protocol proposed in prior work in terms of the computational costs incurred at the IoT devices during mutual authentication as well as continuous authentication.