Designing a Lightweight IoT Authentication Protocol for Resource-Constrained Devices

Another challenge which has been caused by the growth of IoT is the security issues arising from the Internet of Things devices; particularly the constrained devices such as sensors and the system of embedded applications. The encryption schemes used in these technologies are not suitable since they require considerable resources; hence, there is a need for light authentication mechanisms. This research presents a new lightweight authentication protocol that will integrate well with the IoT devices that has limited resources. To provide the security the given protocol uses ECC for key exchange and symmetric encryption for the actual data transfer process. The effectiveness of the proposed protocol is tested with actual sensor data snippets collected from the Intel Berkeley Research Lab dataset, mimicking an IoT network with a total of 100 nodes. The performance evaluation of the proposed scheme shows enhancement of 20% of energy consumption, 12% of the global authentication time, 31% of the communication overheads and memory usage comparatively to a number of existing methods. The current protocol is very effective, efficient and resilient to common security threats and thus effective when implemented in limited IoT systems. Future work will involve expanding on the content and adding more improvements as well as incorporating new features which can be used to improve the security and performance of a system.