RePUF-IoT: Reconfigurable PUF-Based Authentication Protocol for IoT-Driven Healthcare Systems

Recently, NIST has standardized various security algorithms to provide confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity in resource-limited IoT devices. These algorithms are based on lightweight cryptography, which requires fewer resources to maintain security in IoT environments with constrained resources. By employing these algorithms, lightweight security mechanisms can be designed to meet security requirements efficiently. Authentication techniques are fundamental for secure communication in resource-limited IoT environments. However, most existing authentication protocols rely on conventional asymmetric and symmetric cryptographic primitives, which demand high computational resources from IoT devices, leading to communication delays in latency-sensitive applications. This paper proposes an authentication protocol called RePUF-IoT, utilizing the TinyJAMBU authenticated encryption scheme and reconfigurable PUF and hashing functions for secure access to medical data stored on a healthcare server. One-time PUF enables RePUF-IoT to achieve robust resilience against machine learning and modeling attacks. RePUF-IoT establishes a secure communication channel between entities in the healthcare system. Its resilience against various security attacks is validated through both formal and informal security analyses. Additionally, performance evaluations show that RePUF-IoT enhances security while reducing communication overhead by 32%–64 and time required for execution by 88%–94%.