Strong-PUF-Based Identity Authentication Scheme Leveraging Homomorphic Encryption

Internet of Things (IoT) nodes are susceptible to physical attacks, and public channels can leak sensitive information. Identity authentication based on Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) can enhance security, but the leakage of ChallengeResponse Pairs (CRPs) may pose security risks. This paper proposes an identity authentication scheme based on elliptic curve homomorphic encryption, achieving mutual authentication between IoT nodes and servers while ensuring the secure storage of CRPs. PUFs provide physically secure identity identifiers for IoT nodes, and homomorphic encryption ensures the secure storage and reconstruction of CRPs. Security analysis demonstrates that the scheme effectively resists physical attacks, replay attacks, and impersonation attacks while avoiding single points of failure. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme based on elliptic curve homomorphic encryption is superior to the traditional Paillier algorithm in terms of encryption, decryption efficiency and storage consumption, and is more suitable for the identity authentication scenario based on strong PUFs.