A Provably Secure Authentication Protocol Based on PUF and ECC for IoT Cloud‐Edge Environments

The Internet of Things (IoT) cloud model provides an efficient scheme for rapid collection, storage, processing, and analysis of massive node data, and its application has gradually expanded to key areas such as healthcare and transportation. However, the security issues of open channel transmission in IoT still persist. Researchers have proposed a lot of solutions, but the forward secrecy, session key security, and other aspects have not been effectively solved. This paper proposes a provably secure authenticated key agreement scheme, which constructs a secure channel between endpoint, gateway, and cloud server (CS). Compared with other schemes, this scheme has three characteristics: (1) According to the different computing resources of devices, gateways and CSs, a segmented differential authentication and secret key negotiation protocol is designed by using cryptographic primitives with different computing overheads; (2) after verification with the ProVerif tool, rigorous proof with the real‐or‐random (ROR) model, and informal analysis, the protocol has been proven to be secure, effectively guarding against typical threats; and (3) compared with the five most recent schemes, it can be seen that the protocol is at least 35% superior to other schemes in endpoint computational overhead, and it meets 10 security objectives, making it very suitable for application scenarios where endpoint resources are limited.