With the development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, massive heterogeneous equipment involving all walks of life has been connected to networks. However, many current authentication methods have poor robustness and cannot ensure the safety of access equipment due to the complexity and uncertainty of the network environment. To deal with this problem, a hierarchical authentication system was proposed in this paper. First, an equipment identification method (EIM), using stack denoising autoencoders (SDAs), is developed to weaken the uncertainty to recognize the type of access equipment. Second, an equipment authentication method (EAM), based on the identification result and similarity theory, is designed to improve the verification accuracy to guarantee the credibility of access equipment. Third, the proposed hierarchical authentication system was tested in a real access platform. The experimental results demonstrated the satisfactory performance of this proposed hierarchical authentication system.

Due to the emergence of various new technologies, Internet of things (IoT) is gradually becoming one of the most valued technologies at present. The IoT makes our life more and more convenient through the interconnection of everything, but the IoT brings many advantages and also raises some security issues, such as the IoT perception layer as the main means of sensing data delivery, due to the limited resources of sensing nodes and their vulnerability, the diversity of sensing data, and the heterogeneity of the sensing network, making the IoT perception layer more vulnerable to various malicious attacks. Therefore, guaranteeing the trustworthy source of sensing data is the cornerstone to guarantee the secure operation of the sensing layer. In this paper, we investigate the remote proof scheme applicable to the IoT perception layer and propose a remote attestation mechanism using a threshold ring signature for a perception layer of distributed networking, which realizes the trusted proof of a data source and thus can effectively discern the trusted status of the data source, and prove that the proposed scheme in this paper outperforms other remote proof schemes through efficiency analysis and verify the correctness as well as the effectiveness of the scheme in this paper.