With the increased number and reduced cost of smart devices, Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as smart home (SHome) are increasingly popular. Owing to the characteristics of IoT environments such as resource constrained devices, existing authentication solutions may not be suitable to secure these environments. As a result, a number of authentication solutions specifically designed for IoT environments have been proposed. This paper provides a critical analysis of existing authentication solutions. The major contributions of the paper are as follows. First, it presents a generic model derived from an SHome use-case scenario. Secondly, based on the model, it performs a threat analysis to identify possible means of attacks. The analysis leads to the specification of a set of desirable security requirements for the design of authentication solutions for SHome. Thirdly, based on the requirements, existing authentication solutions are analysed and some ideas for achieving effective and efficient authentication in IoT environments are proposed.

Existing authentication solutions proposed for Internet of Things (IoT) provide a single Level of Assurance (LoA) regardless of the sensitivity levels of the resources or interactions between IoT devices being protected. For effective (with adequate level of protection) and efficient (with as low overhead costs as possible) protections, it may be desirable to tailor the protection level in response to the sensitivity level of the resources, as a stronger protection level typically imposes a higher level of overhead costs. In this paper, we investigate how to facilitate multi-LoA authentication for IoT by proposing a multi-factor multi-level and interaction based (M2I) authentication framework. The framework implements LoA linked and interaction based authentication. Two interaction modes, P2P (Peer-to-Peer) and O2M (One-to-Many), are investigated via the design of two corresponding protocols. Evaluation results show that adopting the O2M interaction mode in authentication in the related use-case scenarios can cut communication cost significantly; compared with that of the Kerberos protocol, the O2M protocol reduces the communication cost by 42%∼45%. The protocols are also more efficient. The P2P and O2M protocol, respectively, reduce the computational cost by 70%∼72% and 81%∼82%, in comparison with that of Kerberos. The evaluation results also show that the two-factor authentication option costs twice as much as that of the one-factor option.INDEX TERMS Internet of Things (IoT), level of assurance (LoA), interaction based authentication, multilevel authentication, re-authentication.

The popularity of online teaching has increased in the last decade, especially in the last two years, where many institutions were forced to close their campuses due to Covid-19 restrictions. Although online teaching may provide an easy alternative to on-campus teaching, it often introduces a number of challenges. One of the major challenges is the lack of student engagement. Teachers typically use student engagement as an indicator to identify student strengths and weaknesses to tailor their teaching and delivery methods to meet student needs. Hence, the success of the learning process often relies on student engagement. Educational games are typically used in schools, especially during early years, to enhance student engagement. However, they are rarely used in universities as the games are typically designed for children. Recently, a number of advanced educational video games, such as Microsoft Minecraft Education Edition (MC:EE), have been released. Unlike traditional educational games, designed for children, these games can be used in universities. To provide insight into how educational video games can be used in a university setting, we ran an experiment on a group of university students to teach them fundamental programming concepts using Python programming language. In this experiment, MC:EE was used as the main delivery tool. The feedback received after the experiment was mainly positive. Based on the feedback and experimental results, educational video games can enhance student engagement during online lessons.