A Robust, Low-Cost and Secure Authentication Scheme for IoT Applications

Abstract

The edge devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures are increasingly susceptible to piracy. These pirated edge devices pose a serious threat to security, as an adversary can get access to the private network through these non-authentic devices. It is necessary to authenticate an edge device over an unsecured channel to safeguard the network from being infiltrated through these fake devices. The implementation of security features demands extensive computational power and a large hardware/software overhead, both of which are difficult to satisfy because of inherent resource limitation in the IoT edge devices. This paper presents a low-cost authentication protocol for IoT edge devices that exploits power-up states of built-in SRAM for device fingerprint generations. Unclonable ID generated from the on-chip SRAM could be unreliable, and to circumvent this issue, we propose a novel ID matching scheme that alleviates the need for enhancing the reliability of the IDs generated from on-chip SRAMs. Security and different attack analysis show that the probability of impersonating an edge device by an adversary is insignificant. The protocol is implemented using a commercial microcontroller, which requires a small code overhead. However, no modification of device hardware is necessary.

Private and consortium blockchain-based authentication protocol for IoT devices using PUF

“…The authentication protocols present in the literature can be categorized as PUF based [15]- [25], blockchain based [26]- [32], and PUF and blockchain based [33]- [48] according to the state-of-the-art. In this section, only PUF and blockchain based authentication protocols are discussed which are undeniably robust, immutable and secured in terms of privacy, integrity, and confidentiality of both the device and data.…”

“…which are generated using ID extraction algorithm based on SRAM PUF [15]. After the successful registration of devices, the consortium blockchain gives a corresponding transaction hash (TX) through which the same Ri can be relocated in the consortium blockchain during the authentication phase.…”

“…The ID extraction algorithm using SRAM PUF [15] is used to generate unique device ID i.e., PUFKeyE and the random number generator is used to generate secret key K as secret credentials of the IoD. The same device ID will be regenerated when required and verified using a repeated ID matching technique.In order to generate a unique and costeffective unclonable device ID for each IoT device, an on-chip SRAM present in the IoT device can be used.…”

“…Thus, an error correction code may not be a feasible option for resource-constrained IoT devices. Instead, a repeated ID matching technique [15] can be used to avoid the instability of SRAM which does not require much space and computation.…”

Neuron-PUF: Physical Unclonable Function Based on a Single Spiking Neuron

“…In addition, a PUF can be used in the key management scheme of chip locking techniques [10]- [13]. In a resourceconstrained smart IoT edge device, a PUF can be used for lightweight low-cost authentication protocols [14], [15].…”