The Meeting of Acquaintances: A Cost-efficient Authentication Scheme for Light-weight Objects with Transient Trust Level and Plurality Approach

TL;DR

This paper proposes a lightweight, cost-efficient authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks that reduces reliance on central authorities, enhances security for transient devices, and optimizes communication costs in resource-constrained IoT environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel authentication mechanism that eliminates the need for a nearby central authority, utilizing past interactions for key management and adjustable thresholds for flexible security.

Findings

Communication cost reduced by less than 2000 bits compared to previous schemes

Enhanced flexibility in authenticating unknown devices

Lower energy consumption and resource usage in simulations

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks consist of a large number of distributed sensor nodes so that potential risks are becoming more and more unpredictable. The new entrants pose the potential risks when they move into the secure zone. To build a door wall that provides safe and secured for the system, many recent research works applied the initial authentication process. However, the majority of the previous articles only focused on the Central Authority (CA) since this leads to an increase in the computation cost and energy consumption for the specific cases on the Internet of Things (IoT). Hence, in this article, we will lessen the importance of these third parties through proposing an enhanced authentication mechanism that includes key management and evaluation based on the past interactions to assist the objects joining a secured area without any nearby CA. We refer to a mobility dataset from CRAWDAD collected at the University Politehnica of Bucharest and rebuild into a new random dataset larger than the old one. The new one is an input for a simulated authenticating algorithm to observe the communication cost and resource usage of devices. Our proposal helps the authenticating flexible, being strict with unknown devices into the secured zone. The threshold of maximum friends can modify based on the optimization of the symmetric-key algorithm to diminish communication costs (our experimental results compare to previous schemes less than 2000 bits) and raise flexibility in resource-constrained environments.