A Flexible and Lightweight Group Authentication Scheme

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight, energy-efficient group authentication scheme for IoT networks that enhances security and scalability, suitable for future 6G environments and supporting both centralized and decentralized scenarios.

Contribution

It presents a novel group authentication scheme that reduces energy consumption by 80%, improves security against attacks, and addresses key management in mMTC environments.

Findings

Achieves 80% energy savings compared to existing solutions

Resistant to replay and man-in-the-middle attacks

Applicable to both centralized and decentralized scenarios

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) networks are becoming a part of our daily lives, as the number of IoT devices around us are surging. The authentication of millions of connected things and the distribution and management of secret keys between these devices pose challenging research problems. Current one-to-one authentication schemes do not take the resource limitations of IoT devices into consideration. Nor do they address the scalability problem of massive machine type communication (mMTC) networks. Group authentication schemes (GAS), on the other hand, have emerged as novel approaches for many-to-many authentication problems. They can be used to simultaneously authenticate numerous resource-constrained devices. However, existing GAS are not energy efficient, and they do not provide enough security for widespread use. In this paper, we propose a lightweight GAS that significantly reduces energy consumption on devices, providing almost 80% energy savings when compared to the state-of-the-art solutions. Our approach is also resistant to the replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. The proposed approach also includes a solution for key agreement and key distribution problems in mMTC environments. Moreover, this approach can be used in both centralized and decentralized group authentication scenarios. The proposed approach has the potential to address the fast authentication requirements of the envisioned agile 6G networks, supported through aerial networking nodes.