International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR)
Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) based services are getting a widespread expansion in all
the directions and dimensions of the 21st century. The IoT based deployment involves
an internet-connected sensor, mobiles, laptops, and other networking and computing de-
vices. In most IoT based applications, the sensor collects the data and communicates
it to the end-user via gateway device or fog device over a precarious internet channel.
The attacker can use this open channel to capture the sensing device or the gateway
device to collect the IoT data or control the IoT system. For a long time, numerous
researchers are working towards designing the authentication mechanism for the sen-
sor network to achieve reliable and computationally feasible security. For the resource
constraint environment of the IoT, it is essential to design reliable, ecient, and secure
authentication protocol. In this paper, we propose a novel approach of authentication in
the IoT paradigm called a Level-Dependent Authentication(LDA). In the LDA protocol,
we propose a security reliable and resource ecient key sharing mechanism in which users
at level li can communicate with the sensor at level lj if and only if the level of user in
the organizational hierarchy is lower or equal to the level of sensor deployment. We pro-
vide a security analysis for the proposed LDA protocol using random oracle based games
& widely accepted AVISPA tools. We prove mutual authentication for the proposed
protocol using BAN logic. In this paper, we also discuss a comparative analysis of the
proposed protocol with other existing IoT authentication systems based on communica-
tion cost, computation cost, and security index. We provide an implementation for the
proposed protocol using a globally adopted IoT protocol called MQTT protocol. Finally,
we present the collected data related to the networking parameters like throughput and
round trip delay