Paper 2022/979

Secure and Lightweight User Authentication Scheme for Cloud-Aided Internet of Things

Abstract

Cloud-aided Internet of Things (IoT) overcomes the resource-constrained nature of the traditional IoT and develops rapidly. In a cloud-aided IoT system, users can remotely control the IoT devices or send specific instructions to them. In this case, if the user identity is not verified, adversaries can send fake and malicious instructions to the IoT devices, thereby compromising the security of the entire system. Thus, an authentication mechanism is indispensable to ensure security. In a cloud-aided IoT system, a gateway may connect to mass IoT devices with the exponential growth of interconnected devices. The efficiency of authentication schemes is easily affected by the computing capability of the gateway. Recently, several schemes are designed for cloud-aided IoT, but they all have security flaws. Therefore, we take a typical scheme (presented at IEEE TDSC 2020) as an example to capture the common weaknesses and design challenges of user authentication schemes for cloud-aided IoT systems. Then, we propose a new secure user authentication scheme with lightweight computation on gateways. The proposed scheme provides secure access between the remote user and IoT devices with many ideal attributions, such as forward secrecy and multi-factor security. Meanwhile, the security of this scheme is proved under the random oracle model, heuristic analysis, the ProVerif tool and BAN logic. Finally, we compare the proposed scheme with eleven state-of-the-art schemes in security and performance. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves all listed twelve security requirements with minimum computation and storage costs on gateways.