Paper 2025/1073

LAPWN: A Lightweight User–Server Authentication Protocol for Wireless Networks

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is composed of interconnected devices that exchange data over a network, enabling applications in healthcare, transportation, and smart environments. As IoT ecosystems expand, ensuring security and privacy remains a critical challenge. Many IoT devices rely on wireless networks for data transmission, making them vulnerable to eavesdropping, tracking, and tampering. This highlights the need for robust authentication mechanisms. To address these concerns, numerous authentication protocols have been proposed. However, many fail to ensure adequate security against both passive and active attacks. In this research, we introduce LAPWN, a lightweight protocol for user–server communication, specifically designed for constrained environments, ensuring a balance between security and efficiency. The proposed protocol is implemented as a fully functional Python application, demonstrating its practical usability and evaluating its efficiency in real-world scenarios. To validate its security, we performboth informal and formal analyses, utilizing Scyther, ProVerif, and the Real-or-Random (RoR) model. The results confirm that LAPWN provides a secure, lightweight, and efficient authentication solution with low computational and communication overhead. Furthermore, performance evaluations show that it surpasses existing authentication protocols, making it a highly effective solution for secure user–server interactions in constrained environments.