Lightweight Anonymous Key Sharing Authentication Protocol for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices

The Internet of Things (IoT), as a new type of communication network, is involved in developing and applying secure transmission and storing a large amount of sensitive information. Due to the IoT devices' constrained resources, high connection costs, sluggish transmission speeds, and the inapplicability of security fundamentals like public key methods and digital signatures for simple device authentication, this paper presents a lightweight anonymous key-sharing authentication protocol for IoT devices. The protocol utilizes the tamper-resistant and anti-cloning properties of Hardware Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) to generate shared keys. In addition, it incorporates security primitives such as the MASK algorithm and Hash functions. The security analysis and verification using Ban logic and the proper tool ProVerif demonstrate that the protocol can defend against attacks such as man-in-the-middle, de-synchronization, impersonation, and modeling attacks. Compared with other protocols, this protocol exhibits the characteristics of low computational cost, minimal communication overhead and storage capacity, and high-security performance, making it suitable for secure communication and transmission in resource-constrained devices.