A Novel Lightweight Group Authentication Protocol for Internet of Things

The rapid proliferation of embedded devices has driven the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) across various sectors. However, this growth has exposed a vulnerability, especially in smart homes, where attackers attempt to exploit security weaknesses. Furthermore, many existing user authentication methods in the literature come with added computational complexity and require enhancements to withstand targeted attacks on smart homes. In this work, we develop a novel lightweight authentication protocol designed to enhance the security of IoT applications. The lightweight nature of our solution is suitable for deployment on heterogeneous and resource-constrained IoT devices. Besides, we leverage Shamir's Secret Sharing to establish mutual authentication among the participating entities. We validate the security of the proposed protocol using the Scyther protocol verification tool and prototype it on a Raspberry Pi to analyze the power consumption. Our study reveals that the proposed protocol outperforms existing schemes by consuming 0.52 seconds on average, 23.88% of CPU resources, and 367 MB of memory.