A Scalable and Lightweight Authentication Architecture for the Internet of Things (IoT) in Smart Home Applications

In the evolving landscape of smart home applications, ensuring robust and efficient authentication within the Internet of Things (IoT) environments is paramount. This paper presents a scalable, lightweight authentication architecture for IoT-driven smart homes. The proposed architecture, drawing inspiration from cloud computing mechanisms, introduces a trusted, smart home agent, integrating the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) model to facilitate efficient and secure data exchange within smart homes. Our solution addresses the challenges of minimal computation and processing overheads, essential in resource-constrained IoT devices, and focuses on device-level authentication to reduce computational costs. A comparative analysis with existing models demonstrates the superiority of our architecture in terms of computational efficiency, making it an ideal candidate for scalable deployments. The architecture successfully navigates the complexities of ensuring secure communication among autonomous IoT devices, balancing the dual needs of computational efficiency and robust security, thereby promising resilience against common security threats in the smart home ecosystem.