A Computationally Intelligent Hierarchical Authentication and Key Establishment Framework for the Internet of Things

Our high expectations for the Internet of Things (IoT) and how it will positively influence our lifestyles depend on a secure and trusted implementation of it, especially in sensitive sectors such as health and finance. IoT platforms and solutions must provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) in a secure and transparent way. Due to the extremely large scales of IoT, traditional centralized solutions for security provisioning cannot be employed in their original form. This article discusses the authentication problem in IoT, which is fundamental to providing CIA. We propose a hierarchical security architecture for this problem and focus on computationally lightweight authentication protocols that can intelligently distribute the computational load across multiple levels and effectively push the load toward upper layers.