Enhanced Authentication Mechanism using Virtual Middlebox for IoT Devices

With the proliferation of IoT (Internet of Things) devices, security issues have become increasingly serious. A key security issue is that a large amount of IoT devices are authenticated via weak passwords for the convenience of management. Due to the large quantity of IoT devices, it is tough to use complex passwords or change passwords regularly. To this end, we propose an authentication mechanism employing virtual middle boxes to monitor the access information of physical devices and then send them to an authentication server for enhanced authentication combining OAuth with CoAP. The evaluation results show that our approach can effectively identify the device access including weak passwords and improve device authentication security without changing the original services of the IoT devices.