A Light-Weight Mutual Authentication Protocol for IoT Systems

One of the most important and critical requirements for Internet-of-Things (IoT) based systems is security under limited resources. The simple and low-cost nature of many IoT devices makes them a prime target for physical, side-channel, and cloning attacks. To address this issue, this paper presents an efficient protocol for mutual authentication in IoT systems. The proposed protocol uses a Physical Unclonable Function to provide the desired security characteristics. An analysis of the protocol shows that it is not only robust against different kind of attacks, but also very efficient in terms of memory, computations, energy, and communication overhead.