Lightweight Mutual Authentication between IoT Devices using One-way Accumulator

The Internet of Things (IoT) is integral to modern life, connecting diverse devices that collect and transfer data to central servers or the cloud. IoT devices are resource-constrained in nature and not equipped with adequate in-built security. This raises significant concerns regarding data security and integrity. Thus, secure and lightweight authentication schemes are of utmost need. Existing lightweight authentication schemes often depend on persistent connectivity with a central server and yield significant computational and communication overhead during authentication processes. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a lightweight mutual authentication scheme for IoT devices, leveraging a one-way accumulator while minimizing the dependency on a centralized entity. This cryptographic primitive enables the combination of multiple values into a single, difficult-to-reverse accumulated value, facilitating secure identity verification between nodes. To validate the proposed scheme, we conduct formal security analysis using the ProVerif tool. Additionally, we present a simulation-based comparative analysis using the Cooja IoT network simulator, highlighting the efficiency of our approach over existing benchmark authentication protocols in IoT environments.