Lightweight and Anonymous Mutual Authentication Protocol for Edge IoT Nodes with Physical Unclonable Function

Internet of Things (IoT) has been widely used in many fields, bringing great convenience to people’s traditional work and life. IoT generates tremendous amounts of data at the edge of network. However, the security of data transmission is facing severe challenges. In particular, edge IoT nodes cannot run complex encryption operations due to their limited computing and storage resources. Therefore, edge IoT nodes are more susceptible to various security attacks. To this end, a lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement protocol is proposed to achieve the security of IoT nodes’ communication. The protocol uses the reverse fuzzy extractor to acclimatize to the noisy environment and introduces the supplementary subprotocol to enhance resistance to the desynchronization attack. It uses only lightweight cryptographic operations, such as hash function, XORs, and PUF. It only stores one pseudo-identity. The protocol is proven to be secure by rigid security analysis based on improved BAN logic. Performance analysis shows the proposed protocol has more comprehensive functions and incurs lower computation and communication cost when compared with similar protocols.