A PUF-Based Lightweight Mutual Authentication Scheme for IoT Devices

Internet of Things (IoT) devices improve the quality of human life due to its large number of applications in the fields of smart home, smart education and smart medical care. However, the increasing security and privacy issues affect the further application of IoT. The lightweight and high-level security requirements of IoT networks cannot be fulfilled with some existing solutions simultaneously. For this reason, we propose a lightweight PUF-based mutual authentication protocol for IoT devices. The protocol only uses a small number of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), hash functions and XOR operations. A security mechanism has been designed based on the exchangeability and unclonability of Barrel Shifter PUF (BS-PUF) which can achieve secure anonymous authentication and challenge update. Rigorous security proofs show the protocol meets all types of security requirements. The protocol has lower computation and communication cost compared with similar protocols.