Providing a Lightweight Message Authentication Scheme for IoT Environment

Many devices in IoT have limited resources and use the battery. These embedded devices cannot usually use the high-level protocols; they use binary protocols such as lightweight MQTT instead. MQTT protocol is a pub/sub model-based protocol designed for devices with limited resources. Since these devices are connected directly to the Internet, they are vulnerable to DoS attacks which lead to quick battery-drain. Therefore, authentication must be done in an efficient way, and battery, memory and limiting computing power of the device must be considered. In this paper, a lightweight mechanism is proposed for message authentication. Its main idea is the message lightweight authentication in MQTT protocol without having to send on-line key through scenario of creation and management of the proposed key. In this way, only the authenticated messages are accepted and processing of invalid useless messages is prevented leading to save the energy. Security analysis of proposed mechanism has been done by ProVerif which is a perfect tool for verifying the security features of cryptographic algorithms. The results of communication overheads indicated that the proposed mechanism is a lightweight design that provides security and authentication in MQTT protocol.

Keywords:

Internet of Things , MQTT Protocol , Constrained Device , SPEKE Authentication , lightweight cryptography