A Time-Bound Continuous Authentication Protocol for Mesh Networking

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel lightweight authentication protocol for fast and efficient continuous authentication of constrained Internet of Things (IoT) mesh network devices. An initial static authentication takes place at the beginning of a session, during which the secret is securely shared between two parties. Once the session is established, the continuous authentication scheme generates time-bound tokens using the shared secret, a time-varying component, and a random value. These are used to verify the identity of the connected device in fixed time intervals. These time-bound tokens, which only remain valid for a predetermined time frame and ensure the continuity aspect of the mechanism, can be linked back to the original secret at the server for verification. Therefore, lightweight continuous authentication is achieved using only a few low complexity cryptographic operations, like hash and MAC, without the need to perform costly cryptographic operations. In case of failure, the node is temporarily blocked for an exponential function period of past occurrences of failure. Performance evaluation over a mesh routing protocol shows that our proposal fulfills lightweight and low bandwidth constraining requirements while satisfying the security requirements of an authentication scheme.