Lightweight Hardware Based Secure Authentication Scheme for Fog Computing

Abstract

Fog computing is a new paradigm that extends cloud computing to the network edges. As data processing, communications, and control are performed more closely to the end-user devices in fog computing, chances for the attackers to gain unauthorized accesses to sensitive data have been greatly increased. In this paper, we propose a new resource-efficient physical unclonable function (PUF) based authentication scheme to protect the security and privacy of the confidential information in edge devices. Unlike other PUF based lightweight authentication schemes, our proposed method remarkably increases the machine learning attack time without requiring a server to store a large amount of challenge response pairs (CRPs). Besides, a new strong PUF with feedback loop is employed in our scheme to further resist the machine learning attacks that have demonstrated efficacy in compromising strong PUFs. Our proof-of-concept implementation shows that the proposed scheme is suitable for resource-constrained end-user devices in terms of memory, computation, and security.