AuthIoT 2018 - 2019 Authentication in IoT

Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing a worldwide growth. Not only classical computing and communication devices are connected, but also a whole range of other gadgets that are used in our daily life, such as thermostats, light switches, door locks, refrigerators, etc. Typically, these devices are characterized by a very small amount of memory and computational power. The communication between these devices over the Internet and on local networks needs to be secured to gain trust and acceptance and to avoid direct physical harm to humans, even loss of life. By secure communication, we mainly consider the security features of confidentiality, integrity of the transmitted messages, and authentication of the sending and receiving devices.
Confidentiality and integrity are well studied security features and can be rather easily realized through lightweight symmetric primitives after the establishment of a secret shared key. However, in order to establish such secret shared key, authentication of the devices, being the verification of the identities while sending and receiving messages, is required. Achieving authentication in a robust way is much harder.
We distinguish authentication mechanisms at different levels, going from user, device to network. Each level has its own particularities, resulting in different types of solutions to offer efficient authentication. For instance, at the user level, biometrics play a very important role to be integrated in the authentication schemes. For the device, variants such as physical unclonable functions, but also tamper resistant memory are important aspects to be taken into account. Finally, at the network level, different architectures (proxy, cloud, blockchain based) and communication technologies (5G, BLE, Zigbee, NFC, etc.) should be considered.
One common feature for all of the proposed solutions is efficiency, both from a communication as computation point of view. Additional security features, such as anonymity, unforgeability and non repudiation, are also in some cases required. As a consequence, mechanisms to be considered will be based on symmetric key (aiming for efficiency) and public key cryptography (aiming for additional security features).
Besides giving an overview of the different techniques to be applied to offer authentication, also different specific use cases will be covered, each representing a particular architecture and corresponding requirements with respect to security features and efficiency. In particular, applications in the domains of smart homes, smart cities, smart grids, ambient assisted living, vehicle to vehicle networks, smart card based scenarios, etc will be envisioned.