Lightweight Flexible Group Authentication Utilizing Historical Collaboration Process Information

Existing device authentication techniques may suffer from heavy communication, computation, and storage overhead for identifying a growing number of devices in collaborations. This paper proposes a novel group authentication (GA) method for decentralized edge collaboration by exploiting the historical collaboration process information, i.e., the distributed learning parameters and results from the previous round of collaboration. Two strategies are developed to generate tokens locally at the edge devices' side for mutual authentication, named random token generation (R-TG) and privacy-preserving token generation (PP-TG). Specifically, the R-TG strategy randomly selects several historical learning parameters as tokens, while the PP-TG strategy designs a one-way function to defend against privacy leakage by concealing the historical information. A GA protocol is proposed, where each device simultaneously authenticates the others in the same group by repeating the learning process using their tokens. If the process converges to an expected result, all the devices are authenticated as legitimate group members at once. The proposed scheme provides a lightweight flexible solution without pre-generating and distributing any keys/secrets operating on top of a standardized security protocol, and protects the collaboration continuously. The simulation results demonstrate the viability of our scheme and its superior performance compared to several benchmark schemes.