LCDMA: Lightweight Cross-Domain Mutual Identity Authentication Scheme for Internet of Things

With the widespread popularity of mobile terminals in the Internet of Things (IoT), the demand for cross-domain access of mobile terminals between different regions has also increased significantly. The nature of wireless communication media makes mobile terminals vulnerable to security threats in cross-domain access. Identity authentication is a prerequisite for secure data transmission in the cross-domain, and it is also the first step to guarantee the credibility of data sources. Most existing authentication schemes are based on bilinear pairing or public-key encryption and decryption with high computation overhead, which are not suitable for the resource-limited mobile IoT terminals. Moreover, these schemes have some security drawbacks and cannot meet the security requirements of cross-domain access. In this article, we propose a lightweight cross-domain mutual identity authentication (LCDMA) for the mobile IoT environment. LCDMA uses a symmetric polynomial instead of high-complexity bilinear pairing in the traditional schemes. We theoretically analyze the security performance under the random oracle model. Our results show that LCDMA not only resists common attacks but also preserves secure traceability while guaranteeing anonymity. Performance evaluation further demonstrates that our scheme has better performance in terms of computation and communication overhead, compared with other existing representative schemes.