A replay-attack resistant Authentication Scheme for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the current technological revolution which can upgrade the current Internet environment into a more pervasive and ubiquitous world. Due to the distributed nature and the limited hardware capabilities of IoT, a lightweight authentication scheme is necessary. A certain number of lightweight user authentication schemes suit to the IoT environment had been proposed in recent years. However, these schemes mostly use the timestamp mechanism to resist the replay attack which is infeasible in IoT environment. In this paper, we propose a user authentication scheme based on improved challenge-response mechanism to resist replay attack in which an efficient mutual user authentication and a secure session key agreement are achieved. The performance and security analysis shows that our proposed scheme has a higher security level and is still highly efficient.