A Lightweight Hash-Chain-Based Multi-Node Mutual Authentication Algorithm for IoT Networks

As an emerging technology, IoT is rapidly revolutionizing the global communication network with billions of new devices deployed and connected with each other. Many of these devices collect and transfer a large amount of sensitive or mission critical data, making security a top priority. Compared to traditional Internet, IoT networks often operate in open and harsh environment, and may experience frequent delays, traffic loss and attacks; Meanwhile, IoT devices are often severally constrained in computational power, storage space, network bandwidth, and power supply, which prevent them from deploying traditional security schemes. Authentication is an important security mechanism that can be used to identify devices or users. Due to resource constrains of IoT networks, it is highly desirable for the authentication scheme to be lightweight while also being highly effective. In this paper, we developed and evaluated a hash-chain-based multi-node mutual authentication algorithm. Nodes on a network all share a common secret key and broadcast to other nodes in range. Each node may also add to the hash chain and rebroadcast, which will be used to authenticate all nodes in the network. This algorithm has a linear running time and complexity of O(n), a significant improvement from the O(n(2)) running time and complexity of the traditional pairwise multi-node mutual authentication.