A secure mutual authentication protocol for IoT environment

Rapid development in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) has made it possible to connect many embedded devices to the internet for the sharing of data. Since, the embedded device has limited storage, power, and computational ability, an integration of embedded devices with the large pool of resource such as cloud is required. This integration of technologies is expected to provide extraordinary growth in current and future promising applications of IoT. In this context, the security issues such as authentication and data privacy of devices are major issues of concern. The research motivation of the present work is to propose a secure mutual authentication protocol for IoT and cloud servers based on elliptic curve cryptography. In this work, the security properties of the proposed protocol have been formally verified by using Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tools and informally analyzed and compared with the related protocols in terms of various security attributes such as device privacy, impersonation attack, replay attack, password guessing attack, mutual authentication and so on. Moreover, the performance of the proposed protocol has also been evaluated in terms of computational, communication, storage overhead and total computational time. The security and performance analyses found the supremacy of the proposed protocol over the other related protocols.