Merkle hash tree improved strongly constrained discrete hashing function-based authentication scheme for enabling security for smart home IoT applications

In the modern era, smart home technology is considered as the most growing application of Internet of Things (IoT) as they facilitate users for control home devices remotely. Anonymous and efficient authentication approaches in smart home environments are essential for attaining secure communication as the home and user communication channel is highly vulnerable and insecure. In this paper, Merkle Hash Tree and Strongly Constrained Discrete Hashing Function-based Authentication (MHS-SCDHF-AS) that integrates the transaction history and physical context awareness is proposed for enabling security for Smart Home IoT applications. This MHS-SCDHF-AS prevents the problem of clock synchronization and does not utilize a verification table both during the authentication process. This Strongly Constrained Discrete Hashing Functionis a supervised hashing method which overcomes the limitations of large quantization errors and suboptimal binary codes. It is also capable of learning binary codes and significant in resisting the transmission loss as each information used for verification contains its authentication data in itself. The computation cost and communication cost of the proposed MHS-SCDHF-AS is identified to be lesser than the benchmarked authentication schemes considered for investigation. The formal, informal and model checking-based security investigation of the proposed MHS-SCDHF-AS is also confirmed to be superior over the baseline authentication schemes used for smart home environments.