Man-in-the-Middle Attack Mitigation in IoT Sensors with Hash Based Multidimensional Lamport Digital Signature

Device authentication is a serious security risk for the Internet of Things (IoT). As a result, the privacy and security of IoT sensors are the most important problems at this time. Cyber-attacks on IoT devices take several forms. A man-in-the-middle attack is a sort of cyber threat in which a malicious third party infiltrates an online conversation between two users and remains undetected by both parties. Numerous techniques have been developed by security researchers to protect IoT devices from these types of cyber-attacks. A Digital Signature (DS) method is one of the popular man-in-the-middle attack prevention systems. The digital signature verifies the message’s trustworthiness and establishes the sender’s authenticity through the use of asymmetric key pairs (public and private). This research proposed the modified Lamport digital signature scheme, as well as how it can be exploited via a man-in-the-middle attack. The proposed digital signature permits the secure encryption of an endless number of messages (multi dimensional) using a hash-based private key while preserving a shorter signature. Additionally, it demonstrates how the proposed Lamport digital signature mitigates man-in-the-middle attack. Finally, a security analysis demonstrated the proposed approaches’ efficacy. Security analysis has established that the suggested solution is more effective at containing malicious activity than existing methods.