A Lightweight Authentication Method in Perception Layer of IoT Through Digital Watermarking

Introduction of IoT (Internet of Things) has enjoyed vigorous support from governments and research institutions around the world, and remarkable achievements have been obtained till date. IoT systems collect the voluminous amount of data in real time from hospitals, battlefield and daily living environment which is related to privacy and security of people. So, securing collected sensitive data is one of the major challenges in the development of IoT systems. Authenticating the source of collected data is utmost important because the adversary may act as a source which may lead to a breach in security and privacy of people using the IoT network. IoT devices are resource scarce so lightweight methods for network security and privacy need to develop to achieve future development goals. In this paper, a novel lightweight node to node authentication scheme based on watermark is proposed to solve the contradiction between the security and restricted resources of perception layer. To improve the security, Proposed scheme usage node identity and the number of neighbours as input to generate the watermark and use the watermark to calculate the embedding positions which makes node authentication based on temporal dynamics of sensing network. The generated watermark is embedded in fixed size message digest generated using the variable message as input into a low-cost one-way hashing algorithm LOCHA. The embedded bits of watermark extracted at the receiving node and matched to check the authenticity of the sender node. The security analysis and simulations of the proposed scheme show that it can be a good candidate to ensure the authentication of the resource constraint devices which are integral part of Internet of Things at low cost.