UAP: A unified authentication platform for IoT environment

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network that encompasses every physical object being connected to the Internet. The IoT objects face several issues and challenges due to the large number and the heterogeneity of the interconnected devices. Many researchers have shown that security is among the most important challenges that the IoT faces. Security requirements such as confidentiality, integrity and authentication are fundamental, but the last one is considered as the cornerstone security service. This paper considers authentication as its core and presents an extensive review of the already proposed authentication solutions for the IoT. Subsequently, it investigates new authentication requirements and challenges introduced in the context of the embedded IoT devices. Furthermore, it unveils the proposed authentication platform. The platform is based on a reduced signature generated on a distributed way from the devices’ personal keys. Also, it allows a receiving entity to verify the identity of the sender entity and obliges the sender not to deny the emission action. The analysis and simulation comparison between the literature and the proposed solution is presented. The analysis and simulation study provide that the proposed platform respects the requirements of any IoT device and is recommended for low power IoT devices. In the sequel, simulation results validate the analytical study and shows that the proposal is recommended for any IoT embedded device. For instance, the average energy and communication costs are no more than 0.03 microjoules and 2.73 message exchange, respectively.