A PUF-Based Secure Communication Protocol for IoT

Abstract

Security features are of paramount importance for the Internet of Things (IoT), and implementations are challenging given the resource-constrained IoT setup. We have developed a lightweight identity-based cryptosystem suitable for IoT to enable secure authentication and message exchange among the devices. Our scheme employs a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) to generate the public identity of each device, which is used as the public key for each device for message encryption. We have provided formal proofs of security in the Session Key Security and Universally Composable Framework of the proposed protocol, which demonstrates the resilience of the scheme against passive and active attacks. We have demonstrated the setup required for the protocol implementation and shown that the proposed protocol implementation incurs low hardware and software overhead.