Lightweight Token-Based Authentication Scheme (LTBAS) to Secure SmartWireless Systems Based on SDN

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) has lately come to prominence as a hot research area as it is widely used for a variety of applications and devices, such as wireless sensors, sensitive home sensors, medical devices, and other IoT gadgets. Data transfer across wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a hot topic in the Internet of Things these days. Wireless channels are widely recognized as a threat due to the open network requirements. However, attackers can easily launch eavesdropping, replay attacks, DoS, and other network attacks. As a result, multi-factor authentication techniques have been proposed to reduce the risk of wireless communication and ensure the integrity and authenticity of messages received on WSN, despite the fact that these schemes are more prone to computational overhead due to hash-to-point operations or certificate maintenance. There is a need to manage network-level programmability and monitoring to reduce overhead on resource-constrained devices. The authentication scheme provides the first line of defense in Software Defined Networking(SDN) smart systems and the lightweight authentication scheme reduces the cost complexity of the resource-constrained devices. Therefore, we propose a Lightweight Token-Based Authentication Scheme(LTBAS) to secure smart wireless systems based on SDN. The proposed scheme is cost-effective for resource-constrained smart devices as it uses only lightweight operations like concatenation, exclusive-OR (XOR), and cryptographic hash. Moreover, LTBAS is proven to be secure and complete via formal security analysis using the widely accepted Proverif tool. In addition, a comparative analysis shows that the calculated cost of our scheme is 0.0888 ms less than the previous schemes.