A novel hybrid authentication protocol utilizing lattice-based cryptography for IoT devices in fog networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) has taken the interconnected world by storm. Due to their immense applicability, IoT devices are being scaled at exponential proportions worldwide. But, very little focus has been given to securing such devices. As these devices are constrained in numerous aspects, it leaves network designers and administrators with no choice but to deploy them with minimal or no security at all. We have seen distributed denial-of-service attacks being raised using such devices during the infamous Mirai botnet attack in 2016. Therefore we propose a lightweight authentication protocol to provide proper access to such devices. We have considered several aspects while designing our authentication protocol, such as scalability, movement, user registration, device registration, etc. To define the architecture we used a three-layered model consisting of cloud, fog, and edge devices. We have also proposed several pre-existing cipher suites based on post-quantum cryptography for evaluation and usage. We also provide a fail-safe mechanism for a situation where an authenticating server might fail, and the deployed IoT devices can self-organize to keep providing services with no human intervention. We find that our protocol works the fastest when using ring learning with errors. We prove the safety of our authentication protocol using the automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications tool. In conclusion, we propose a safe, hybrid, and fast authentication protocol for authenticating IoT devices in a fog computing environment.