Secure and Efficient Authentication Protocols for Next Generation IoT and Mobile Networks

Abstract

The proliferation of mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices will continue, particularly in applications like Smart Cities, Health monitoring, Smart homes, Smart Factories, Smart grids, Hospitality, and Tourism. This growth has resulted in frequent interactions between these devices and the servers providing network services, thus increasing potential security risks. Vulnerabilities have emerged because the communication between these devices and the servers takes place over an insecure public channel, allowing third parties or attackers monitoring the network to access confidential information. Just encrypting the information transmitted over the channel is not sufficient, we also need a robust authentication protocol essential to ensure the security of communication between mobile and IoT devices and the server. Numerous authentication protocols are designed to secure IoT and mobile device communication with the server. The current state-of-the-art solutions reveal that many of them are either vulnerable to attacks or computationally expensive. Thus, this thesis aims to design secure and lightweight authentication protocols for various technologies, including 5G, WLAN, Network Slicing, and Fog computing, used in applications to secure mobile and IoT device communication. In the first chapter, we propose design of an authentication protocol to secure WLANconnected IoT devices. Second, we design an authentication mechanism for 5G-AKA, which provides significant security features such as perfect forward secrecy and is more lightweight than other 5G-AKA variants. Third, we design a lightweight authentication mechanism to address Fog and Dew computing vulnerabilities. Fourth, we create an authentication mechanism for the Network Slicing, supporting cross-network-slice authentication. The security of these protocols is verified using informal and formal methods such as Real-Or-Random (ROR), Burrows, Abadi, and Needham (BAN) logic, Gong, Needham and Yahalom (GNY) logic, and Scyther validation tool. Furthermore, a comparative analysis is conducted, considering computational, communication, storage, and energy consumption costs to demonstrate the lightweight nature of these protocols. Additionally, performance under unknown attacks is also measured for all four proposed works to show that they perform better for known and unknown attacks. Additionally, a prototype implementation for all four works using a testbed is performed to showcase the practical feasibility of the designed protocols.