HMAM: Hash-Chain Based Multi-Channel Authentication Mechanisms for Edge/Fog Devices

Abstract

Abstract: With the emerging trends in home automation, office automation and industry automation using various IoT devices, there are more and more security vulnerabilities identified and misused. Some of these security compromises in applications like smart cars or military applications can be fatal and prove too costly but these IoT/Fog devices are absolutely needed. Though fog devices have limited computation power, it has the ability to communicate in multiple channels like Cellular Network, Bluetooth, etc. Traditional approaches like password-based authentication, identity based key encryption etc. were found less competitive in terms of computing power, lengthy computation, and too many messages exchanged which can lead to latency problems. In this paper, we propose a novel Hash-chain based Multi-channel Authentication Mechanism (HMAM) which utilizes multiple channels for authentication of fog/IoT devices. The client’s metadata is verified using a challenge-response key exchange hash-chain model and then stored on a centralized cum distributed secured blockchain. The proposed method requires less computational time for the resource and computation power constrained devices, as we use multiple channels for mutual authentication for easy and fast communication to avoid data theft or modification during delayed communication thereby reducing latency. Moreover, the proposed HMAM is implemented with very few computations and very few key exchanges between Fog nodes and the server so that security can be achieved in fewer computations. The metadata and node Id are stored in blockchain, and the keys are not stored anywhere in the memory and as a result the storage overhead is reduced.