Private and mutual authentication protocols for Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) consists of a range of devices that communicate with other devices that are surrounding them. Secure communications between IoT devices have been an essential requirement. However, most existing authentication protocols fail to provide privacy protection for devices such that sensitive information including device owner’s identity and device type can be leaked. In this paper, based on attribute-based encryption (ABE), we propose two private and mutual authentication protocols to protect the privacy of IoT devices. The first protocol is a three-message key exchange protocol, following the public-key encryption mode of the Internet Key Exchange (IKE). The second protocol is a one-round key exchange protocol, thereby providing simplicity and efficiency of messages communicated between the participants. Both of our protocols can be proved secure in the defined model. Finally, we implement the two protocols in an open source framework.