Data Authentication and Anonymization in IoT Scenarios and Future 5G Networks Using Chaotic Digital Watermarking

Future Internet-of-Things (IoT) scenarios and applications are envisioned to be supported by emerging 5G networks. In this context, complex routing schemes for pervasive infrastructures are highly simplified, as every hardware element may stablish its own communication link with a 5G base station. However, this situation also introduces new risks, especially in the security field where innovative cyber-physical attacks and distributed denial of service attacks are becoming more popular and dangerous each day. Thus, data authentication, protection and anonymization in those new applications and schemes is a key challenge to be addressed. Besides, most devices in future IoT systems will be resource constrained, so traditional solutions based on private keys stored in devices’ memory and computationally heavy cryptographic algorithms will turn unsecure, inefficient or, directly, impossible to run. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new mechanism to protect, authenticate and anonymize data in IoT systems supported by future 5G networks. The proposed solution employs both digital watermarking techniques and lightweight cryptographic technologies. To generate keys in a secure and simple manner, physical unclonable functions are employed. Besides, to reduce as much as possible the computational cost of algorithms, chaotic dynamics will be considered. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution an experimental validation based on simulation techniques is also carried out.