SeMLAS: An Efficient Secure Multi-Level Authentication Scheme for IoT-Based Smart Home Systems

Smart Home Networks (SHNs) are attracting increasing interest in the research, development, and professional communities, particularly with the fast adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, because of the limited processing, storage, and communication capabilities of these devices as well as their proprietary technologies, SHNs are getting vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. Granting access to the legitimate users/entities is, therefore, essential to prevent illegitimate users from unauthorized use of the available resources. We argue that current access control schemes are not suitable for IoT-based SHN. We, therefore, propose in this paper a novel Secure Multi-Level Authentication Scheme (SeMLAS) based on software mobile agents. In addition to enabling secure authentication between external peers and nodes at different hierarchical level of the SHN, our scheme can shorten the authentication process and detect malicious nodes via an appropriate use of mobile agents. The performance analysis of the implementation of SeMLAS with the NS2 tool is showing promising results. Indeed, compared with the OTP and TinyPK schemes, SeMLAS is achieving 48% and 24% less in terms of communication overhead and total energy consumption respectively.