Boot-IoT: A Privacy-Aware Authentication Scheme for Secure Bootstrapping of IoT Nodes

The Internet of Things (IoT) devices perform security-critical operations and deal with sensitive information in the IoT-based systems. Therefore, the increased deployment of smart devices will make them targets for cyber attacks. Adversaries can perform malicious actions, leak private information, and track devices' and their owners' location by gaining unauthorized access to IoT devices and networks. However, conventional security protocols are not primarily designed for resource constrained devices and therefore cannot be applied directly to IoT systems. In this paper, we propose Boot-IoT – a privacy-preserving, lightweight, and scalable security scheme for limited resource devices. Boot-IoT prevents a malicious device from joining an IoT network. Boot-IoT enables a device to compute a unique identity for authentication each time the device enters a network. Moreover, during device to device communication, Boot-IoT provides a lightweight mutual authentication scheme that ensures privacy-preserving identity usages. We present a detailed analysis of the security strength of BootIoT. We implemented a prototype of Boot-IoT on IoT devices powered by Contiki OS and provided an extensive comparative analysis of Boot-IoT with contemporary authentication methods. Our results show that Boot-IoT is resource efficient and provides better scalability compared to current solutions.