Sensors, Vol. 19, Pages 3663: An Effective Multifactor Authentication Mechanism Based on Combiners of Hash Function over Internet of Things (Sensors)

Internet of Thing (IoT) is the most emerging technology in which all the objects in the real world can use the Internet to communicate with each other as parts of a single unified system. This eventually leads to the development of many smart applications such as smart cities, smart homes, smart healthcare, smart transportation, etc. Due to the fact that the IoT devices have limited resources, the cybersecurity approaches that relied on complex and long processing cryptography are not a good fit for these constrained devices. Moreover, the current IoT systems experience critical security vulnerabilities that include identifying which devices were affected, what data or services were accessed or compromised, and which users were impacted. The cybersecurity challenge in IoT systems is to find a solution for handling the identity of the user, things/objects and devices in a secure manner. This paper proposes an effective multifactor authentication (CMA) solution based on robust combiners of the hash functions implemented in the IoT devices. The proposed CMA solution mitigates the authentication vulnerabilities of IoT and defends against several types of attacks. Also, it achieves multi-property robustness and preserves the collision-resistance, the pseudo-randomness, the message authentication code, and the one-wayness. It also ensures the integrity, authenticity and availability of sensed data for the legitimate IoT devices. The simulation results show that CMA outperforms the TOTP in term of the authentication failure rate. Moreover, the evaluation of CMA shows an acceptable QoS measurement in terms of computation time overhead, throughput, and packet loss ratio.