A lightweight group-based SDN-driven encryption protocol for smart home IoT devices

With the increasing adoption rate of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart home applications, it is vital to safeguard the privacy and security of information, communications among IoT devices and the underlying infrastructure. In open communication scenarios, an adversary can easily tamper with data transmitted by IoT communication devices. This paper proposes a softwarized lightweight authentication key agreement scheme for smart home applications in Software-Defined IoT (SDIoT) environment. The proposed scheme comprises registration, authentication, and key selection phases. Devices are registered in the registration phase after the successful completion of validation checks, while sessions’ keys are granted to the registered devices in the authentication phase. In the final phase, controllers classify IoT devices based on pre-defined parameters and impose class-specific access control based on classification. The security of the proposed scheme is validated using the widely accepted AVISPAs verification tool against a strong adversary. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme outperforms existing schemes in terms of running time, computation complexity, and energy consumption. It is found that the proposed scheme has significant cost-effectiveness.