A Federated Lightweight Authentication Protocol for the Internet of Things

Abstract: Considering the world's IoT development and market, it is necessary to guarantee the security of the developed IoT applications as well as the privacy of their end users. In this sense, Federated Identity Management (FIdM) systems can be of great help as they improve user authentication and privacy. In this paper, we claim that traditional FIdM are mostly cumbersome and then ill-suited for IoT. As a solution to this problem, we come up with a federated identity authentication protocol exclusively tailored to IoT. Federated Lightweight Authentication of Things (FLAT), our solution, replaces weighty protocols and asymmetric cryptographic primitives used in traditional FIdM by lighter ones. For instance, FLAT synergistically combines symmetric cryptosystems and Implicit Certificates. The results show that FLAT can reduce the data exchange overhead by around 31% when compared to a baseline solution. FLAT's Client is also more efficient than the baseline solution in terms of data transmitted, data received, total data exchange, and computation time. Our results indicate that FLAT runs efficiently even on top of resource-constrained devices like Arduino.