Lightweight PUF-based authentication protocol for IoT devices

Conventional cryptographic solutions to the security are expensive in terms of computing resources (memory and processing capacity) and power consumption. They are not suitable for the Internet of Things devices that have constrained resources. In this regard, physically unclonable functions (PUFs) have become an increasingly popular technology for building secure authentication in these systems. In this paper, we propose lightweight PUF-based authentication protocol. This was implemented on a wireless sensor network constructed using the resource-limited IoT devices: Zolertia Zoul re-mote. The functionality of the proposed scheme was verified using a server-client configuration. Then power consumption and memory utilisation of the proposed protocol were estimated and compared with the existing solutions, namely: DTLS (datagram transport layer security) handshake protocol and UDP (user datagram protocol). Our results indicate that the proposed PUF based authentication saves up to 45% power and uses 12% less memory compared to DTLS handshake authentication.