Lightweight Two-Factor Authentication With S-Box Flipping Module for IoT Security

Introduction

Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming an intriguing trend worldwide as it allows any device to create and participate in a highly immersive and connected environment by integrating physical, digital, and social aspects of the users to react according to the user requirements (Esfahani et al. 2017), (Wang et al. 2018). The success of an IoT application depends on how well it fulfills certain design considerations like reliability, quality of service, security, scalability of the applications, among which security issues gain more importance in the real world because of the exposure of vulnerabilities in IoT applications (Akbarzadeh et al. 2019), (Hernandez-Ramos et al. 2015). Furthermore, it can have serious consequences and is significant to set up an enhanced mechanism for assuring security. The perpetual growth in the number of devices tends to create more vulnerabilities if these devices are not authenticated before the device communicates (Zhou et al. 2019). However, designing a security mechanism for IoT is a challenging task due to the resource-constrained nature of the underlying sensor elements in the network (Joshitta et al. 2016). Authentication is considered as one of the most important, newest, and fastest-growing mechanisms in the communication area, and this process is supported by IoT devices, (Ometov et al. 2019).

IoT consisting of integrating sensors at daily smart objects that are linked to the Internet through wireless sensor networks that lead to open the door to new methods of exchanging the data (Farash et al. 2018). However, these IoT devices mostly follow wireless communication which raises the curtain for various security challenges related to wireless sensor networks (Mohit et al. 2019). The problem of node authentication in the network is always a major concern in wireless sensor networks (Li et al. 2018). In IoT, whenever a device initiates the communication, data collection and data aggregation, there is a possibility for the intrusion of attackers (Devi et al. 2015). The attacker accesses critical data of the communication and can modify the settings of the devices (Mishra et al. 2019). IoT devices are susceptible to different security attacks like impersonation, replay attacks which brings up the imperative need for a security mechanism. Also, checks the authenticity of the devices before the data collection and data acquisition tasks get completed (Yang et al. 2020). Also, IoT devices possess limited memory and processing power (Li et al. 2017) which causes the draining of resources that brings the necessity for the cryptographic protocols to reduce the computation overhead and prolong their lifetime (El-hajj et al. 2019). To overcome the aforementioned problems, two factor authentication models for different network environments are introduced to improve data security. The main objective and contribution of the research work is given as follows: