A Localized PUF-Assisted Authentication Protocol based on Algorithm Detection

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are constrained by limited hardware resources, with computational capability and storage capacity continuously compressed. In conventional architectures, each request from a device must be authenticated through a central server, which results in substantial communication burden and computational overhead when massive numbers of devices access the network. To address this issue, this paper proposes a localized PUF-assisted authentication protocol. The proposed scheme replaces conventional data-feature-based authentication with algorithm-process-based authentication, and delegates the verification function to a local authenticator during the authentication phase, thereby eliminating the communication burden and computational overhead of the central server. Experimental results show that the communication overhead of the proposed scheme is reduced to 512 bits, representing a 38.46% reduction compared with schemes involving server participation. Security analysis further demonstrates that the proposed protocol provides a high level of security and successfully passes verification by ProVerif and Scyther.