Serverless lightweight mutual authentication protocol for small mobile computing devices

Abstract

Small and inexpensive computing devices are becoming potential players in the Internet arena as they are used for collecting or generating information and later relay them to the designated servers. The information gathered must be adequately protected against all kinds of attacks during storage and communication. However, smart constrained devices have limited resources and unable to run most of the classical protocols that provide robust security. This article presents a lightweight mutual authentication protocol for resource constrained computing devices with high mobility. Our solution is novel as it facilitates resource constrained devices to autonomously perform mutual authentication and establish a session key with other parties without sharing common parameters. Our proposed protocol is lightweight, symmetric and requires few space for storing keys and parameters locally. The protocol is formally verified using AVISPA tool.