# Autonomous Mutual Authentication Protocol in the Edge Networks
## 1 Introduction  
In edge networks, local data processing and storage helps to make it independent of complex network infrastructure [1, 2]. Therefore, edge network devices should be protected to avoid major attacks [3, 4] such as DDOS, ransomware, man in the middle (MITM) attack, etc. As the paradigm of distributed computing, edge network devices centralize data centers and acts as smart things to overcome cloud computing limitations. High-speed data networks such as 5G wireless communication have boosted the application of edge devices and increased the vulnerability at the same time. Hence, this work uses authentication protocol to secure the multiple edge device interconnectivity for the Internet of Things (IoT) communication. Evolution of edge computing marks a significant change by overcoming the client-server or network architecture limitations. As the edge devices can function independently, a network communication delay and shortest path planning is eliminated. Therefore, for the secure communication of the edge devices we have designed an autonomous mutual authentication protocol. Security is an essential factor for protecting the data confidentiality and integrity. To ensure secure communication, this work provides authentication within the independent edge devices. The scope for this work is providing a security solution for the protection of IoT devices against malicious contents to function smoothly and efficiently. The data communication consists of a unique session key generation and exchange within edge devices to achieve mutual authentication by the protocol. The background knowledge for this work contains authorization, public-key cryptography, challenge-response mechanism, session keys, PRNG, and mutual authentication. Public-key cryptography is also popularly known as asymmetric cryptography, which uses unique pairs of different keysfor encryption and decryption as public key and private key, respectively. These keys are generated as a part of cryptographic algorithms by a one-way function in which the public key is disclosed to everyone for communication. The authorization of the official registered user is said to be granted or approved after the genuine user permission is assigned, e.g., Diffie-Hellman key exchange, elliptic-curve cryptography, Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) algorithm, etc. In the challenge-response mechanism, the party wishing to communicate first needs to provide a valid answer to the question as set by the other party for authentication. The session keys are part of communication protocol, which are shared for the validity confirmation between multiple parties as a part of the agreement. The PRNGs are derived from linear congruential generator algorithms, which function as a deterministic random bit generator having properties similar to the approximation of a random number. Mutual authentication can be defined as an authentication protocol process performed between the two parties at the same time. The motivation for this work is given as \"How to design a mutual authentication protocol for the autonomous devices in the edge network?\" [5; 6; 7; 8]. Considering the independence feature of the autonomous devices for mutual authentication, they must not be restricted to a particular area network after the registration phase [9; 10]. Therefore, referring to the autonomous vehicular protocol design community, many researchers have started improving the security authentication and confidentiality communication, following [PERSON], [PERSON], [PERSON], and [PERSON] in 2004, who applied it in autonomous system traceback for authentication [11]. The inclusion of third-party infrastructure in the authentication of the autonomous vehicle process has been a challenge that acts as an overhead on the resource-constrained IoT devices, which needs to be resolved. Henceforth, in this work, a novel challenge-response model using pseudo-random-number-based octet's transitions is proposed.