IoT Authentication: Securing the Front Door
Tags: iotsecurity, industrialiot
Published: 2020-09-08 08:12:34

Nowadays we are here in a very captivating span of technology. With rapidly emerging technology, our connected devices are also becoming smarter. Due to a large number of IoT devices and machine to machine communication characteristic of IoT, legacy authentication and authorization techniques are not applicable for it.
Devices must validate each other before interchanging any data between them (M2M communication) which is a question for researchers due to the huge number of devices. 

It is like the race between the cybercriminals and development of cybersecurity.
The reasons are apparent: with so many connected devices that execute such various tasks, the chances for taking benefits of them are limitless. Apart from all tools that can stop or slow down hackers, vigorous authentication is the one that’s been around for a while. Still, it has to become different as well. Let’s take a look at the Future of IoT Authentication.

IoT Authentication Significance

In general IoT infrastructure contains a huge number of interconnected and distributed devices that interact with each other. Hence it is important to have a vigorous, reliable and scalable authentication method in place where each IoT device is precisely authenticated to assure and to prevent unauthorized IoT Devices from being installed on the whole network.

IoT is concentrating more on Machine to machine (M2M) mode of communication. For such communication nodes, authentications are essential for assuring security and privacy. When two or more nodes are interacting with each other for an objective they should validate each other first in order to obstruct a fake node attack.

When an IoT device interacts with another peer device they require recognizing each other and validating their identity to each other, to begin with, Authentication. This is acquired via cryptographic methods that may differ in terms of difficulty and level of security.

In the IoT Architecture (https://www.hiotron.com/), the 2FA/MFA system can be more complex as it requires hardware tokens, distinct devices, or biometrics such as facial recognition, fingerprint to enhance security. It is important for IoT as this system has to assure that it’s approved to execute administrative actions for IoT devices.

IoT Authentication Challenges

It is a challenging task to initiate secure communication between two IoT devices. This means that in case a public-key cryptographic authentication method is utilized, there should be a way to assure that the public key is acquired by a peer IoT device included in the proposed communication channel and that the IoT device can be trusted.

This needs that the public key is restored safely on the device. It must not be feasible for an attacker to change the key or to utilize another fake key instead. For secure communication in IoT, authentication is done by digital certificates offered by the certificate authority, which makes authentication more vigorous. An advanced encryption standard is utilized to assure data confidentiality. Similarly often utilized asymmetric algorithm for digital signature and key interchange is Rivest Shamir Adelman (RSA) which is also very secure.

Another challenge in the security, as hardware and software differences between several IoT devices, make it much rigid to come up with a security solution that would be applicable in every different case.

Even though legacy network security solutions are evolving enough but it is not practical to apply it in the context of IoT due to the size of IoT networks heterogeneity in its infrastructure and resource-constrained IoT end nodes.

Secure Authentication

Authentication is the solution if we can make it easier and more efficient. Authentication methods performed should be rigid enough to be flexible against several attacks likewise eavesdropping/spying, replay attacks, MiTM attacks, or brute-force attacks.

At the same time, it’s important to utilize the same strong authentication for various devices that are generally utilized (considering few devices have no Human Machine Interface (HMI), it could be a GPS-location or silent authentication and be faster and more appropriate than our present 2FA/MFA processes. It is essential to keep all critical data and biometrics on the device itself to increase security.

Much rather, you should be capable to validate yourself to your device locally and then it would authenticate the user online by utilizing public-key cryptography. This would minimize the requirement to have any link-ability between various accounts or services, largely improving security. 

FIDO (Fast ID Online) authentication protocol could be the best security option to re-utilize which stores personally-identifying information likewise biometric authentication data.

Resolving security issues by securing the front door via strong and smart authentication will drive us a step closer to more captivating technological developments.

This thorough study will guide us as to where efforts should be invested to build security solutions for IoT.