Non-interactive zero knowledge proofs for the authentication of IoT devices in reduced connectivity environments

Current authentication protocols seek to establish authenticated sessions over insecure channels while maintaining a small footprint considering the energy consumption and computational overheads. Traditional authentication schemes must store a form of authentication data on the devices, putting this data at risk. Approaches based on purely public/private key infrastructure come with additional computation and maintenance costs. This work proposes a novel non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZKP) authentication protocol that incorporates the limiting factors in IoT communication devices and sensors. Our protocol considers the inherent network instability and replaces the ZKP NP-hard problem using the Merkle tree structure for the creation of the authentication challenge . A series of simulations evaluate the performance of NIZKP against traditional ZKP approaches based on graph isomorphism. A set of performance metrics has been used, namely the channel rounds for client authentication , effects of the authentication processes , and the protocol interactions to determine areas of improvements. The simulation results indicate empirical evidence for the suitability of our NIKP approach for authentication purposes in resource-constrained IoT environments.