An edge-assisted group authentication scheme for the narrowband internet of things

Abstract As an emerging wireless communication technology, narrowband Internet of Things is widely used in various scenarios, but it also brings new security problems, especially the group authentication between terminal devices and servers. In narrowband Internet of Things, terminal devices are often deployed in unattended environments, which are vulnerable to various attacks and controlled by adversaries, resulting in identity information leakage. Secondly, a large number of terminal devices send authentication request information to the server at the same time, which is easy to cause network signaling congestion, and the centralized calculation mode of the server will cause a large delay in the authentication process. To solve these problems, we propose an edge-assisted group authentication scheme for narrowband Internet of Things. Firstly, a lightweight encryption algorithm LCHAOSAES was used to encrypt the terminal device identity to prevent the terminal device identity information leakage. Then, the edge computing method was used to add an edge network layer to the NB-IoT system architecture to assist in completing the group authentication of massive terminal devices, and the edge assistance could realize decentralization and reduce the load of centralized processing of the server. The Burrows Abadi Needham logic verification, informal security analysis and performance analysis show that the proposed scheme is robust under malicious attacks such as replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack and insider attack, and has less signaling overhead and delay.