The Improvement of PUF-Based Authentication in IoT Systems

—The Internet of Things (IoT) has been widely utilized in many fields, including healthcare, manufacturing, and intelligent transportation. IoT has many advantages, including the ease of collecting, accessing, and editing data remotely. Unfortunately, IoT has also given rise to many risks due to its lack of security features. Authentication protocols for IoT environments have been proposed using Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) to resolve security problems in IoT environments. However, we have found that these protocols have weaknesses, where the attacker steals the IoT device, obtains data from the communication channel, and has the ability to program for activating PUF, hence the attacker gets the challenge and generates a response. Therefore, we propose a new authentication protocol that resolves the issues with the existing protocol to safeguard against the attack mentioned above with PUF and masking method. We present the results of the Real or Random model (RoR model), which shows that our protocol is secure. The programming model (Scyther tool) also shows that our protocol is safe and can withstand attacks. Finally, our protocol has a low computational time.