iMAC: Implicit Message Authentication Code for IoT Devices

The role of cryptography is not only limited to enabling secure communication but also providing mechanisms for authentication, integrity, privacy, trust and non-repudiation. All these mechanisms play vital role in modern digital communications. Currently, number of interconnected IoT devices has exceeded over billions, which makes managing them not only challenging but also impractical. Central management of IoT devices also introduces serious security threats such as central point of failure and lack of transparency, confidentiality, and integrity. Lightweight and decentralized device-to-device schemes are important to cope with the ever increasing number of resource constrained IoT devices. Implicit cryptographic schemes, in which only devices in the same context can authenticate and communicate, is an efficient way to achieve decentralized and transparent IoT security. In this paper, we propose a multi-sensor-based lightweight implicit message authentication mechanism. The proposed scheme is efficient and secure.