Robust and Lightweight Remote User Authentication Mechanism for Next-Generation IoT-Based Smart Home

The IPv4 address architecture has been declared ended finally due to the fast growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). IPv6 is becoming a next-generation communication protocol and provides all the requirements that the industry needs. A smart home is an emerging technological revolution in which IoT-enabled smart physical objects such as smart TVs, smart refrigerators, smart locks, etc. are linked to the Internet to make human life more comfortable. There are several resource-constrained smart devices interconnecting with 6LoWPAN to control the smart home remotely. The communication channels used by cellular communication are vulnerable and increase security threats especially related to authentication. A reliable and portable remote authentication method is critical for ensuring safe communication in the next-generation smart home environment. Recently, many authentication schemes have been proposed but adopt complex mathematical techniques or protocols that are viewed as heavyweights in the context of computation and communication costs. This research proposes a lightweight and reliable remote authentication mechanism for the next generation of IoT-based smart homes. Informal and formal security assessments through the AVISPA tool determine the robustness of our proposed scheme. Moreover, we implemented our authentication scheme on a Linux-based client-server network model by using Android programming. In addition, we compared our proposed scheme with existing schemes based on computation and communication costs. Results show that our proposed mechanism reduced computation costs by up to 54.03 % and reduced communication costs by up to 25.28 % related to existing schemes. So, our proposed scheme is better, more secure, and most suitable for smart home ecosystems.