GASE: A Lightweight Group Authentication Scheme With Key Agreement for Edge Computing Applications

Abstract

Motivated by the fact that mass authentication is one of the desirable security features in the edge computing paradigm, we propose a lightweight group authentication protocol with a session key-agreement. Most of the previously proposed group authentication schemes (GASs) are heavyweight and do not support multiple authentications or key-agreement. On the other hand, our protocol, which is based on secret sharing scheme and aggregated message authentication code, is lightweight and provides multiple asynchronous authentications. Furthermore, we implement a simple key refreshing mechanism in which, in each session, a new session-key between an Internet of Things node and the authenticating server is established without the need for redistributing new shares. Our security analysis includes proving that our protocol provides group authentication, message forward secrecy, and prevents several attacks. Additionally, we present a formal automated verification using Verifpal tool. Furthermore, we show that our scheme has better performance than other relative schemes in terms of communication complexity, secret-share redistribution, and session key derivations.