ILAPU-Q: An Improved Lightweight Authentication Protocol for IoT Based on U-quark Hash Function

Background: In the last decades, the development of Internet activities has been significantly accelerated, particularly with the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). Heterogeneous devices in the IoT can seamlessly and feasibly inter-connect with each other without human interaction. Due to this revolution, many applications have been adopted in the arena of smart healthcare, e-commerce, environmental and habitat monitoring, etc. In order to promote and facilitate people's standards of living around the world. However, these unbounded applications bring more challenges to the storage capabilities of devices, and their security and privacy preservation. Moreover, security issues suffer from weak authentication protocols. Methods: To address these issues, suitable and secure lightweight mutual authentication schemes based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) are required for the approval of Identity Management (IDM) of devices in the IoT. In this paper, we will propose an improved mutual authentication scheme based on ECC, coupled with a relevant seminal work considered as a reference in the field. This scheme is combined with U-quark, a lightweight hash function, to guarantee the security needed in the IoT environment. Results: We will compare our amended protocol with a seminal scheme as an established reference in terms of computation cost, storage cost, and executing CPU time to demonstrate that our version can ensure the most favorable performance during the authentication process. Conclusion: Finally, our proposed mutual authentication scheme has demonstrated its effectiveness in enhancing the security of IoT devices when compared to the seminal work in the same computational environment.