GLARM: Group-based lightweight authentication scheme for resource-constrained machine to machine communications

Supporting a massive number of machine to machine (M2M) devices has been considered as an essential requirement in M2M communications. Meanwhile, cyber security is of paramount importance in M2M; if M2M devices cannot securely access the networks through efficient authentication, all applications involving M2M cannot be widely accepted. One of research challenges in M2M is group authentication since a large number of M2M devices accessing the network simultaneously will cause a severe authentication signaling congestion. To solve this problem, as well as reduce authentication overhead of the previous schemes based on public key cryptosystems, we propose a novel lightweight group authentication scheme for resource-constrained M2M (GLARM) under the 3GPP network architecture, which consists of two protocols that can achieve efficient and secure group authentication in the 3GPP access case and non-3GPP access case, respectively. GLARM can not only authenticate all M2M devices simultaneously, but also minimize the authentication overhead. The security analysis shows that the proposed scheme can achieve the security goals, and prevent the various security threats. In addition, performance evaluation demonstrates its efficiency in terms of computation complexity and communication overhead. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.