A Lightweight 2-factor Authentication Scheme for Smart Homes

Abstract

Smart home technology provides the ability for homeowners to remotely monitor and control home appliances by connecting them to the internet. Despite its benefits, many people around the world are reluctant to adopt smart devices into their home for security reasons. Namely, connecting smart homes to the internet opens an attack surface for hackers to gain access and possibly control the smart home. Also, most smart home devices have low computational power and therefore cannot provide complex security protocols. In that case, to achieve the goal of remote user authentication, this paper proposes a 2-factor authentication scheme that consists of local biometric authentication and remote authentication with user identity and a time-based one-time password (TOTP). The security of the scheme is validated with formal and informal security checks. The proposed system outperforms similar systems since its computation overhead is (0.02 ms) and its communication overhead is (416 bits). A possible avenue of future work may involve using this authentication scheme in wider IoT applications such as wireless sensor networks.