Research Area:  Edge Computing
In this paper, we propose a lightweight mutual authentication and inter-cloud redeemable payment protocol which allows IoT devices to subscribe with their home cloud service providers for roaming coverage. More precisely, such devices acquire authenticated payment tokens in order to benefit from the computation offloading services from edge nodes deployed by foreign cloud service providers. Hence, IoT devices are continuously serviced even when outside of their home cloud providers coverage. The protocol makes use of tree of secrets, hash chains, and Merkle trees. It requires sharing a Merkle tree root and a 128-bit secret key for constructing the tree of secrets among cloud admins. Our protocol provides mutual authentication, confidentiality, and easy charge redemption from the home server. For N subscribed IoT devices, the storage at the hosting clouds is limited to 2 ×(Ns +1)×16 bytes and 32×LogN bytes for the IoT device, where Ns is the maximum number of devices served by the IoT gateway per payment redemption period.
Keywords:  
Lightweight Authentication
Internet of Things
Edge Computing
Computation Offloading
Mutual Authentication
Micropayment
Author(s) Name:   Mohamed Seifelnasr; Mouna Nakkar; Amr Youssef; Riham AlTawy
Journal name:  
Conferrence name:  2020 IEEE 9th International Conference on Cloud Networking (CloudNet)
Publisher name:  IEEE
DOI:  10.1109/CloudNet51028.2020.9335814
Volume Information:  
Paper Link:   https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9335814