Group authentication with fault tolerance for internet of things

With proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications, it is expected that 50 billion connected devices will be operating amongst us by 2020, so the normal authentication mechanism will be a big issue to handle to avoid causing a serious burden to server. As it is known, some devices could share the same characteristics such as the same geographical area, the same features. In this case, these devices could be in the same group and the group will be identify by an identity. Taking advantages from this mechanism, all devices can be authenticated at the same time using the group identity. Among group authentication issues are if a member device of the group cannot authenticate with the distributor of the group intentionally or unintentionally, the group loses its identity. This loss of identity causes the authentication failure of the other group devices. To solve this issue in IoT a fault tolerance scheme introduced for the group authentication architecture. Our algorithm of fault tolerance allows reconstructing the group authentication identity despite the lack of broken devices of the group. Indeed, reconstructing the group identity can be performed by using multi-secret sharing scheme based on an error correcting codes if a sufficient number of the group devices are available. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.