On the Resilience of Authentication Schemes in IoT Networks With Different Structural Topologies

The concern of network security is one of the major factors preventing the development of IoT-based applications. Such security risks can be mitigated by adopting a proper authentication scheme. The lack of quantitative comparison increases the difficulty when choosing the authentication scheme. This paper presents an empirical study of the effectiveness of three authentication methods including the blockchain-based method, a newly joined competitor. This study does not solely focus on the scheme level security but also five common structural topologies in IoT networks. We conduct simulations of these topological networks under six attack strategies and evaluate their survival sizes and survival link ratios. The network vulnerability coefficient is also proposed to illustrate a network’s expected exploit rate providing quantitative results to compare among schemes. The blockchain-based method achieves a 57.68% to 225.28% improvement compared to a defenseless network and outperforms other traditional schemes in BA, NSW and GRID structured networks. The results indicate that the network topology can greatly affect the resilience of an authentication scheme. © 2023 IEEE.