Autenticación eficiente en la capa de percepción IoT con pruebas de conocimiento cero

Abstract

The adoption of the Internet of Things in critical applications highlights the need to strengthen security in its perception layer, one of the most vulnerable. This article presents a threat model for this layer, identifying replay, denial-of-service, and network traffic capture attacks as the most critical. In order to counteract them, an optimized variant of an authentication protocol based on zero-knowledge proofs is proposed, improving the efficiency and scalability of the original Hecht protocol. The solution introduces elementary matrices to reduce protocol computational complexity and an explicit mechanism for secure secret management. It is experimentally validated in a QR code-based access control system, simulating a real Internet of Things environment. The results show that the proposed variant is lightweight, efficient, and suitable for resource-constrained devices, especially in web environments, offering a high level of security by not revealing information about the secret key during authentication. Furthermore, a design of experiments optimizes the protocol parameters, minimizing execution time without compromising security. The proposed protocol represents a significant improvement in security and efficiency for authentication in the Internet of Things perception layer.