SLAP: Secure lightweight authentication protocol for resource-constrained devices

Motivated by the upcoming Internet of Things, designing light-weight authentication protocols for resource constrained devices is among the main research directions of the last decade. Current solutions in the literature attempt either to improve the computational efficiency of cryptographic authentication schemes, or to build a provably-secure scheme relying on the hardness of a specific mathematical problem. In line with the principles of information-theoretic security, in this paper we present a novel challenge-response protocol, named SLAP, whose authentication tokens only leak limited information about the secret key, while being very efficient to be generated. We do support our proposal with formal combinatorial arguments, further sustained by numeric evaluations, that clarify the impact of system parameters on the security of the protocol, yielding evidence that SLAP allows performing a reasonable number of secure authentication rounds with the same secret key.