Fast Authentication and Progressive Authorization in Large-Scale IoT: How to Leverage AI for Security Enhancement

Security provisioning has become the most important design consideration for large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) systems due to their critical roles in supporting diverse vertical applications by connecting heterogenous devices, machines, and industry processes. Conventional authentication and authorization schemes are insufficient to overcome the emerging IoT security challenges due to their reliance on both static digital mechanisms and computational complexity for improving security levels. Furthermore, the isolated security designs for different layers and link segments while ignoring the overall protection leads to cascaded security risks as well as growing communication latency and overhead. In this article, we envision new artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled security provisioning approaches to overcome these issues while achieving fast authentication and progressive authorization. To be more specific, a lightweight intelligent authentication approach is developed by exploring machine learning at the base station to identify the prearranged access time sequences or frequency bands or codes used in IoT devices. Then we propose a holistic authentication and authorization approach, where online machine learning and trust management are adopted for achieving adaptive access control. These new AI-enabled approaches establish the connections between transceivers quickly and enhance security progressively so that communication latency can be reduced and security risks are well controlled in large-scale IoT systems. Finally, we outline several areas for AI-enabled security provisioning for future research.