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WSNs are crucial components of IoT and as explained by El-hajj et al. (2019), IoT application spectrum includes smart cities, homes, wearables, e-health among others. These devices are smart enough to collect, analyze and even make decisions devoid of human interaction. In this environment, security and specifically authentication is critical owing to the devastating effects of malicious unauthenticated device in an IoT system. Depending on the type of application, IoT security requirements may include authentication, confidentiality or integrity (Nyangaresi et al., 2020). As pointed out by El-hajj et al., (2019), authentication is key since trusting devices making up an IoT network is crucial for the better operation of the network. For instance, if one sensor node (SN) is compromised, then the entire network can be brought down or result in disasters. Fadi and David (2020) explain that IoT offers connectivity to internet devices that provide interactivity between physical and cyber objects. This facilitates data observation and measurement of physical entities. As explained by Harbi et al., (2019), both WSN and IoT are characterized by decentralization where security measures and authentication procedures are deployed at both device and network levels to enhance network reliability. However, Kouicem et al., (2018) explain that IoT devices are resource constrained owing to limited battery power. Their communication and information access is via open wireless channels, which renders them susceptible to threats such as eavesdropping. To boost smart manufacturing and increase productivity, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been developed to address the complexity and sophistication of the manufacturing process. As such, the entire manufacturing process consists of a number of diverse administrative IoT domains where devices from dissimilar domains collaborate on a similar task. This brings forth security and privacy issues regarding device to device communications. Worse still, the current authentication schemes exhibit high key management overheads (Nyangaresi et al., 2020) or depend on a trusted third party (Shen et al., 2020). Consequently, security and privacy issues during IoT device communication still present some challenges.
According to Kumar et al., (2020), the development of mobile Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the invention of many smart mobile services. Unfortunately, Zeng et al., (2018) point out that owing to their explosive growth and connectivity, malicious attacks can result in an unauthorized access to these devices. As such, the provision for security has become a very crucial design consideration for IoT systems that support heterogenous, machines, devices and industry processes. As discussed by Fang et al., (2020), current authentication and authorization protocols rely on static digital techniques and have high computational complexity. Therefore, they are insufficient for IoT environment. In addition, these security designs for diverse layers and link segments are desolate and disregard the overall protection, causing high communication latencies, overheads and cascaded security risks. Alladi and Chamola (2020) point out that the application of IoT in healthcare leads to sensitive patient data being sent over the networks, which calls for the deployment of robust security techniques to thwart cyber attacks.