Secure IoT Node with Hardware-Assisted Authentication

This paper described a low-cost ESP32-based IoT monitoring prototype that combines temperature sensing, ESP-NOW communication, gateway-side packet checks, and local or web-based presentation. A separate test node provides a way to exercise the receiver with unauthorized or malformed traffic. The arrangement is useful for demonstrating why a gateway should validate messages before updating an application-facing display. A central design lesson is that hardware identification and cryptographic authentication serve different purposes. An eFuse-backed identifier can support device registration, but it should not be assumed to be confidential or unforgeable at the protocol level. Similarly, SHA-256 is a hash function rather than a digital-signature algorithm. A robust implementation should authenticate messages with HMAC-SHA-256 or another suitable cryptographic protocol, protect keys against disclosure, and use sequence numbers or nonces to prevent replay. Security claims should be based on tests of the implemented protocol rather than on the presence of a hardware identifier or hash function alone. With these improvements and a documented performance evaluation, the prototype can provide a foundation for studying practical authentication in resource-constrained IoT systems.

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