Recent advances in information and communication technologies and embedded systems have given rise to a new disruptive technology, the Internet of Things (IoTs). IoT allows people and objects in the physical world as well as data and virtual environments to interact with each other so as to create smart environments, such as smart transport systems, smart cities, smart health, and so on. However, IoT raises some important questions and also introduces new challenges for the security of systems and processes and the privacy of individuals, such as their location and movements and so on.
In this paper, at first, we propose a distributed IoT system architecture. Subsequently, we propose an anonymous authentication scheme, which can ensure some of the notable properties, such as sensor anonymity, sensor untraceability, resistance to replay attacks, cloning attacks, and so on. It is argued that the proposed authentication scheme will be useful in many distributed IoT applications (such as radio-frequency identification-based IoT system, Biosensor-based IoT healthcare system, and so on), where the privacy of the sensor movement is greatly desirable.