TAF Journal of Applied and Physical Sciences 2016, 2(2): 37-41 JAPS Content from this work is copyrighted by TAF Publishing, which permits restricted commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium under a written permission. Users may print articles for educational and research uses only, provided the original author and source are credited. Any further utilization of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s), the title of the work and journal citation in the form of a proper scientific referencing. PRIMARY RESEARCH A method for detecting man-in-the-middle attacks using time synchronization one time password in interlock protocol based internet of things Tae-Ho Cho 1 , * , Garam-Moe Jeon 2 1, 2 Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea Abstract— Internet of Things (IoT) is used for devices to interact with each other, and Femtocells are used to provide reliable communication by eliminating shaded areas where wireless signals have become weak. IoT security is crucial since the untethered nature of wireless networks primarily allows for eavesdropping threats to confidential information. Therefore, the interlock protocol is proposed to protect confidential information that is prone to eavesdropping due to the use of an unsecure public key. This paper addresses this limitation through a countermeasure that combines the time synchronization one-time password (OTP) and the interlock protocol. In the proposed method, we use OTP for authentication before transmitting the public key and data. In order to counter eavesdropping attacks, the OTP should be first used to detect the attacker. Simulations show that both methods have up to 46% of detection rate. However, our method has a prevention rate that is 54% higher than that of the interlock protocol. © 2016 TAF Publishing. All rights reserved. I. INTRODUCTION The internet protocol (IP) has enabled for Internet of Things (IoT) devices to be interconnected and to interact. The internet protocol (IP) has enabled for Internet of Things (IoT) devices to be interconnected and to interact [1]. IoT devices are used in wide area networks (WANs), such as in WiMAX, and shadowed areas should be illuminated to ensure uninterrupted communication. The shadow area problem is where there is an interruption in * Corresponding author: Tae-Ho Cho E-mail: thcho@skku.edu wireless signals due to a shadow or to signal fading with distance. A femtocell is a prevalent type of IoT device that eliminates this problem [2]. However, the femtocell is susceptible to Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack [3] because wireless signals can be tapped from outside the premises. The interlock protocol was thus proposed to detect such an attack [4]. In the interlock protocol, data are encrypted using a public key and are then transmitted in two equal segments. This protocol has been proposed in order to detect eavesdropping by an MITM attack since without a countermeasure, security can easily be compromised if the public key has been exposed [5]. We have applied a time synchronization-based One- Index Terms Internet of Things One-time Password Interlock Protocol WiMAX Femtocell Received: 7 May 2016 Accepted: 8 June 2016 Published: 24 June 2016