Generally, people use the Internet for their desired services, for example, sending/receiving emails, monitoring
health-care processes, accessing multimedia contents, playing online games and using the other social networking
applications. In the near future, the number of Internet users is expected to reach two billion, while the interconnection
of natural and human-made systems spreads rapidly around the globe. Thus, it is predictable that the Internet will exist
as a seamless fabric of interconnectivity and interoperability related to the desired services, which will be all around us
and readily available. This vision is now being pursued with the development of technologies. More specifically,
the technologies facilitate the Internet of Things (IoT) by dealing with resource-limited devices such as wireless
sensor nodes and radio frequency identification. The technologies are slowly but inexorably becoming part of
our everyday lives. However, at the same time, the IoT also opens up a whole new class of security problems [1–3].
Each resource-limited device (e.g. a sensor) is potentially a point of vulnerability to people who upload malicious code
for fun, profit or other advancement of personal goals. Replica attacks are some of the most challenging security
problems. Such attacks can make complete nonsense of existing defence systems such as secure communication and
entity authentication by using inside secret credentials. An attacker may be able to either physically compromise devices
(or so-called nodes) or insert malicious code in them via the Internet. The attacker then obtains private information or
credentials that allow him/her to pass through the existing defence systems in order to inject fake data, disrupt network
operations and eavesdrop on network communications. A far more harmful consequence of a node compromise attack is
that the attacker can fabricate replicas with the credentials and surreptitiously insert them at selected target positions (or
place them in/on selected target objects) in the network. These replicas can then be used to launch various stealth
attacks depending on the aim of the attacker (e.g. to control the target areas). This type of attack, first referred to as a
‘replica attack’ by Parno et al. [4], is considered the most fatal type of attack that must be resolved [5–18].