Due to the limited resources of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, Symmetric Key Cryptography (SKC) is typically favored over resource-intensive Public Key Cryptography (PKC) to secure communication between IoT devices. To utilize SKC, devices need to execute a key exchange protocol to establish a session key before initiating communication. However, existing SKC-based key exchange protocols assume that communication devices have a pre-shared secret or there are trusted intermediaries between them; neither is always realistic in IoT. We introduce a new SKC-based key exchange protocol for IoT devices. While also intermediary based, our protocol fundamentally departs from existing intermediary-based solutions in that intermediaries between two key exchange devices may be malicious, and moreover, our protocol can detect cheating behaviors and identify malicious intermediaries. We prove our protocol is secure under the universally composable model, and show that it can detect malicious intermediaries with probability 1.0. We implemented and evaluated our protocol on different IoT devices. We show that our protocol has significant improvements in computation time and energy cost. Compared to the PKC-based protocols ECDH, DH, and RSA, our protocol is 2.3 to 1,591 times faster on one of the two key exchange devices and 0.7 to 4.67 times faster on the other.
Due to the limited resources of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, Symmetric Key Cryptography (SKC) is typically favored over resource-intensive Public Key Cryptography (PKC) to secure communication between IoT devices. To utilize SKC, devices need to execute a key exchange protocol to establish a session key before initiating communication. However, existing SKC-based key exchange protocols assume that communication devices have a pre-shared secret or there are trusted intermediaries between them; neither is always realistic in IoT. We introduce a new SKC-based key exchange protocol for IoT devices. While also intermediary based, our protocol fundamentally departs from existing intermediary-based solutions in that intermediaries between two key exchange devices may be malicious, and moreover, our protocol can detect cheating behaviors and identify malicious intermediaries. We prove our protocol is secure under the universally composable model, and show that it can detect malicious intermediaries with probability 1.0. We implemented and evaluated our protocol on different IoT devices. We show that our protocol has significant improvements in computation time and energy cost. Compared to the PKC-based protocols ECDH, DH, and RSA, our protocol is 2.3 to 1,591 times faster on one of the two key exchange devices and 0.7 to 4.67 times faster on the other.
Device authentication and key exchange are essential issues for Internet of Things (IoT) which plays an indispensable role in modern life. Many sensor devices in IoT, with limited resources and poor self-protection capabilities, are deployed in the unattended and open places, making them vulnerable to physical attacks while facing traditional security threats. Despite several researches have been conducted by using the physical unclonable function (PUF) to immune the communication between IoT devices from the security threats above, as per the knowledge of the authors, current solutions rely on the participation of the server to distribute the key parameters, which requires high message overhead and markedly influences the efficiency. To fill this gap, this article proposes an end-to-end mutual authentication and key exchange protocol for IoT by combining PUF with certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) on elliptic curve, which only needs “three handshakes” without the real-time participation of the server. The security analysis shows that the proposed protocol can not only secure the IoT devices from various attacks, but also provide perfect forward secrecy. Moreover, the experimental validation and performance analysis show the proposed protocol outperforms existing related protocols in terms of security features, protocol rounds and communication cost.
Authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol for client–server environments is a significant cryptographic primitive that provides communication confidentiality and mutual authentication between clients and servers. In an Internet of Things (IoT) environment, clients typically employ IoT devices with limited computing capability to interact with servers through the Internet. Numerous AKE protocols suitable for IoT devices, called AKE-IoT protocols, have been proposed. Recently, side-channel attacks have been conducted to defeat traditional cryptographic protocols because a side-channel adversary can retrieve partial content of long-term or short-term secret keys. Several leakage-resilient AKE (LRAKE) protocols were presented to counteract such attacks. Unfortunately, the existing LRAKE protocols are not suitable for IoT devices because expensive pairing operations are required for client sides. In this article, we propose the first efficient LRAKE protocol suitable for IoT devices, named LRAKE-IoT. By the unbalanced computation method, no pairing operation is required for client sides in our protocol. In the generic bilinear pairing group model, security analysis is conducted to demonstrate the security of the proposed protocol in the continuous-leakage-resilient extended-Canetti–Krawczyk model. Finally, computational experiences on two IoT devices are given to show that the proposed protocol is well-suited for IoT devices.
In the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, more types of devices than ever before are connected to the internet to provide IoT services. Smart devices are becoming more intelligent and improving performance, but there are devices with little computing power and low storage capacity. Devices with limited resources will have difficulty applying existing public key cryptography systems to provide security. Therefore, communication protocols for various kinds of participating devices should be applicable in the IoT environment, and these protocols should be lightened for resources-restricted devices. Security is an essential element in the IoT environment, so for secure communication, it is necessary to perform authentication between the communication objects and to generate the session key. In this paper, we propose two kinds of lightweight authentication and key agreement schemes to enable fast and secure authentication among the objects participating in the IoT environment. The first scheme is an authentication and key agreement scheme with limited resource devices that can use the elliptic curve Qu-Vanstone (ECQV) implicit certificate to quickly agree on the session key. The second scheme is also an authentication and key agreement scheme that can be used more securely, but slower than first scheme using certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC). In addition, we compare and analyze existing schemes and propose new schemes to improve security requirements that were not satisfactory.
Network communications are expanding rapidly in many fields, including telecommunications, the Internet of Things, space, consumer electronics, and the military, with different privacy and security issues at stake in each of these areas. The Internet of Things (IoT) has drawn increased attention from academic and industrial researchers over the last few decades. In this environment, keys are routinely exchanged through a public protocol to support the highly secure IoT domain and thwart security threats from unauthorized parties. The environment for IoT devices is subject to numerous limitations, including those related to processing, memory, and energy. These devices need to pass through a gateway or sink to connect to the network. Additionally, the environment must enable secure communication between gateways and IoT devices, even when the devices are disconnected from the rest of the network. In this paper, a lightweight key exchange protocol for IoT environments is presented, allowing the gateway and the IoT device to communicate over an open channel. Our proposed protocol improves security by utilizing noncommutative structures and polynomials over noncommutative rings. The underlying idea is to use the generalized decomposition problem associated with noncommutative rings. Furthermore, how the suggested protocol can achieve key certification and perfect onward secrecy is addressed. Results show this protocol is a strong candidate for key sharing and secure communication between IoT devices. We put our methodology into practice and the results of our experiments demonstrate enhancement of security levels. Finally, the performance analysis of the suggested protocol is compared with some other protocols, in terms of security, communication, and computing overhead.
An authenticated key exchange for the Internet of Things (IoT) sensor layer is discussed in this paper. This paper presents an enhanced key exchange protocol to provide an authentication scheme and data confidentiality for IoT sensor layer. In our approach, we incorporate an identity-based authentication scheme into the existing key exchange protocol based on Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman (ECDH). We utilize two communication channels for the process, main channel and auxiliary channel. The main channel is used to exchange key and sensor data and the auxiliary channel is used to exchange the identity information prior to the key exchange process. To provide the data confidentiality, AES encryption algorithm is implemented with a key derived from shared secret key to ensure the Perfect Forward Secrecy. For the evaluations, there are four parameters that are evaluated: the protocol resistance, formal verification of protocol, the protocol security, and performance testing. The protocol resistance was evaluated using security analysis against common security threats on IoT sensor layer. The formal verification of the proposed protocol was evaluated using Scyther, and the protocol security was evaluated using attack scenarios (i.e., authentication and sniffing attack) to prove the authentication and confidentiality. The performance testing was conducted to measure time complexity and memory complexity of the protocol. The experiment results show that the proposed protocol is able to provide an authentication mechanism, data confidentiality, and resilience against common security threats at IoT sensor layers.
The Internet of Things (IoT) consists of a range of devices that communicate with other devices that are surrounding them. Secure communications between IoT devices have been an essential requirement. However, most existing authentication protocols fail to provide privacy protection for devices such that sensitive information including device owner’s identity and device type can be leaked. In this paper, based on attribute-based encryption (ABE), we propose two private and mutual authentication protocols to protect the privacy of IoT devices. The first protocol is a three-message key exchange protocol, following the public-key encryption mode of the Internet Key Exchange (IKE). The second protocol is a one-round key exchange protocol, thereby providing simplicity and efficiency of messages communicated between the participants. Both of our protocols can be proved secure in the defined model. Finally, we implement the two protocols in an open source framework.