Design of a Secure and Scalable Key Management Protocol for IoT Communication over RF-Constrained Wireless Networks
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31838/NJAP/07.03.16Keywords:
IoT Security, RF-Constrained Networks, Key Management Protocol, ECC, Secure Communication, Wireless Sensor Networks, Lightweight Cryptography, Scalability, Authentication, Cluster-Based ArchitectureAbstract
The fast spread of the Internet of Things (IoT) has transformed many fields of application within the realm of smart cities, automation of industries, healthcare services, and environmental control. But securing contact in such a setting has been a quite daunting task, particularly in RF-limited wireless systems using low bandwidth, energy, and computing resources. The traditional key management protocols tend to be inadequate in those environments since they either provide too much cryptographic overhead or are non-scalable or non-adaptive. In order to overcome these shortcomings, it was decided the paper would introduce a new, lightweight, scalable Key Management Protocol in and around the IoT Communication over RF-Constrained Networks (KMP-IoT-RF). The protocol merges the cryptographic strength of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) alongside a cluster-based trust structure that permits the reduction in the cost of communication and computational expense whilst increasing the performance of the key distribution. IoT nodes authentication is performed with the help of ECC-based challenge and responses and end-to-end encryption is implemented with help of Elliptic Curve DiffieHellman (ECDH) exchanges between the node and its cluster head. In addition, the protocol has dynamic key refresh, localized revocation and also hash-based chain functions along with compressed broadcasts of certificate revocation. The vast simulation experiments show that KMP-IoT-RF is far better than the current symmetric, asymmetric key management approaches with respect to the energy efficiency, setup time of keys, and resilience to various security challenges, such as node capture, replay attacks, and impersonation. The protocol is computationally and packet efficient to perform secure key exchange and is easily applicable to IoT networks that have unreliable channels and where computing resources are scarce. Striking a balance between security, scalability, and RF-efficiency, KMP-IoT-RF acts as a further step towards the realisation of practical, real-life cryptographies in the framework of next-generation IoT frameworks. Future research avenues would be to further customize the protocol to accommodate mobility, post-quantum cryptographic primitives, and an implementation of real worldpath using more constrained hardware pulses like ARM Cortex-M and RISC-V.
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