Certificates ensure the authenticity of users’ public keys, however their overhead (e.g., certificate chains) might be too costly for some IoT systems like aerial drones. Certificate-free cryptosystems, like identity-based and certificateless systems, lift the burden of certificates and could be a suitable alternative for such IoTs. However, despite their merits, there is a research gap in achieving compatible identity-based and certificateless systems to allow users from different domains (identity-based or certificateless) to communicate seamlessly. Moreover, more efficient constructions can enable their adoption in resource-limited IoTs. In this work, we propose new identity-based and certificateless cryptosystems that provide such compatibility and efficiency. This feature is beneficial for heterogeneous IoT settings (e.g., commercial aerial drones), where different levels of trust/control is assumed on the trusted third party. Our schemes are more communication efficient than their public key based counterparts, as they do not need certificate processing. Our experimental analysis on both commodity and embedded IoT devices show that, only with the cost of having a larger system public key, our cryptosystems are more computation and communication efficient than their certificate-free counterparts. We prove the security of our schemes (in the random oracle model) and open-source our cryptographic framework for public testing/adoption.
P-HIP: A Lightweight and Privacy-Aware Host Identity Protocol for Internet of Things
The Host Identity Protocol (HIP) has emerged as the most suitable solution to uniquely identify smart devices in the mobile and distributed Internet of Things (IoT) systems, such as smart cities, homes, cars, and healthcare. The HIP provides authentication methods that enable secure communications between HIP peers. However, the authentication methods provided by the HIP cannot be adopted by the IoT devices with limited processing power because of the computation-intensive cryptographic operations involved in hash generation, signature validation, and session key establishment. Moreover, IoT devices cannot utilize the HIP as is to communicate securely in the low power and lossy networks as there is a considerable communication overhead, such as packet fragmentation and reassembly, for exchanging certificates over a lossy link. Additionally, the use of static host identifiers makes IoT devices vulnerable to cyber espionage and user-targeted attacks. In this article, we propose an authentication scheme, P-HIP, that protects the identity privacy of an IoT device by enabling the device to compute and use unique host identifiers from networks to networks and sessions to sessions. To make the HIP suitable for resource-constrained IoT devices, P-HIP provides methods that unburden IoT devices from computation-intensive operations, such as modular exponentiation, involved in more »
- Award ID(s):
- 1642078
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10200838
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Internet of Things Journal
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 1 to 1
- ISSN:
- 2372-2541
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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