Lightweight Group-Key Establishment Protocol for IoT Devices: Implementation and Performance Analyses
Nico Ferrari, Teklay Gebremichael, Ulf Jennehag, Mikael Gidlund · 2018
In the context of Internet of Things (IoT), group communication is an efficient and fast way of broadcasting group messages. The message needs to be sent securely to maintain confidentiality of data and privacy of users. Establishing cryptographically secure communication links between a group of transceivers requires the pre-agreement upon some key, unknown to an external attacker. Complex and resource-intensive security schemes are infeasible for devices with limited computational capabilities. In this paper, we implement a lightweight and computationally secure group key establishment scheme suitable for resource constrained IoT networks. The proposed scheme is based on elliptic curve cryptography and cryptographic one-way accumulators. We analyze its feasibility by implementing it in the Contiki operating system and simulating it with the Cooja simulator. The simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of the scheme and its computational and communication costs are also comparable with other existing approaches, with an energy consumption of only 109 mJ per node for group key establishment.