Innovative Lightweight Key Agreement Protocol Based on Hyperelliptic Curve for IoT Mutual Authentication

Abstract

Fog nodes are established to be intermediate between the IoT devices node and the cloud data center to alleviate the latency of data transmission. Fog computing enables low-cost IoT systems to communicate with high-end cloud servers at the network’s edge. As a result, fog systems can conduct data summarization and analysis, resulting in a substantial reduction in request delay for latency-sensitive applications. It can perform data aggregation, reducing the bandwidth required, which is critical for wireless connection with cloud servers. Due to the huge amount of data exchanged among three nodes namely: IoT device, fog, and cloud nodes, it poses many security issues like how to protect these connected devices from unauthorized access.

The challenge is to design a secure mutual authentication protocol that has lightweight to resource-constrained devices. Therefore, IoT-enabled devices demand a lightweight secure cryptography scheme. It’s necessary to secure end-to-end communication in IoT applications to avoid information leakage. This study proposes a lightweight authenticated key agreement protocol based on a hyperelliptic curve which uses a small size base field compared with traditional cryptography methods. The proposed protocol saves communication bandwidth and reduces computational complexity. In addition, the proposed protocol can establish a common session key between three communication nodes. We analysed and proved the security properties of the proposed protocol informally against the known attacks. We found that the proposed protocol can resist known attacks. The comparative analysis of our proposed protocol with related works in contexts of IoT security and performance showed that our work outperformed the protocols of related works by 54% as an average rational improvement with less communication and computation overhead costs.