A Secure and Lightweight ECC-Based Authentication Framework for IoT Environment

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has linked billions of smart devices that are employed in healthcare, smart cities, industrial automation, intelligent transportation systems and other applications. However, the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices (limited compute power, memory capacity and energy resources) complicates typical security solutions. The basic security services required in IoT contexts are authentication and key agreement, as they are vital to secure communication and avoid unwanted access. The current authentication mechanisms are unsuitable for lightweight Internet of Things applications due to their high processing and communication costs. To overcome these issues in resource-constrained IoT devices, we propose a lightweight Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) in this paper. The proposed method comprises three processes: device registration, mutual authentication and session key creation. The trusted cloud server registers IoT devices securely and creates credential tokens. In the mutual authentication step, the legality of both connecting entities are verified by using hash functions, random nonces and lightweight ECC algorithms. Then, a temporary ECC-based shared secret is utilised to generate the session key, which ensures the session integrity, freshness, and secrecy. The protocol provides high security guarantees and minimum processing and transmission overhead. The experimental results show that the proposed AKA+ECC protocol is superior to the existing DAC+ECC, LAP+ECC, and SLA+ECC authentication schemes, with a computational cost of 8.3 ms and a communication overhead of 1044 bits. Additionally, the protocol supports secure session key building and is resistant to replay attacks, impersonation attacks, and man-in-the-middle attack. The results proved that the proposed approach is lightweight, scalable and efficient for the security of future IoT settings.