A Novel Latin-Square-Based Secret Sharing for M2M Communications

Abstract

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, an automated communications technology for the equipment or devices, holds great promise in every corner of the modern society, such as civil transportation, smart homes, smart grids, and industrial automation. The M2M technology is still in its infancy, and further development and deployment of M2M systems hinges on establishing an efficient and secure information management system with a satisfactory security level. In this paper, we extend the idea of $(t,n)$ secret sharing for information transmission in M2M with high security and efficiency. Specifically, a secret is divided into $2k$ shares, and then, transmitted through $2k$ node-disjoint paths constructed by the Latin square. Note that in our scheme, the secret key is simultaneously transmitted along with the encrypted message through these $2k$ paths from the source node to the destination node, which greatly improves the efficiency of point-to-point communications in M2M systems. Furthermore, owing to the properties of $(t,n)$ secret sharing, the security of M2M communications is guaranteed. In addition, to avoid dishonest participants, verifiable secret sharing is supported in the proposed scheme. Sufficient theoretical proof and performance analysis demonstrate that our scheme is secure and efficient for M2M communications.