A Scalable Key Pre-distribution Scheme based on the Unital Design for the Internet of Things Security

Abstract

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has swept through most aspects of people lives, where all objects are connected to a common network. Therefore, the security of IoT devices is naturally crucial. As for the constrained resources of IoT devices, we need to have lightweight encryption algorithms. Accordingly, the symmetric key establishment is a favourite paradigm for securing IoT. In this study, a key pre-distribution scheme (KPS) has been proposed based on the combinatorial design for IoT. The proposed KPS has been created to increase network scalability. Therefore, a combinatorial design called the unital design has been applied for the establishment of keys. In the present scheme, a kind of mapping has been proposed from the unital design to the key establishment, which yields a network with high scalability. The results indicate that the present scheme increases network scalability considerably with high resilience.