A Secure Symmetric Key Synchronization Using Session Key Identifier Block Algorithm for LPWAN Networks

Abstract

Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) have gained considerable importance with the usage and sustainable development of the Internet of Things (IoT). LPWANs have advantages; however, they have many limitations, including limited bandwidth, restricted payload size, and low power devices. Due to these limitations, LPWAN networks confront many challenges, like encrypting the data with the cypher chaining mode or implementing complex algorithms. Here, the cypher chaining mode cannot identify the next message if any packet has been lost because of the device's limited payload size and low memory. So, currently available algorithms cannot be used for LPWAN networks. Key is very important in cryptography; if an attacker compromises a secret key, it leads to a breach of the whole data. The best possible solution to prevent this breach is to frequently change the secret key. Here, we propose a novel algorithm to change the key for every message by synchronizing the sender's IoT device key. This system also proposes a Session Key Identifier Block (SKIB), implementing a session key for every message without any sequence number. The SKIB module identifies the session keys with the hash function and a shared secret key. The proposed work also compared the previous methods with experimental results.