ACKE: Asymmetric Computing Key Exchange Protocol for IoT Environments

Abstract

Most of the cryptographic protocols currently in use are not appropriate for Internet of Things (IoT) environments because of their huge computing overhead, especially for terminal embedded devices with resource-constrained. Moreover, the computing resources in IoT environments are frequently asymmetric, that is to say, the computing power of the terminal devices is always weak and the server-side is relatively stronger. In order to guarantee the security in the scenario, we present the asymmetric computing cryptosystem. Take the key exchange protocol as an example, we show how to construct ACKE, an asymmetric computing key exchange protocol, by employing the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol and the Subset Product problem (NP-complete) in this paper. The underlying idea this construction is to significantly decrease the computational complexity of one party, and allow for a suitable rise in the computational complexity of another party. Our proposed protocol is implemented on an IoT simulation platform composed of a notebook PC of Intel i5-5200U 2.2GHZ/8G and a smart watch of MTK6062 1.2GHZ/512M. The experimental results show that this work will assist in making the Diffie-Hellman type protocol suitable for practical applications in IoT environments.