An efficient key agreement and authentication protocol for secure communication in industrial IoT applications

Abstract

A most prominent and emerging technology namely the Internet of Things (IoT) enables legitimate users to access and monitor the sensors installed in various units of the industry. Such access and monitoring is facilitated using a secure authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocol. However, the complexity arises during the establishment of an effective session key agreement protocol to allow users to communicate securely with the sensors placed in the industrial IoT (IIoT). Few key agreement protocols existing in the literature have proved to perform the task effectively. Nevertheless, such protocols suffer from increased computation and communication cost. Hence, the motivation is to develop an efficient key agreement protocol that could over perform the existing protocols. Therefore, this research paper proposes an efficient key agreement protocol which is computationally and communication efficient. Moreover, the proposed key agreement protocol permits the users to securely communicate with the sensors. The proposed work focuses on twin dimensions. The first dimension is to reduce the computational complexity while sharing the mutual session key among the users and sensors. The second dimension focuses on decreasing the communicational cost. This is achieved by minimizing the amount of information communicated among the users and sensors. Subsequently, the proposed protocol is a hybrid methodology in which there are two working layers through which the session key is established. In the first layer, a mutual secret key is generated using a well-known elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) technique and this is shared among the users and the gateway node (GWN). In the second layer, the key generated in the above layer is used and the user initiates the key agreement process, wherein the GWN and sensors are generating a mutual session key using a group key. The simulated results of the proposed work clearly depicts the substantial reduction of computational and communicational complexities.