An Unbalanced Security Protocol for IoT devices

Abstract

Authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol is a crucial process in Internet of Things. This paper aims to customize the Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH)-based AKE according to the computational capability of devices. We propose a method to unbalance the computations in the ECDH key exchange scheme by configuring the more powerful device undertake one scalar multiplication on behalf of the computationally limited one. The analysis results show that the computationally unbalanced protocols are more friendly to computationally limited devices than the original one.