CoopECC: A Collaborative Cryptographic Mechanism for the Internet of Things

Wassim Jerbi,Abderrahmen Guermazi,Hafedh Trabelsi,Omar Cheikhrouhou,Mucheol Kim

doi:10.1155/2021/8878513

Abstract

The emergence of IoT applications has risen the security issues of the big data sent by the IoT devices. The design of lightweight cryptographic algorithms becomes a necessity. Moreover, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is a promising cryptographic technology that has been used in IoT. However, connected objects are resource-constrained devices, with limited computing power and energy power. Driven by these motivations, we propose and develop a secure cryptographic protocol called CoopECC which leverages the organization of IoT nodes into cluster to distribute the load of cluster head (CH) among its cluster members. This technique proves that it optimizes the resource consumption of the IoT nodes including computation and energy consumption. Performance evaluation, done with TOSSIM simulator, shows that the proposed protocol CoopECC outperforms the original ECC algorithm, in terms of computation time, consumed energy, and the network’s lifespan.

Highlights

The emergence of IoT technology resulted in its integration in various applications including smart cities, healthcare, machine to machine systems, connected vehicles, and smart homes
In order to evaluate the performance of our CoopECC protocol, we implemented it on Telosb sensors, which are designed by Crossbow Technology for research purposes
CoopECC permits to speed up the cryptographic operations computation based on parallelism concept

Summary

Introduction

The emergence of IoT technology resulted in its integration in various applications including smart cities, healthcare, machine to machine systems, connected vehicles, and smart homes. The big data volume generated by IoT devices increases the necessity of lightweight cryptographic algorithm to encrypt such data in privacy aware applications. These security needs, recent studies [1] show that existing security protocols fail to fulfill the characteristics and requirements of IoT devices. Our solution is more adapted to clusterbased network architecture, and it allows the cluster head (CH) to break down the computation task between the different members of the cluster. This permits to lighten the cryptography processing at IoT nodes.

Related Works

The Proposed Protocol

Performance and Evaluation of CoopECC

Conclusion