Cryptanalysis of ecc-based key agreement scheme for generic IoT network model

Abstract

Enhancement in Wireless sensing technology had widened its application scope and deployment possibilities. Since 2004, Wireless Sensor Network(WSN) became one of the top interesting topics for the researchers due to its advantages and futuristic aspects. After the emergence of the Internet of Things(IoT), WSN became an integral part of IoT. IoT is the technology which aims to provide any service to anyone at any time with the improved quality of service. IoT invites many entities to communicate in its large scale application and allow entities to share collected information in either wired or wireless manner. After studying most of the literature, we found out that most communication in IoT scenario occurred over public channel rather than secured channels and this aspect approached many researchers to focus on the security part of IoT communication. Billions of devices/humans do the communication with each other as well as provide the critical data to each other on public channels so it becomes important for the communicating parties to validate each other as well as generate a communication secret for sharing a secret or critical information. Since 2009, many authors had focused on Remote User Authentication(RUA) for Wireless Sensor Network. In this paper, we have reviewed the RUA scheme provided by Chen et al. [1] and listed out some shortcoming of their scheme. Authors have made use of famous light weight and secured cryptographic approach called as Elliptic Curve Cryptography(ECC) for their protocol design but due to adversary capabilities, we have found their there scheme is not secured against node capturing attack and gateway node bypassing attack. We have also discussed the network model followed by authors in their paper which may help other researchers to study and apply in their RUA protocol design. This activity would help other protocol designers to improve their approaches in the field of RUA protocol designing for IoT environment.