LiSP-XK: Extended Light-Weight Signcryption for IoT in Resource-Constrained Environments

Tai-Hoon Kim,Tannishtha Devgun,Reji Thomas,Rahul Saha,Gulshan Kumar,William J Buchanan

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3097267

Abstract

There is an increasing drive to provide improved levels of trust within an Internet-of-Things (IoTs) environments, but the devices and sensors used tend to be limited in their capabilities for dealing with traditional cryptography methods. Resource constraints and security are often the two major concerns of IIoT (Industrial IoT applications and big data generation at the present time. The strict security measures are often not significantly resource-managed and therefore, negotiation normally takes place between these. Following this, various light-weight versions of generic security primitives have been developed for IIoT and other resource-constrained sustainability. In this paper, we address the authentication concerns for resource-constrained environments by designing an efficient authentication protocol. Our authentication scheme is based on LiSP (light-weight Signcryption Protocol); however, some further customization has been performed on it to make it more suitable for IIoT-like resource-constrained environments. We use Keccack as the hash function in the process and Elli for light-weight public-key cryptography. We name our authentication scheme: <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Extended light-weight Signcryption Protocol with Keccack</i> (LiSP-XK). The paper outlines a comparative analysis on our new design of authentication against a range of state-of-the-art schemes. We find the suitability of LiSP-XK for IIoT like environments due to its lesser complexity and less energy consumption. Moreover, the signcryption process is also beneficial in enhancing security. Overall the paper shows that LiSP-XK is overall 35% better in efficiency as compared to the other signcryption approaches.

Highlights

IoT is one of the most promising technologies to be adopted in multi-dimensional applications [1]–[3]
Even though IoT has provided many advantages, there are some serious problems that relate to security, privacy, compatibility and complexity [7]
As IoT has extended to Industrial IoTs (IIoTs), smart developments and other progressive dimensions, the number of connections has been significantly increased

Summary

INTRODUCTION

IoT is one of the most promising technologies to be adopted in multi-dimensional applications [1]–[3]. Various algorithms exist with generic cryptographic constructions for both encryption and authentication These methods are not always feasible for IoT environments due to their complexities and poor resource utilization. It digitally signs the message and encrypts it in a single logical step, where the digital signature provides the authentication of the user’s device at the perception layer. Such signcryption schemes are beneficial on resource-constrained scenarios due to their reduced computational cost and effectiveness as compared to the sign--encrypt approach. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) We address the resource constraints of the IoT applicability by the design of an extended light-weight authentication.

RELATED WORK

SETUP AND KEY GENERATION

Findings

DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS

CONCLUSION