Robust and lightweight symmetric key exchange algorithm for next-generation IoE

Abstract

The Internet of Everything (IoE) is a multi-domain environment where millions of people and smart devices are connected and communicate with each other. IoE demands security services in terms of data or entity authentication, data confidentiality, data integrity, data or services availability, and non-repudiation. There are multiple security protocols that work with secret keys to provide security services. The key exchange or key distribution between two parties over the insecure network is the main challenge. Researchers introduced several state-of-the-art symmetric or asymmetric key exchange algorithms such as RSA, ECC, DH, ECDH, and Curve25519. Asymmetric algorithms are considered heavyweight in terms of computation and communication costs while symmetric key exchange algorithms are considered lightweight. Symmetric key exchange algorithms do not provide authentication services. As a result, the algorithms are exposed to a man-in-the-middle attack. In this research paper, we propose a lightweight and robust symmetric key exchange algorithm for smart devices which have short computational processing power. Furthermore, we implement our proposed algorithm on the Linux-based Ubuntu virtual operating systems by using system programming in C/C++. In addition, we prove the robustness of our proposed algorithm with the help of informal and formal security analysis through the AVISPA tool. Finally, we compare our proposed algorithm with existing algorithms in terms of computation cost, communication overhead, and security features. The comparison results with existing state-of-the-art key exchange algorithms show that our proposed key exchange algorithm is more suitable for smart devices.