Secure and Efficient Key Exchange Mechanism for Heterogeneous Connected Objects

Abstract

The fast evolution in microelectronics and the emergence of wireless communication technologies, have allowed the appearance of the promising field of Internet of Things (IoT). The latter is more and more present in the human life, that is why it becomes essential to secure the communications done with the connected objects. Almost all communicating systems attach great importance to security, consequently, on the cryptographic key management. The existing key management schemes for conventional networks are relatively resource-intensive, that is why they are not adequate for resource-constrained networks like IoT, especially since the nodes’ capabilities are heterogeneous. In this paper, we focus on exchanging and updating of cryptographic keys among the IoT objects often limited in resources, where we propose a new form of key exchange based on the mechanism of concealing encryption keys, while exploiting the misused spaces in the header fields of the exchanged packets by the communication standards, such as ZigBee, BLE, WiFi.