Secure authenticated key exchange for WSNs in IoT applications

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are the key technological building block of Internet of Things (IoT), by which remote users can access the real-time data from the sensor nodes. Due to the openness and mobility of such network, it is essential to establish secure links for end-to-end communication with proper authentication. Although amount of research works in this area have been made, so far designing a secure and efficient authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol for this setting is still an open topic. So, the authors in this paper design a two-factor AKE protocol using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for WSNs in the context of IoT, allowing the end users and sensor nodes to exchange information directly after a secure link is established with the help of the corresponding gateway node. The heuristic security analysis has shown that the new protocol can provide various expected security attributes and resist various known attacks. Moreover, the performance study states that the new protocol is efficient enough and has certain efficiency advantages in the aspects of computation and communication costs compared with the same type of ECC-based AKE protocols for IoT applications.