Security Issues on Machine to Machine Communications

Abstract

Machine to machine (M2M) communications is the hottest issue in the standardization and industry area, it is also defined as machine-type communication (MTC) in release 10 of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). Recently, most research have focused on congestion control, sensing, computing, and controlling technologies and resource management etc., but there are few studies on security aspects. In this paper, we first introduce the threats that exist in M2M system and corresponding solutions according to 3GPP. In addition, we present several new security issues including group access authentication, multiparty authentication and data authentication, and propose corresponding solutions through modifying existing authentication protocols and cryptographic algorithms, such as group authentication and key agreement protocol used to solve group access authentication of M2M, proxy signature for M2M system to tackle authentication issue among multiple entities and aggregate signature used to resolve security of small data transmission in M2M communications.