Biblio
Traditional security solutions that rely on public key infrastructure present scalability and transparency challenges when deployed in Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we develop a blockchain based authentication mechanism for IoT that can be integrated into the traditional transport layer security protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS). Our proposed mechanism is an alternative to the traditional Certificate Authority (CA)-based Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that relies on x.509 certificates. Specifically, the proposed solution enables the modified TLS/DTLS a viable option for resource constrained IoT devices where minimizing memory utilization is critical. Experiments show that blockchain based authentication can reduce dynamic memory usage by up to 20%, while only minimally increasing application image size and time of execution of the TLS/DTLS handshake.
6LoWPAN networks involving wireless sensors consist of resource starving miniature sensor nodes. Since secured authentication of these resource-constrained sensors is one of the important considerations during communication, use of asymmetric key distribution scheme may not be the perfect choice to achieve secure authentication. Recent research shows that Lucky Thirteen attack has compromised Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) with Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode for key establishment. Even though EAKES6Lo and S3K techniques for key establishment follow the symmetric key establishment method, they strongly rely on a remote server and trust anchor for secure key distribution. Our proposed Lightweight Authentication Protocol (LAUP) used a symmetric key method with no preshared keys and comprised of four flights to establish authentication and session key distribution between sensors and Edge Router in a 6LoWPAN environment. Each flight uses freshly derived keys from existing information such as PAN ID (Personal Area Network IDentification) and device identities. We formally verified our scheme using the Scyther security protocol verification tool for authentication properties such as Aliveness, Secrecy, Non-Injective Agreement and Non-Injective Synchronization. We simulated and evaluated the proposed LAUP protocol using COOJA simulator with ContikiOS and achieved less computational time and low power consumption compared to existing authentication protocols such as the EAKES6Lo and SAKES.