SUMMARYAsymmetric cryptography has been widely used to generate a digital signature for message authentication. However, such a strategy cannot be used for packet authentication. Neither the source nor the receiver will be capable of handling the computational cost of asymmetric cryptography. For unicast communication, the solution adopted is based on symmetric cryptography. Solutions based on symmetric cryptography do not scale for multicast communication. Several solutions have been reported to authenticate multicast streams, with the possibility of packet losses. Proposed solutions are based on the concept of signature amortization, where a single signature is amortized on several packets. In this paper we present a new mechanism for multicast data source authentication based on signature amortization. Multi-layers connected chains divides the packet stream into a multi-layer structure, where each layer is a two-dimensional matrix. The hash of a packet is included into a forward chain of packets within the same layer as well as a downward chain of packets across multiple layers. The values of the key parameters that influence the mechanism efficiency as well as its performance are selected following a mathematical analysis. Comparisons of performance results with the well-known efficient multi-chained stream signature scheme as well as a recently reported scheme multiple connected chains model show that the proposed mechanism achieves a stronger resistance to packet losses with low overhead and high authentication probability.

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Secure communication of Internet of Things (IoT) devices relies on cryptographic approaches whose robustness is based on the security of encryption keys. For instance, an adequate key management scheme must be used to properly manage the used keys. Designing an efficient and robust key management scheme for the connected devices is a challenging task. Reported key management schemes suffer from several deficiencies such as the single point of failure and the non–trade‐off between scalability, connectivity, and resiliency. This paper first reviews key management schemes in the context of the IoT. Then, we propose a collaborative lightweight key management scheme that secures the keys during the life cycle of the embedded devices. Our proposal relies on the collaboration of the smart devices, where all the devices participate in the construction of the global key. Following the analytical and the comparative studies, we show that our proposal can be integrated in several communication protocols designated for embedded devices such as IEEE 802.15.4. Simulation results validate the analytical study and show that the proposed collaborative group key scheme exhibits superior performance when compared with two corresponding schemes reported in the literature.