L-ECQV: Lightweight ECQV Implicit Certificates for Authentication in the Internet of Things

Abstract

The vast expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and related applications has bridged the gap between the physical and digital world. Unfortunately, security remains a major challenge and the lack of secure links have fueled the increased attacks on IoT devices and networks. Due to its inherent scalability, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is the well-known and classic approach to bring public-key certificate based security to IoT. Even though the standard X.509 explicit certificates can be viable solution, they are inefficient and too large for resource constrained IoT networks and therefore, smaller, faster and more efficient Elliptic Curve Qu Vanstone (ECQV) implicit certificates can be employed for establishing authenticated connections in IoT. Moreover, the existing certificate-based authentication proposals in standardized IoT networks have either been deployed at the transport or physical layers. Thus, these proposals fail to provide true end-to-end security to messages at the application layer in the presence of intermediate CoAP proxies. This challenging aspect is addressed in this proposal by focusing on the certificate-based authentication at the application layer to ensure true end-to-end security of messages. Additionally, IoT application layer security protocols like EDHOC lacks mechanism for authenticated distribution of public keys and thus, there is a need for lightweight authentication based cryptographic primitive for establishing secure key agreement in IoT. This paper introduces a design and implementation of a lightweight ECQV implicit certificate and use them for authenticated key exchange in EDHOC at the application layer. We also design a lightweight profile with a novel encoding mechanism for ECQV implicit certificate, called L-ECQV. To prove its viability, L-ECQV has been implemented and evaluated on Contiki operating system. Our evaluation results show that the proposed L-ECQV certificate approach reduces energy consumption by 27%, message overhead of EDHOC handshake by 52%, and shows improvements in certificate validation time. The security analysis demonstrates that proposed L-ECQV certificates for EDHOC protocol is secure against a number of attack vectors present in the IoT network. This novel combination of ECQV certificates with EDHOC key exchange leads to a secure and lightweight authenticated key agreement in IoT networks.

Exploring Authentication Paradigms in the Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Scoping Review

“…Networks: Comprising 12% of the total, research papers [57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65] in this domain emphasize advanced protocols and encryption strategies to foster trusted connections. The primary focus is on fortifying network security to mitigate unauthorized access and potential data breaches.…”

“…This section will delve into the five contribution approaches for each domain, and they have been mapped in Table 7. Among the most popular problems involves addressing the issue of computational constraints associated with authentication processes in IoT, which leads to the proposal of a lightweight authentication framework [7,44,55,59,61,64,65,67,70], especially when integrating blockchain technology [80]. Another problem arose from the risk to personal data (or data privacy), which requires a secure communication protocol to protect the privacy and reliability of IoT communications [10,30,32,33,50,52,53,65,71,77].…”

“…Malik's [58] work emphasizes the necessity for resource-efficient security mechanisms in IoT applications, proposing lightweight ECQV implicit certificates (L-ECQV) to optimize security for constrained devices. Leng [59] contributes with single-frame and multi-frame physical-layer authentication schemes using spreading code watermarking, streamlining authentication without complicated upperlayer protocols. Transitioning to Blockchain Integration, Chanal [60] adopts a Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) server agency and the Random Forest (RF) algorithm to utilize context information for IoT object authentication.…”

“…Regarding Efficient Encryption, Annadurai [10] emphasizes the importance of secure data transmission in a biometric authentication system, underscoring the significance of efficient encryption methods to fortify overall system security. Regarding innovation approaches, Chen [59] proposes an authentication scheme tailored for smart IoT applications. This scheme supports mutual authentication among devices, back-end servers, and users' mobile applications, covering the entire device lifecycle.…”

“…Precision measures correctly predicted positive samples out of all predicted positives, and recall measures correctly predicted positive samples out of all positives. Prediction performance in authentication was evaluated based on such accuracy measures [14,16,46,59,60,68,74], as well as the quality of the encryption technique [34]. Other studies focus on converging the prediction model incorporated in the overall authentication processes [71].…”