Unforgeable Digital Signature Integrated into Lightweight Encryption Based on Effective ECDH for Cybersecurity Mechanism in Internet of Things

Abstract

Cybersecurity protocols enable several levels of protection against cyberattacks (digital attacks) that spread across network devices, platform programs, and network applications. On the Internet of Things (IoT), cyberattacks are generally intended to access and change/destroy sensitive information, which may reduce IoT benefits. Moreover, recent IoT systems are experiencing a critical challenge in designing a lightweight and robust cybersecurity mechanism on resource-constrained IoT devices. The cybersecurity challenges facing the IoT that should be taken into consideration are identifying compromised devices, data/service protection, and identifying impacted IoT users. This paper proposes an unforgeable digital signature integrated into an effective lightweight encryption (ELCD) mechanism that utilizes the secure key distribution in an elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH) and resolves the weak bit problem in the shared secret key due to the Diffie–Hellman exchange. The ELCD mechanism proposes a secure combination between the digital signature and encryption, and it uses fast hash functions to confidentially transfer a shared secret key among IoT devices over an insecure communication channel. Furthermore, the ELCD mechanism checks the true identity of the sender with certainty through the proposed digital signature, which works based on a hash function and three steps of curve-point inspection. Furthermore, the security of ELCD was mathematically proven using the random oracle and IoT adversary models. The findings of the emulation results show the effectiveness of ELCD in terms of CPU execution time, storage cost, and power consumption that are less by 53.8%, 33–17%, and 68.7%, respectively, compared to the baseline cryptographic algorithms.

An Authenticated Group Shared Key Mechanism Based on a Combiner for Hash Functions over the Industrial Internet of Things

“…As a result, the general idea of related works in this paper concentrated on group key management in the IIoT networks. Adel et al [10] proposed a shared group secret key (SGSK), which is created based on the token ring concept. This means that the SGSK is forwarded from one node to the next connected node in the group.…”

“…The previous literature studies [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] had several limitations, which can be specified in three facts: Firstly, the group key agreements that were reviewed in the related works were required to broadcast and exchange many messages between the controller and the group members, which might have exposed the group shared key (GSK) and increased the communication and computation costs. Second, some protocols did not consider the group member authentication and message integrity, thereby facilitating the MITM attack.…”

“…The message authentication code (MAC) is calculated for Q using the hash function-based GPS location for the IIoT device. (3) The MAC is signed with the private key d. The digital signature algorithm in our previous works [10,27,28] has been used to sign the MAC. ( 4)…”

“…The performance evaluation of the AGSK has been evaluated and compared to the baseline mechanisms in terms of CPU computation time, power consumption, and storage costs. Three baseline mechanisms were inspected which are the SGSK [10], GKA-SS [12], and NM-CHH-GKA [11]. All experiments investigated only the performance of the group key sharing without authentication and digital signature for the AGSK and baseline mecha-nisms.…”

“…The prior four cryptanalysis attacks have been discussed in detail and the proposed cryptography, authentication, and digital signature securities have been mathematically proven in our previous works [10,27,28].…”