A Lightweight and Secure Communication Protocol for the IoT Environment

Ensuring secure communications for the Internet of Things (IoT) systems remains a challenge. Due to exacting resource limitations of computing, memory, and communication in IoT environments, communication schemes based on asymmetric cryptographic systems can be challenging to deploy. An alternative is to deploy symmetric encryption schemes based on pre-shared keys. However, there are also challenges in designing such schemes and examples include how to achieve an optimal trade-off between security and performance levels while meeting resource consumption requirements, especially when adding some of these devices to the blockchain. Hence, this paper presents a lightweight key synchronization update algorithm, which is then used as a building block in our proposed lightweight secure communication protocol. The security of the protocol is analyzed to show that it can resist common attacks, such as replay attacks, and man-in-the-middle attacks. We then use Tamarin, a widely accepted security protocol verification tool, for formal verification. In addition, we evaluate the randomness and computational performance of the lightweight key synchronization update algorithm and demonstrate that it outperforms other schemes. We also evaluate the performance of the protocol, in terms of computational and communication costs, to demonstrate utility.