Lightweight deterministic non interactive (ni) hierarchical key agreement scheme (KAS)

Abstract

Key management is a cornerstone requirement for any security solution. Energy efficient key agreement schemes (KAS) that establish symmetric secrets are best suited for resource constraint devices of low cost Internet of Things (IoT), like sensors of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). There exists numerous elegant distributed KAS, either random or deterministic; however an adequate deterministic hierarchical proposal is absent till date. We propose a lightweight key agreement scheme (KAS) that achieves these desirable design criteria: supports a decentralized hierarchy of prefixed number of levels (l). Decentralization is necessary for large networks to delegate powers to lower level users and thereby reduce the burden of primal central authority; deterministic KPS implies nodes in our hierarchy has predictable key rings;our scheme is resilient against compromise of (i) any number of lower level users; and (ii) threshold number of same or higher level nodes in hierarchy;our scheme has predictable connectivity throughout the hierarchy which is a linear function of the system parameter n. In fact our subset based scheme is fully connected till depth 2 (root authority at depth 0). non-interactive: that saves bandwidth. Rigorous quantitative and qualitative analysis exhibit that this first ever deterministic subset scheme (defined in [8]) outperforms related state-of-the-art protocols.