Secure Provisioning for Achieving End-to-End Secure Communications

Abstract

The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) is raising significant impact in several contexts, e.g., in cities, at home, and even attached to the human body. This digital transformation is happening at a high pace and causing a great impact in our daily lives, namely in our attempt to make cities smarter in an attempt to increase their efficiency while reducing costs and increasing safety. However, this effort is being supported by the massive deployment of sensors throughout cities worldwide, leading to increase concerns regarding security and privacy. While some of these issues have already been tackled, device authentication remains without a viable solution, specially when considering a resilient decentralized approach that is the most suitable for this scenario, as it avoids some issues related to centralization, e.g., censorship and data leakage or profit from corporations. The provisioning is usually an arduous task that encompasses device configuration, including identity and key provisioning. Given the potential large number of devices, this process must be scalable and semi-autonomous, at least. This work presents a novel approach for provisioning IoT devices that adopts an architecture where other device acts as a manager that represents a CA, allowing it to be switched on/off during the provisioning phase to reduce single point of failure (SPOF) problems. Our solution combines One Time Password (OTP) on a secure token and cryptographic algorithms on a hybrid authentication system.