Lightweight Authentication Model for IoT Environments Based on Enhanced Elliptic Curve Digital Signature and Shamir Secret Share

Abstract

With the rapid use of the Internet, and the increase in the numbers of smart and mobile devices, the internet of things (IoT) fields had become more crucial fields in the interest of developers. Many aspects related to authentication and privacy communication during an interaction between remote users and IoT devices should be enabled and achieved in a lightweight and secure manner. Due to the elliptic curve digital signature (ECDSA)’s features that are secure and lightweight compared with other public key algorithms; this paper presents a new IoT authentication model that incorporates a modified ECDSA. But unfortunately, the familiar use of ECDSA in Blockchain showed some problems related to the capability of revealing the random private integer, which leads to private key disclosure, and hence funds theft, this paper highlights this problem and proposes modifications to the ECDSA to make it more reliable. In addition, the proposed model combines a modified ECDSA and Shamir’s secret sharing (SSS). The combination can give better results in establishing a more securely authentication agreement and robustness to resolve the standard algorithm attenuation, this modification involved a variant of ECDSA’s calculations in signature processing, and employing Shamir’s Secret Sharing to further protect the random private integer. Also, the proposed model achieves lower overhead communications by splitting and redistributing authentication calculations roles between the system’s entities. After security analysis, the proposed algorithm exhibits ability to resist potential threats, also, a comparison with other related works demonstrates that the proposed algorithm performs fewer arithmetic operations, relatively, by decreasing the number of modular inverse operations, so this feature lowers resources-efforts and high performance, moreover, the theoretical analysis indicates that the proposed algorithm efficiently manages the scalability of the system