S6AE: Securing 6lowpan using authenticated encryption scheme

Abstract

IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) has an ample share in the Internet of Things. Sensor nodes in 6LoWPAN collect vital information from the environment and transmit to a central server through the public Internet. Therefore, it is inevitable to secure communications and allow legitimate sensor nodes to access network resources. This paper presents a lightweight Authentication and Key Exchange (AKE) scheme for 6LoWPAN using an authenticated encryption algorithm and hash function. Upon successful authentication, sensor nodes and the central server can establish the secret key for secure communications. The proposed scheme ensures header verification during the AKE process without using IP security protocol and, thus, has low communication and computational overheads. The logical correctness of the proposed scheme is validated through Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic. Furthermore, automatic security analyses by using AVISPA illustrate that the proposed scheme is resistant to various malicious attacks in 6LoWPANs.