Light-SAE: A Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Large-Scale IoT Environments Made with Constrained Devices

Abstract

Due to the increasing demand for Internet of Things (IoT) applications with sensitive data, the use of encryption on constrained devices is crucial for protecting and ensuring privacy and security. The devices used in such applications have limited computational power, memory, and energy resources, making them vulnerable to attacks that exploit these limitations. Lightweight cryptography has been growing fast in recent years aiming to circumvent the lack of security in these types of devices. We propose a modular solution that capitalizes on the strengths of lightweight cryptography to offer an approach that can be easily adapted to meet the needs of private wireless sensor networks. The solution is designed to work in multi-hop communication networks, where Nodes out of range of the Gateway can be part of the network, offering the same security level that a Node in the communication range of the Gateway has. To further enhance the security and lifetime of the network, our solution incorporates a key renewal mechanism and supports the use of signature schemes for integrity. Additionally, it is designed to be distributed to achieve high levels of scalability. Experimental results show that using our solution on top of standard communication protocols does not introduce significant overhead in terms of performance.