Lightweight noncommutative key exchange protocol for IoT environments

Abstract

Network communications are expanding rapidly in many fields, including telecommunications, the Internet of Things, space, consumer electronics, and the military, with different privacy and security issues at stake in each of these areas. The Internet of Things (IoT) has drawn increased attention from academic and industrial researchers over the last few decades. In this environment, keys are routinely exchanged through a public protocol to support the highly secure IoT domain and thwart security threats from unauthorized parties. The environment for IoT devices is subject to numerous limitations, including those related to processing, memory, and energy. These devices need to pass through a gateway or sink to connect to the network. Additionally, the environment must enable secure communication between gateways and IoT devices, even when the devices are disconnected from the rest of the network. In this paper, a lightweight key exchange protocol for IoT environments is presented, allowing the gateway and the IoT device to communicate over an open channel. Our proposed protocol improves security by utilizing noncommutative structures and polynomials over noncommutative rings. The underlying idea is to use the generalized decomposition problem associated with noncommutative rings. Furthermore, how the suggested protocol can achieve key certification and perfect onward secrecy is addressed. Results show this protocol is a strong candidate for key sharing and secure communication between IoT devices. We put our methodology into practice and the results of our experiments demonstrate enhancement of security levels. Finally, the performance analysis of the suggested protocol is compared with some other protocols, in terms of security, communication, and computing overhead.