Development of lightweight cryptographic primitives for secure communication in the internet of things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) envisages connecting all physical things to the Internet and bridging the gap between the physical and the digital world, with new solutions bringing benefits to people, processes and businesses. However, key management, a security challenge, associated with authentication of communicating parties will be a major challenge in enabling most of such applications. The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) has been an effective solution to establish trusted cryptographic identities on the Internet using digital certificates. The challenges in the deployment of PKI in IoT include the constrained nature of IoT devices, large size of certificates, and expensive cryptographic operations of the PKI. Therefore, there is a need to optimize PKI primitives for their successful implementation in IoT. In this thesis, a thorough and critical analysis of the existing key management solutions in IoT with major focus on PKI-based solutions is performed. Then, a novel lightweight implicit digital certificate profile based on Elliptic Curve Qu-Vanstone (ECQV) standard to reduce the memory, communication and computational overhead on IoT devices is proposed. Later, an integration of proposed implicit certificate profile with Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman over COSE (EDHOC), a key establishment protocol has been proposed to ensure mutual authentication of communicating entities. Further, a lightweight implicit certificate enrollment primitive designed using Enrollment over Secure Transport (EST) and EDHOC protocol is proposed. The utilization of an implicit certificate authenticated EDHOC protocol to carry EST enrollment messages as auxiliary data ensures lightweight certificate enrollment and authenticated key exchange for secure communication in IoT. newline