Energy Efficient Secure Key Management Schemes for WSNs and IoT

Abstract

Secret sharing is critical to most applications making use of security and remains one of the most challenging research areas in modern cryptography. In this thesis, we propose a novel efficient multi-secret sharing scheme based on the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) with two verification methods, while the previous works are mostly based on the Lagrange polynomial. Key management schemes play an important role in communication security in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). While the previous works mainly targeting on two different types of WSNs: distributed and hieratical, in this thesis, we propose our flexible WSN key management scheme, which is based on (n,t,n) multi-secret sharing technique, to provide a key management solution for heterogeneous architecture. The powerful key managers are responsible for most of the communicational and computational workload. They can provide Peer-to-Peer pair-wise keys for a pair of sensors to establish a secure communication session, and in the same time, they can also form communication clusters as cluster heads according to different application requirements. Internet of Things (IoT) becomes more and more popular and practical in recent years. Considering the diversity of the devices and the application scenarios, it is extremely hard to couple two devices or sub-networks with different communication and computation resources. In this thesis, we propose novel key agreement schemes based on (n,t,n) multi-secret sharing techniques for IoT in order to achieve light weighted key exchange while using Host Identity Protocol (HIP). We refer the new schemes as HIP-MEXs with different underlying multi-secret sharing techniques. We analyzed the computational and communication costs of the extremely resource constrained device which is referred to as Initiator, and CRT based HIP-MEX successfully outsource the heavy workload to the proxy, which are considered more powerful, when establishing new secret key.