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A secure blockchain-based group key agreement protocol for IoT

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Abstract

Since most Internet of things (IoT) devices are energy-limited, increasingly more manufacturers have chosen to develop IoT applications based on group communication. For these applications, a secure and effective authenticated group secret key is fundamental to whole group communication. A large number of related protocols have been proposed to address this security problem. However, most of them have a centralized architecture, which is vulnerable to a single point of failure. Blockchain technology has the potential to address the challenges mentioned above because of its distributed, secure, and private property. Thus, this paper proposes a blockchain-based authenticated group key agreement protocol for IoT. The proposed protocol introduces a new entity called the device manager, who acts as an intermediary to connect IoT devices with blockchain networks. Security analysis demonstrates the robustness of the proposed protocol to various kinds of attacks. Besides, the simulation results further show that the time costs of protocol operations are reasonable and suitable for IoT environments.

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Notes

  1. To prevent malicious users from sending a large number of meaningless transactions in the blockchain network, resulting in the waste of computing resources, most of the existing blockchain platforms adopt the transaction charging strategy. For example, each transaction on Ethereum requires a fee, and gas is the basic unit used for measuring the computing resources consumed by a transaction. Generally, the more computational steps a transaction takes, the more gas it consumes.

  2. Txpool is a buffer for a large number of transactions. As long as there are new transactions, no matter they are created by this node or broadcast by other peer nodes, they will be first added to txpool. When the blocks are packed, transaction will be extracted from this pool.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Collage of of Computer Science and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, Shandong, China

    Chien-Ming Chen

  2. School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, China

    Xiaoting Deng

  3. College of Cyber Security, Jinan University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

    Wensheng Gan

  4. School of Computer, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

    Jiahui Chen

  5. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Information Technology Kalyani, Kalyani, West Bengal, India

    S. K. Hafizul Islam

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  1. Chien-Ming Chen
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  2. Xiaoting Deng
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  5. S. K. Hafizul Islam
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Correspondence to Wensheng Gan.

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Chen, CM., Deng, X., Gan, W. et al. A secure blockchain-based group key agreement protocol for IoT. J Supercomput 77, 9046–9068 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-020-03561-y

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