Secure and scalable access control protocol for IoT environment

doi:10.1016/j.iot.2020.100291

Internet of Things

Volume 12, December 2020, 100291

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iot.2020.100291 Get rights and content

Abstract

Smart applications based on IoT has gained huge momentum in recent times. Typically, these applications involve the deployment of smart devices within the perception layer of three-tier IoT architecture. The smart devices may be required to be re-deployed due to adversary attacks, or outage of power. Deployment of new smart devices within the perception layer of IoT based applications is a significant security concern. The deployed smart device can be a malicious node that can disrupt the complete network operations. An access control protocol regulates the deployment of smart devices within the perception layer. Besides obliging the resource constraint nature of smart devices, an access control protocol must also fulfill specific security and functional requirements for its practical consideration. In this paper, an access control protocol based on Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) has been presented. Besides sufficing to all other major security and functional requirements, the proposed protocol is also scalable and independent of clock synchronization issues. The correctness and the soundness of the proposed protocol has been validated using BAN logic. The proposed protocol has also been formally validated using automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) and Scyther tools. The proposed protocol has been compared with relevant existing schemes on various security and functional requirements. The comparison suggests that the proposed protocol has a better trade-off as compared to relevant existing schemes.

Introduction

Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as physical entities with in the world connected to the Internet [1]. As indicated by Gartner [2], the number of connected entities will reach 20.4 billion by the year 2020. IoT has shown much promise to develop smart applications, which include smart offices, smart health, smart water, etc. Typically the IoT based applications are based on 3-tier architecture [3], as shown in Fig. 1. The tiers include 1. Perception layer 2. Network layer 3. Application layer. The perception layer primarily involves sensing and collecting data within a particular region of interest. Within the perception layer, smart devices or nodes capable of sensing and actuating are deployed. The parameters sensed are communicated to the IoT gateway over a network based on 802.15.4, 6lowpan, and other short-range technologies. The sensed data perceived and acquired by the IoT Gateway is further relayed to the network layer. The network layer provides the primary communication support for transmitting the sensed data to various end-user applications, which include smart homes, smart traffic, smart grid, smart health, etc. Besides that, a network layer also provides cloud computing support for a high volume of sensed data. The application layer provides the user application type solution for various applications based on IoT.

One of the critical security services within the IoT environment is the deployment of the smart devices within the perception layer. The need for the re-deployment of the smart devices arises as they may be lost due to adversaries attacks or their battery getting exhausted. The node deployed within the perception layer may be malicious, which may disrupt the functioning of the perception layer and, subsequently, the functioning of the complete IoT application. An access control mechanism is employed to determine the legitimacy of the new smart device to be deployed within the perception layer. An access control mechanism primarily comprises of the following two tasks [4]:

1
Authentication: A newly deployed smart device is authenticated for its legitimacy by its neighbors in the communication range.
2
Shared key establishment: A newly deployed smart device after due authentication establishes a shared key with its neighbors for secure communication with them.

To achieve authentication and shared key establishment within low power devices, various schemes [5], [6], [7], [8], [9] have been suggested. However, these schemes do not allow a smart device deployment dynamically. An access control scheme must be dynamic and should not require reconfiguration of the complete network for new device deployment. In literature, many dynamic access control protocols have been suggested for smart device deployment in an IoT environment. However, to consider an access control protocol for practical implementation, it must suffice to specific functional and security requirements. The major security and functional requirements are tabulated in Table 1. The existing protocols suggested in literature do not conform to all the major functional and security requirements. The functional requirements of no interdependence on clock synchronization and scalability has not been paid much attention. Moreover, most of the access control protocols in literature are not resistant to ESL attack. The major improvement in the proposed access control protocol is that it adheres to all major functions and security requirements, as indicated in Table 1. Besides sufficing to all major requirements, the proposed access control protocol is scalable and is independent of clock synchronization issues. The design of the proposed protocol also makes it resilient to ESL attacks, thus improving its security strength.

The major highlights and the contributions of the proposed protocol are being given below:

1
The proposed protocol provides a secure and practical access control mechanism for the IoT environment with a better trade-off as compared to the existing related schemes.
2
The proposed protocol is scalable and supports large preception layer coverage as it does not involve an IoT Gateway for new smart device deployment.
3
The proposed protocol does require clock synchronization between the smart devices, thus increasing its practical applicability.
4
The proposed protocol adheres to all major security requirements and is also resistant to an ESL attack.
5
The proposed access control mechanism is formally verified and proved for its correctness using BAN Logic
6
The security strength of the proposed scheme has been formally verified using AVISPA [10,11] and Scyther [12]. The results of the formal modeling indicate that the proposed scheme is SAFE against various active and passive attacks.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, related work has been presented and the drawbacks in the existing schemes have been highlighted. Section 3 presents the proposed ECC based access control protocol. In Section 4, a detailed analysis of the proposed protocol in terms of security requirements has been presented. Section 5 functional analysis of the proposed protocol has been carried out. Section 6 presents the BAN Logic verification of the proposed protocol. In Section 7, detailed formal security validation and verification of the proposed protocol has been carried out using Scyther and AVISPA. Finally, in Section 8, a detailed comparison of the proposed protocol with the relevant existing scheme has been carried out.

Section snippets

Related work

In 2013, Das et al. [13] suggested an access control scheme based on ECC Certificates. The scheme is secure, and the security strength of the scheme is validated using automated tools. However, the scheme has high computational overhead and also requires clock synchronization between the nodes in a network. Yu et al. [14] and Ma et al. [15] used traditional sigencryption [16] approach for new node deployment within the perception layer based on WSN. The schemes were computationally inefficient

Proposed access control scheme

In this section, the proposed access control protocol for the new smart device addition in the perception layer of the IoT environment is presented. The scheme is based on elliptical curve cryptography and one-way hash function. The symbols used in the proposed protocol are listed in Table 2.

Security analysis

a)
S1: Resistant against Replay Attack

An adversary can initiate a replay attack by storing the old request broadcast from a smart device and replaying it in the future to gain illegitimate access within the perception layer. Let S_I be a new smart device to be deployed in the perception layer with neighbors {S_J, S_K S_L S_M}. The smart device S_I initiates a request broadcast to become the part of the perception layer. $S_{I} \to * : U s_{I} (x, y) | | A s_{I} (x, y) | | H [F s_{I} (x, y)] ∥ {D^{K}}_{S I} ∥ Q_{S I} (x, y) ∥ S_{I}$

The request broadcast from S_I is

Functional analysis

a)
F1: Overhead in terms of Computation, Communication, and Memory

In order to evaluate the functional efficiency of the scheme, the number of critical computations involved is calculated. The operations undertaken for computational Analysis of the proposed scheme and its comparison with other schemes are indicated in Table 3. The no of the critical operations involved in the proposed scheme is 4 T_ES +3 T_EP + 5 T_HASH + T_INV+T_SED. The communication overhead is estimated based on the number of bits

Formal analysis using BAN logic

BAN Logic was introduced by Burrows et al. [27] in 1989 to verify and validate security protocols formally. In this section, BAN logic has been used to evaluate the correctness of the proposed access control protocol.

Formal security validation and verification using AVISPA and Scyther

Formal verification and validation of the proposed access control scheme have been carried out using AVISPA and Scyther. AVISPA is a de-facto tool considered for formal security validation of security protocols. However, to perform the security verification in an unbounded number of sessions and also verify multi-protocol attacks, Scyther has also been used. Formal verification and validation using AVISPA and Scyther ensure that the proposed access protocol scheme is not susceptible to active

Comparative analysis with other schemes

The comparative summary of the proposed scheme with the existing scheme in terms of computational and communication cost is depicted in Table 13. Bracken et al. [18] have the lowest computational cost as the scheme is based on one-way hash functions and symmetric encryption /decryption. The highest computational cost is that of Li et al. [17] as it involves a significant number of bilinear pairing operations. Moreover, from Table 13, it can be depicted that the proposed scheme has the lowest

Conclusion

In this paper, a secure and scalable access control mechanism for the IoT environment has been proposed. The scheme proposes a mechanism for the deployment of new smart devices within the perception layer of IoT applications. The proposed scheme provides a better trade-off in terms of functional/security requirements and resource overheads as compared to existing schemes. The proposed scheme supports major functionality requirements of scalability and no interdependence on clock synchronization

Declaration of Competing Interest

None.

References (37)

A.K. Das et al.
Taxonomy and Analysis of security protocols for Internet of Things
Future Gener. Comput. Syst.
(2018)
C.-.Y. Chen et al.
Secure access control method for wireless sensor networks
Int. J. Distrib. Sen. Netw.
(2015)
F. Li et al.
Practical access control for sensor networks in the context of the Internet of Things
Comput. Commun.
(2016)
S.H. Islam et al.
A pairing-free identity-based two-party authenticated key agreement protocol for secure and efficient communication
J. King Saud Univ. Comput. Inf. Sci.
(2017)
Rose.K et al.
The Internet of Things (IoT): An Overview– Understanding the Issues and Challenges of a More Connected World
(2015)
...
Abdmeziem, M. & Tandjaoui, D. & Romdhani, I. 2015. Architecting the Internet of Things: State of the Art....
A. Perrig et al.
SPINS: security protocol for sensor networks’
L. Eschenauer et al.
A key management scheme for distributed sensor networks
S. Zhu et al.
LEAP: energy-efficient security mechanism for large-scale distributed sensor networks

C. Karlof et al.

TinySec: a link layer security architecture for wireless sensor networks

A. Armando et al.

The AVISPA tool for the automated validation of internet security protocols and applications

AVISPA, “SPAN, the Security Protocol Animator for AVISPA, 2019, accessed on March 2019. [Online]. Available:...

C.J.F. Cremers

The Scythe Tool: Verification, Falsification, and Analysis of Security Protocols in Computer-Aided Verification

(2008)

A.K. Das et al.

(2013)

H. Yu et al.

Enabling end-to-end secure communication between wireless sensor networks and the Internet

World Wide Web

(2013)

C. Ma et al.

Distributed access control with adaptive privacy preserving property for wireless sensor networks

Secur. Commun. Netw.

(2014)

Y. Zheng

Digital signcryption or how to achieve cost (signature & encryption) cost (signature) + cost(encryption)

Cited by (16)

Differential spectrum access for next generation data traffic in massive-IoT
2021, Microprocessors and Microsystems
Citation Excerpt :
This approach has limitation in analyzing how to manage the generation rate in a dynamic environment [18]. The RA-based scheme is examined in [19, 20] with the implementation of a compressed sensing mechanism with the implementation of the RACH algorithm [21–23]. However, the existing approach concentrated on data transmission technique without improving the spectrum access technique.
The demand for Massive Internet of Things (mIoT) have largely increased as it is used in many applications by many users. mIoT witnessed a widespread due to its low latency and throughput requirement while being able to provide an outstanding connectivity coverage. To transmit such a massive data, the mIoT adopt the ultra-reliable and low latency communication (URLLC) for improved network performance and spectrum access. In this paper, a novel Fractional Knapsack and Differential Hyper Plane Spectrum Access (FK-DHSA) approach is proposed. The proposed model estimates the communication channel within the constructed IoT cluster and allocates the spectrum based on demand. The proposed FK-DHSA provides 5 - 7% increased throughput, and access accuracy of 2% - 4%. Additionally, its able to reduce the error rate by 4–6% when compared to other existing techniques found in literature.
A Formal Verification of a Reputation Multi-Factor Authentication Mechanism for Constrained Devices and Low-Power Wide-Area Network Using Temporal Logic
2023, Sensors
A Self-Sovereign Distributed Identity Management and Cross-Domain Authentication Scheme
2023, SSRN
Machine Learning Techniques for Detecting and Mitigating DDoS Attacks in IoT
2023, 2023 International Conference on Sustainable Emerging Innovations in Engineering and Technology, ICSEIET 2023
A Novel Edge-Assisted IoT-ML-Based Smart Healthcare Framework for COVID-19
2023, CMES - Computer Modeling in Engineering and Sciences
Practical and scalable access control mechanism for wireless sensor networks
2023, International Journal of Internet Protocol Technology

View all citing articles on Scopus

View full text