Publication

Abstract : The Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have grown exponentially to provide unprecedented opportunities in terms of intelligent monitoring, automation of industries, and smart city implementations. Nevertheless, the fact that WSN nodes are resource-constrained and the IoT communication channels are open makes them very susceptible to replay attacks, eavesdropping, impersonation, and integrity attacks. The current cryptographic designs are strong with a high computational cost or lightweight with a weak protection with a gap on balanced designs. To solve this, we suggest a new security architecture to combine Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to provide lightweight key establishment with Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) to provide secure data transmission. The methodology consists of: (i) ECC key pair authentication of nodes, and firmware verification by hash; (ii) nonces to generate new session keys and ensure freshness; (iii) hash-chained message integrity verification; and (iv) encryption and Authenticated Encryption with data to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and replay safety. Also, optional Message Authentication Codes (MACs) are added to implement the layers of defense, whereas scalability is achieved with the help of lightweight computations. The comprehensive performance analysis is carried out based on the latency, power usage, throughput and scalability at diverse network densities. Findings prove that the suggested ECC + AEAD scheme is more effective in terms of lowering the latency