Implementation of an Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) based Authentication Framework for Contiki to Secure Internet of Things (IOT)

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) can provide global connectivity and management of sensors, devices, users and information. However, as of all Technologies, security is a major concern in IoT based networks. Nevertheless traditional security mechanisms may not suite IoT based networks due to their resource constrained, decentralized and highly mobile nature. Therefore for the past decade IoT security or more specifically security in sensor based networks has been a topic of research. As a result, various researches has been done to address this issue in multiple disciplines including IoT based operating systems along with various inbuilt security protocols, Cryptographic toolkits developed for sensors, Secure Routing Protocols, distributed PKI architectures and distributed Intrusion Detection Systems. Through this research author analyses existing security mechanisms for IOT and focus on implementing a secure authentication protocol with the use of elliptic curve cryptography. As for the analysis of existing security mechanisms author justifies the need to use elliptic curve cryptography for IOT based environments mainly based on its performance and memory advantages. Then author discusses the design of the developed protocol and moves on to evaluating the developed protocol against existing implementations which uses elliptic curve cryptography. Through the evaluation author was able to demonstrate the memory savings introduce through the implemented protocol along with its performance matrices. Furthermore the protocol was implemented for resource constrained sky motes and was simulated using cooja simulator as a proof of concept to demonstrate its functionality and capabilities.