End-To-End Encryption Enabled Lightweight Mutual Authentication Scheme for Resource Constrained IoT Network

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication networks consist of resource-constrained autonomous devices, also known as autonomous Internet of things (IoTs) or machine-type communication devices (MTCDs) which act as a backbone for Industrial IoT, smart cities, and other autonomous systems. Due to the limited computing and memory capacity, these devices cannot maintain strong security if conventional security methods are applied such as heavy encryption. This article proposed a novel lightweight mutual authentication scheme including elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) driven end-to-end encryption through curve25519 such as (i): efficient end-to-end encrypted communication with pre-calculation strategy using curve25519; and (ii): elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) based mutual authentication technique through a novel lightweight hash function. The proposed scheme attempts to efficiently counter all known perception layer security threats. Moreover, the pre-calculated key generation strategy resulted in cost-effective encryption with 192-bit curve security. It showed comparative efficiency in key strength, and curve strength compared with similar authentication schemes in terms of computational and memory cost, communication performance and encryption robustness.