Begonia: An Efficient and Secure Content Dissemination Scheme for Smart Cities

Content dissemination, while achieving efficiency and security, is a key challenge in Smart Cities. Existing encryption and key exchange schemes either fail to fulfill the security requirements or incur unaffordable communication, computation, storage and energy overheads. We present a novel approach, Begonia, that provides both efficiency and security when disseminating content to a significantly large number of devices in a smart city context. Begonia makes use of bilinear maps and elliptic-curve cryptography to achieve communication, computation, storage and energy efficiency. This approach completely removes the need for excess communication for key exchange while achieving the desired cryptographic strength. Additionally, it provides dynamic regrouping, joining and isolation capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate huge performance gains when the number of IoT nodes is very large.