Lightweight Authentication for IoT Devices Based on Elliptic Curve El Gamal Using Ephemeral Encoding Parameters

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) present a subset of the IOT with a huge increase in usage in various fields such as industry, agriculture, medicine, and military. Unfortunately, most WSNs are composed by resource-constrained sensor nodes. Those nodes are deployed in hostile areas and are often left unattended. Therefore, WSN sensors are target to various attacks. In this context, to secure WSNs communication, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)presents a technique that outstrip the other techniques due to its smaller key size. In 2022, we enrich the Ellipc Curve ElGamal (ECEG) protocol by offering a new ephemeral encoding method. We proved that the proposed protocol improves the security of an ECEG encryption system, without significantly increasing the computation time. However, the ephemeral encoding values can be compromised during transmission. So, they should be properly securely exchanged. Thus, we propose in this article a new method which ensures the confidentiality and the integrity of the encoding values and at the same time ensures the mutual authentication between two communicating parties. Therefore, in this research, we propose an ECEG-based lightweight authentication using the ephemeral encoding method. The enhanced ECEG protocol and the proposed authentication scheme are implemented and their results are discussed.