ECC Based Authentication Scheme for Smart Homes

Smart homes security has attracted a lot of attention from both the industry and academia, leading to the development of numerous schemes for both key management and authentication. However, most of these schemes are either inefficient due to both high communication and computational costs, or do not fully offer the required levels of both privacy and security. To address some of these issues, this paper proposed elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) based lightweight key management and mutual authentication protocol for the smart home environment. The performance evaluation of the proposed protocol was accomplished using communication costs, computation overheads, throughput and end-to-end- delays (EED). On the other hand, widely applied Dolev–Yao and Canetti-Krawczyk models were deployed for security evaluation of the proposed protocol. The simulation results showed that this protocol exhibited the least communication and computation overheads, and had the least impact on both throughput and EED compared with related schemes. Moreover, it was robust against conventional smart home attacks such as replay, forgery, impersonation and man-in-the middle (MitM) attacks.