New Framework for Authentication and key Establishment to Secure 6LoWPAN Networks

This paper describes a design of a lightweight authentication solution for the 6LoWPAN based Wireless Sensor Network. 6LoWPAN nodes are classified as constrained devices with limited memory and computing power. Therefore, since confidential data is shared in various fields through a public channel, the underlying resources are vulnerable to security threats. Moreover, constrained devices make it impossible to secure information using traditional resource-intensive encryption algorithms such as biometric, username, and password. Therefore, a variety of symmetric cryptographic and public key-based authentication methods have been proposed to address such issues. Conversely, the solutions still suffer from large communication and computational overhead problems and do not resist some known attacks. Our proposed framework aims to reduce computing and communication costs by using lightweight authentication-based symmetric key management. It employs a hash-based method, pre-distribution key, track sequence, nonce, and symmetric Lici-2 algorithm in both phases (establishment and authentication). This proposal framework is expected to resist attacks as exemplified by to reply and man in the middle.