Provably Secure and Efficient One-to-Many Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Resource-Asymmetric Smart Environments

The smart environment is a crucial application of the Internet of Things (IoT). Due to its growing security and efficiency needs, recent years have seen the proposal of numerous authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols. Unfortunately, most of existing AKA protocols only support one-to-one AKA and rely on the elliptic curve cryptosystem, resulting in huge overhead. In addition, these protocols fail to consider the resource-asymmetric characteristics of this scenario. That is, the resources on the gateway (GW) side are abundant, while the resources on user sides and device sides are limited. In order to achieve efficient and secure one-to-many AKA establishment in this scenario, where one-to-many means that users can realize key agreements with multiple smart devices (SDs) at the same time. For the first time, this article uses the one-to-many computing structure of the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) to design an efficient one-to-many AKA establishment, which is perfectly adapted to resource-asymmetric allocation in smart environments. Compared with existing solutions, this solution has the following advantages. First, our protocol is suitable for resource-asymmetric environments, where the GW acts as an intermediate node and uses rich resources to integrate multiple AKA requests. Second, the solution supports users to negotiate session keys with multiple SDs at the same time. Third, we prove the protocol’s security under the real-or-random (ROR) model. In addition, we perform formal security verification of the protocol using the automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications (AVISPAs) tool. Finally, the security and efficiency of this solution are superior to similar solutions. Specifically, our solution can meet 18 security and functionality requirements. Compared with the latest similar scheme, assuming that the number of SDs is ten, our scheme reduces the computational cost by 75.75%. At the same time, in terms of communication cost, our protocol reduces it by 37.78%.