An authentication and key establishment scheme to enhance security for M2M in 6LoWPANs

With the rapid development of wireless communication technologies, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, which is an essential part of the Internet of Things (IoT), allows wireless and wired systems to monitor environments without human intervention. To extend the use of M2M applications, the standard of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN), developed by The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), would be applied into M2M communication to enable IP-based M2M sensing devices to connect to the open Internet. Although the 6LoWPAN standard has specified important issues in the communication, security functionalities at different protocol layers have not been detailed. In this paper, we propose an enhanced authentication and key establishment scheme for 6LoWPAN networks in M2M communications. The security proof by the Protocol Composition Logic (PCL) and the formal verification by the Simple Promela Interpreter (SPIN) show that the proposed scheme in 6LoWPAN could enhance the security functionality with the ability to prevent malicious attacks such as replay attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, impersonation attacks, Sybil attacks, and etc.