A Decentralized and Reliable Election-based Key Management Protocol for Communicating Things

The use of Internet of Things (IoT) is continuously growing, and its application areas henceforth reach all societal and economical fields. The number of connected IoT devices is increasing exponentially, and so is the amount of their exchanged data. To ensure the security and privacy of these data, several Group Key Management (GKM) schemes were proposed. These schemes assume the presence of a centralized Key Manager (KM), which is regarded as the central component of these schemes. However, the huge responsibilities carried out by the KM require that it meets several performance and security criteria. Moreover, the central role it plays in the GKM makes it a classic single point of failure. Solving this issue in an energy efficient way remains a difficult challenge. In this paper, we propose a highly flexible and decentralized election-based protocol for Key Management. We introduce new mechanisms to ensure the technical reliability of our scheme in terms of performance and security. We also describe how our solution tackles the issue of single point of failure, by introducing a simple failure recovery procedure. Our simulations show that our solution have a low energy consumption.