Robust and Efficient Data Security Solution for Pervasive Data Sharing in IoT

Pervasive sensing is shaping up modern societies and opening the door for many unconventional applications. Instead of the contemporary access model where sensor data is disseminated to a single user, multi-access scenarios are becoming more prevalent, which raises the issue of how to authenticate users, how to ensure access authorization, and how to prevent information leakage. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel lightweight protocol that promotes a data-driven methodology. The idea is to employ hardware primitives to support authentication of legit data recipients and to factor in the previously shared data samples in generating encryption keys. Our protocol in essence generates encryption keys that vary per packet and in an implicitly synchronized manner between the data source and each recipient. The generated key is also a function of the hardware primitive and thus effectively prevents data access to unauthorized recipients. We analyze the resilience of our protocol to impersonation and message replay, and hardware primitive modeling attacks. The security properties of our solution is validated using the AVISPA toolset and its performance is compared to the asymmetric cryptography approaches.