A Mutual Authentication and Key Establishment Scheme for M2M Communication in 6LoWPAN Networks

The machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, which plays a vital role in the Internet of Things (IoT), allows wireless and wired systems to monitor environments and exchange the information among various machines automatically without human interventions. In order to promote the development of the IoT and exploit the M2M applications, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been developing a standard named Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) over low-power wireless personal area networks (6LoWPAN) to enable IP-based M2M devices to connect to the open Internet. Although the 6LoWPAN standard has specified the important issues in the M2M communications, various security issues have not been addressed. In this paper, an enhanced mutual authentication and key establishment scheme is designed for the M2M communications in 6LoWPAN networks. The proposed scheme enables a 6LoWPAN device to securely authenticate with the remote server with a session key established between them. The security proof by the protocol composition logic can prove the logic correctness of the proposed scheme. The formal verification and the simulation show that the proposed scheme in 6LoWPAN could not only enhance the security functionality with the ability to prevent various malicious attacks, but also incur less computational and transmission overhead.