Secure End-to-End key establishment protocol for resource-constrained healthcare sensors in the context of IoT
Internet of Things (IoT) is an ubiquitous concept where physical objects are connected over the internet and are provided with unique identifiers to enable their self-identification to other devices and the ability to transmit data over the network. Sensor nodes along with their heterogeneous nature are the main part of the IoT and may act as internet hosts or clients. Communication security and end-users privacy protection is a major concern in the development of IoT especially if these IP-enabled sensor nodes have limited resources. Secret key distribution for heterogeneous sensors becomes challenging due to the inconsistencies in their cryptographic primitives and computational resources as in Healthcare applications. This paper introduces a new End-to-End key establishment protocol that is lightweight for resource-constrained sensors and secure through strong encryption and authentication. By using this protocol, resource-constrained nodes can also benefit from the same security functionalities that are typical of unconstrained domains, without however having to execute computationally intensive operations. The protocol is based on cooperation by offloading the heavy cryptographic operations of constrained nodes to the neighboring trusted nodes or devices. Security analysis and performance evaluation results show that the proposed protocol is secure and is sufficiently energy efficient.