An improved authentication and key management scheme for hierarchical IoT network using elliptic curve cryptography

Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the dominant research topics in recent era. With the advent of Industrial IoT, smart grid, smart home, IoT in Health services that attracts a lot of interest whereas the security of IoT devices attract major concern. Hierarchical IoT Network (HIoTN) consists of various different nodes like gateway, sensor devices and cluster heads connected to each other that provides user an organized hierarchy to use. The user must be able to access information in real-time from the sensor nodes and the messages sent by either sensor nodes or the user through gateway must be protected from malicious users. To provide security in this generic hierarchical IoT network, a scheme is proposed by Wazid et al. that demonstrates a model for secure transmission of messages within the HIoTN system. Wazid et al. proposed the UAKMP model to preserve information security using three-factor (smartcard, password and biometrics) authentication protocol. After analyzing the Wazid et al. scheme it can be determined that the said method is prone to security threats like flooding attack, it is susceptible to attacks such as the stolen verifier, node capture attack, clock synchronization problem, impersonation attack and forward secrecy is not preserved. This work proposes an enhanced authentication and key management system for HIoTN utilizing elliptic curve cryptography to address these security flaws. The proposed system is then examined in light of all pertinent recent attacks, in addition to that an informal as well as formal security investigation is used to demonstrate its safekeeping against such attacks. Additionally, the communication and computation overheads of our suggested method are compared to those of Wazid et al. and other analogous schemes, demonstrating that it produces the best results.