A Cooperative End to End Key Management Scheme for E-health Applications in the Context of Internet of Things

In the context of Internet of Things where real world objects will automatically be part of the Internet, e-health applications have emerged as a promising approach to provide unobtrusive support for elderly and frail people. However, due to the limited resources available and privacy concerns, security issues constitute a major obstacle to their deployment. Among these issues, key distribution for heterogeneous nodes is problematic due to the inconsistencies in their cryptographic primitives. This paper introduces a new key management scheme that aims to establish session keys for highly resource-constrained nodes ensuring security protection through strong encryption and authentication means. Our protocol is based on collaboration by offloading heavy asymmetric cryptographic operations to a set of third parties. The generated shared secret is then used to derive further credentials. Security analysis demonstrates that our protocol provides strong security features while the scarcity of resources is taken into consideration.